April 12 2024 Theatre of Cruelty: Republican Political Performances As Allegories of Degradation and Dehumanization

Let us first acknowledge the abasement of the Republican Party before its false idol Traitor Trump, and its capture by the Fourth Reich which is a consequence of the 1980 capture of the Republican Party by fundamentalists of theocratic patriarchal sexual terror. Margaret Atwood warned us of this existential threat to our democracy and ideas of universal human rights and the equality, citizenship, and bodily autonomy of women in her magisterial novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which remains among the finest critiques of gendered forces and systems of oppression ever written, and relevant as well to the role of faith weaponized in service to power in theocracy, patriarchy, fascism, and tyranny.

All of which are recursive forms and motives of politics as a Theatre of Cruelty as now performed by the Trump campaign and the Republican Party, with which the Arizona abortion ban confronts us as disruption and the violation of normalities.

Trump slept for many years with a copy of Mein Kampf on his nightstand in place of a Bible, and his performance as a Clown of Terror in a Theatre of Cruelty is modeled on that of his idol Adolf Hitler. In the performances of Trump and the Republican Party we see the echoes and reflections of Hitler’s reimagination of politics as theatre; in the words of the monster himself; “Politics is the new art!”

As I wrote ion my post of June 5 2021, Remember Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and His Legacy of Dishonor, Treason, and Fascist Tyranny; Our Clown of Terror; his jests did distract us from his subversion of democracy until almost too late. Idiot madman of monstrous perversions that he was, we must give the devil his due; Trump was the greatest foreign agent to ever attack America, and he nearly brought our democracy down into fascist tyranny and white supremacist terror.

Remember the Clown, and his absurd empire of lies and depravities, his subversions of democracy and violations of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, his kleptocracy of looting the public wealth, his Wall of Hate, his syndicate of Epstein sexual terror and human trafficking, his orchestration of white supremacist terror and treason, his use of racists in disrupting the Black Lives Matter protests in a campaign of violence, arson, vandalism and looting to discredit the mass action for equality and racial justice and provide a pretext for the federal occupation of Democratic cities and the founding of a fascist tyranny, and the pathetic puppet show of Traitor Trump and his master Putin.

Remember him and his era of fascism as the collapse of values which nearly became the Fall of America, for the enemies of democracy never rest, and neither must we.

Thanks for showing us all what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.

And remember, you can always discover someone’s secret Republican name whereby they recognize each other; its their act of treason plus their sex crime.

As I wrote in my post of September 24 2019, America rediscovers its values: the impeachment of Pennywise; Jubilation in the streets as America rediscovers its values and begins the impeachment of Pennywise, clown and cannibalistic monster who dwells beneath the human face of Trump, a mask of flesh stolen from the abducted and enslaved women in the brothels his grandfather built the Trump family fortune on during the Alaska Gold Rush, and who today carries forward the legacy of terror and misogyny he was raised with, whose election should be de-certified as the coup of a foreign power and whose Presidency has no legitimacy.

History will remember Trump as the standard bearer of the global Fourth Reich and its assault on democracy, stealer of children for his vile and twisted purposes, author of genocidal ethnic cleansing and builder of concentration camps, pathological liar and ignorant fool, whose alliance of xenophobic racists and white supremacists, Christian Identity fanatics and other fundamentalists who dream of the restoration of the Patriarchy and a quasi-Confederacy under medieval Biblical law as a tyranny of the Elect, and amoral Plutocrats out to loot America for all the wealth they can send offshore while sabotaging our economy and driving our nations into collapse, thereby removing the major guarantor of freedom and human rights in the world and opening everything to exploitation.

A full accounting of the treasons and crimes of Trump and his Republican conspirators would fill a thousand pages and more, would roll on like the endless night litany of the death of God during an Orthodox Easter service; but this is the moment of its end, wherein the chanting turns to rapture and joy at the break of dawn, for Nancy Pelosi and the power brokers of the Democratic Party have rummaged around in Pandora’s Box and found at last our hope, calling for impeachment and the restoration of the rule of law just at the point of no return, before the legitimacy of our government and the values on which it is built, freedom, equality, truth, and justice, are forever lost and America falls to fascism and tyranny, and with it the world descends into a Dark Age.

It took a millennia to emerge from the last one; civilization may not be recoverable again, should it fall under conditions of fascism and totalitarian regimes of absolute state power and surveillance, war, ethnostates and genocides, and unbridled extractive plunder of the earth. And this we must resist.

Therefore celebrate with me the call for impeachment, and prepare ourselves for the great struggle ahead to make it real, to reawaken America’s values and to save democracy and universal human rights throughout the world.

As I wrote in my post of January 10 2023, Allegories and Symbols of the Fall of Democracy in America and Brazil: the January Insurrections as Theatre of Cruelty; In Brazil now as in America two years ago, the January Insurrections against democracy have failed in the direct capture of the state, but in such failure have established a Lost Cause like that of the Confederacy in the imaginations of the fascists who would enslave us. This too is a ground of struggle, of far more broad significance that the assaults on the symbols of national identity and institutions of government in Brasilia and Washington D.C.; the full faith and credit of the state and the values and ideals which it embodies and enacts.

Liberty, equality, truth, and justice; a secular state founded on universal human rights and the interdependent and parallel rights of citizens of a free society of equals. If our faith in the idea of democracy and our solidarity with each other is lost, so are we.

