NP David Brooks: Trump as Carnival, Trump as Fool

[Mark Thibodeau]

I despise David Brooks, but this is excellent. Thank you for bringing
it to our attention!

YOPJ

On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 7:45 AM, Allan Balliett
<allan.balliett at gmail.com> wrote:
> interesting editorial (better with the accompanying illustration) from
> today's NYTimes. Shared in whole for those whose current station in life,
> like myself, has put them on the wrong side of the paywall except for 4
> stories a month.
>
> -Allan in WV
>
> "This is a resolution I’m probably going to break, but I resolve to write
> about Trump only on the presidential level, not on the carnival level. I’m
> going to try to respond only to what he does, not what he says or tweets. I
> really wish some of my media confreres would do the same"
>
> King David was most compelling when he danced. Overcome by gratitude to God,
> he stripped down to his linens and whirled about before the ark of the
> covenant — his love and joy spilling beyond the boundaries of normal
> decorum.
>
> His wife, Michal, the daughter of King Saul, was repulsed by his behavior,
> especially because he was doing it in front of the commoners. She snarked at
> him when he got home for exposing himself in front of the servants’ slave
> girls like some scurrilous fellow.
>
> The early Christians seem to have worshiped the way David did, with ecstatic
> dancing, communal joy and what Emile Durkheim called “collective
> effervescence.” In her book “Dancing in the Streets,” Barbara Ehrenreich
> argues that in the first centuries of Christianity, worship of Jesus
> overlapped with worship of Dionysus, the Greek god of revelry. Both Jesus
> and Dionysus upended class categories. Both turned water into wine. Second-
> and third-century statuettes show Dionysus hanging on a cross.
>
> But when the church became more hierarchical, the Michals took over. Somber
> priest-led rituals began to replace direct access to the divine. In the
> fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus urged, “Let us sing hymns instead of
> striking drums, have psalms instead of frivolous music and song, … modesty
> instead of laughter, wise contemplation instead of intoxication, seriousness
> instead of delirium.”
>
> When elites try to quash the manners and impulses of the people, those
> impulses are bound to spill out in some other way. By the Middle Ages the
> cathedrals were strictly hierarchical, so the people created carnivals where
> everything was turned on its head. During carnival (Purim is the Jewish
> version), men dressed like women, the people could insult the king and
> bishops, drunkenness and ribaldry was prized over sober propriety.
>
> As Ehrenreich puts it, “Whatever social category you had been boxed into —
> male or female, rich or poor — carnival was a chance to escape from it.”
>
> Sometimes the celebration took on an enthusiasm that is hard for us to
> fathom. In 1278, 200 people kept dancing on a bridge in Utrecht until it
> collapsed and all were drowned.
>
> The carnivals were partly a way to blow off steam, but in hard times they
> served as occasions for genuine populist revolts. In 1511, a carnival in
> Udine, Italy, turned into a riot that led to the murder of 50 nobles and the
> sacking of more than 20 palaces.
>
> Carnival culture was raw, lascivious and disgraceful, and it elevated a
> certain social type, the fool.
>
> There were many different kinds of fools: holy fools, hapless fools, vicious
> fools. Fools were rude and frequently unabashed liars. They were willing to
> make idiots of themselves. The point of the fool was not to be admirable in
> himself, but to be the class clown who had the guts to talk back to the
> teacher. People enjoyed carnival culture, the feast of fools, as a way to
> take a whack at the status quo.
>
> You can see where I’m going with this. We live at a time of wide social
> inequality. The intellectual straitjackets have been getting tighter. The
> universities have become modern cathedrals, where social hierarchies are
> defined and reinforced.
>
> We’re living with exactly the kinds of injustices that lead to carnival
> culture, and we’ve crowned a fool king. Donald Trump exists on two levels:
> the presidential level and the fool level. On one level he makes personnel
> and other decisions. On the other he tweets. (I honestly don’t know which
> level is more important to him.)
>
> His tweets are classic fool behavior. They are raw, ridiculous and
> frequently self-destructive. He takes on an icon of the official culture and
> he throws mud at it. The point is not the message of the tweet. It’s to
> symbolically upend hierarchy, to be oppositional.
>
> The assault on Representative John Lewis was classic. He picked one of the
> most officially admired people in the country and he leveled the most
> ridiculous possible charge (all talk and no action). It was a tweet
> devilishly well crafted to create the maximum official uproar. Anybody who
> writes for a living knows how to manipulate an outraged response, and Trump
> is a fool puppet master.
>
> The sad part is that so many people treat Trump’s tweets as if they are
> arguments when in fact they are carnival. With their conniption fits,
> Trump’s responders feed into the dynamic he needs. They contribute to
> carnival culture.
>
> The first problem with today’s carnival culture is that there’s an ocean of
> sadism lurking just below the surface. The second is that it’s not real. It
> doesn’t really address the inequalities that give rise to it. It’s just
> combative display.
>
> This is a resolution I’m probably going to break, but I resolve to write
> about Trump only on the presidential level, not on the carnival level. I’m
> going to try to respond only to what he does, not what he says or tweets. I
> really wish some of my media confreres would do the same
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l