Who do we want to become, we humans; a world of masters and slaves, hegemonic elites of wealth, power, and privilege living by fear, force, and lies, hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and the countless subjugated and dehumanized masses of outcasts and untouchables who do the hard and dirty work which creates that wealth and power, in a future of tyrannies of force and control, or co-owners of our governments who choose how to be human together in equal share, no one’s rights infringe upon another’s, and no one is better than any other by reason of birth.

Those of us who live in democracies founded on the values of the Enlightenment and the historical legacies of the great revolutions against aristocratic feudalism, monarchy, and colonial imperialism may agree on our shared values, but we can no longer take this for granted. We now live in a world wherein democracy is imperiled even in its bastions and guarantor nations like America.

We must never allow ideologies and narratives of fascism to become normalized, or we will devolve to societies of caste, color, theocracies of the elect, tyrants and kings, totalitarian police states of brutal repression and pervasive surveillance and propaganda; authoritarian carceral states wherein only power and force are real and have meaning.

To fascism and tyranny let us give the only reply it merits; Never Again!

Here is an expanded version of my post of January 6 2020 on the Surrealist film Gummo as a satire of the Deplorables who committed treason and armed insurrection against our nation at the command of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump; On Insurrection Day, I offer for your consideration the film Gummo, a sensitive and elegant documentary of the Deplorables from whom the Fourth Reich cadre who staged the assault on Congress were recruited, and an allegory of the Fall of America.

Bacon? Stapled to the wall, a strip of bacon captures ones attention as a symbol of degeneration and barbarian atavisms of instinct. Werner Herzog signposted it for our attention, and it persists as a symbol of degeneration to an animal state, like a trophy of wealth which is also offal above a bathtub filled with filth as our young protagonist eats spaghetti, his mouth smeared with red like the cannibals adrift on Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa so brilliantly described in Julian Barnes’ History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters; an unforgettable image of the fallen American Dream. A reproduction of the painting in miniature hangs by my writing desk, to remind me of the stakes as our civilization collapses from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions.

It is the little things which disturb, provoke, and incite us to challenge normality, the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, the authorized identities of hegemonic elites and divisions of otherness, and to transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden with glorious sins of beatification.

Here as always, all true art defiles and exalts.

We dine in filth on the carrion of others lives and by their labor. This is a Surrealist film intended as an allegory of America and a thematic interrogation of our flaws and dark legacies of injustice, and in large part restates Nietzsche’s critique of Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure and the idea of the innate depravity of man, an extension of the doctrine of original sin, on which all our law is based, as Nikos Kazantzakis argues in his thesis on Nietzsche, The Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist analysis of authority as dehumanization which underlies all his later work.

So also does the film restate William S. Burroughs’ analysis of capitalism and imperialism as the Algebra of Need, in which drug addiction becomes a metaphor of our addiction to wealth, power, and privilege, an engine of self-destruction, commodification, and dehumanization which feeds on and worsens our most atavistic instincts. Burroughs derives his ideas here from dialectical Marxism; I rephrase his terms as the Calculus of Fear, for fear and belonging are the true bases of human exchange. Here the flaws of our humanity, fear and rage, vanity and jealousy, the need to dominate and control, become the instruments of our subjugation to hegemonic elites through divisions of exclusionary otherness and to tyrants of force and control and the imperial and carceral states of those who would enslave us.

The film itself is brutally shocking, grotesque, and borders on the obscene; which is why I adore it so. I must warn you that while I like it as an allegory of America’s flaws, and to poke fun at Trump’ s followers, this is brutal and depressing; anyone with suicidal ideation should avoid it. This debut of a heralded wonder of the new age as director was not understood as a critique of state power as a force of dehumanization and regression to an animal state, like that of the Deplorables, and unjustly derailed a promising career; a historical injustice I would like to redeem, because Gummo is a film we need now.

We must see the enemies of Liberty as they truly are, if we are to heal our nation from the primary trauma of fracture they enacted in the January 6 Insurrection.

Both the Insurrection and the film Gummo, like the Trump presidency as a whole, must be interpreted as performances of the Theatre of Cruelty as articulated by Antonin Artaud in his manifesto The Theatre And Its Double. Trump is a figure of the mad emperor from his great novel Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist; his performances as a clown of terror, disruption, and sadism were also brilliantly prophesized by Robert Coover in The Public Burning, A Political Fable, written as a satire of Nixon.

Let us see beyond the lies and illusions with which Trump and his Deplorables conceal their subversions of democracy, sabotage of our institutions, and violations of our ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice.

Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz, he’s never anything but “just an old humbug.”

As I wrote in my post of February 11 2021, Profiles in Treason and Terror; The dishonorable and the mad, the delusional and the sadistic epicures of brutality and perversions, the feral predators hooting and champing before the gallows and guillotines they have brought to murder members of congress with and their partners in uniform unleashing racist terror and gun violence in the streets, and the amoral and predatory grifters and puppetmasters of fascism who have subjugated and enslaved them and stolen their honor and their souls; these are among the idolators of Traitor Trump who conspired, enabled, and collaborated in his plot to subvert democracy and overthrow America in the January 6 Insurrection which attempted to seize Congress and execute its members, which like Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch on which it was modeled was intended to decapitate the government of the people in a single stroke.

As details emerge of the internal operations and massive scale of the plot against America, in terms of its central coordination and logistics under direct operational command of Trump and his cabal of conspirators, we are offered not only the spectacle of his aberrance and monstrosity as a mad idiot Clown of Terror drooling and gloating in bestial depravity at the destruction of our values and institutions, the violation of our ideals and the endless suffering he has caused, but of those of his freakish and degenerate followers as well.

The role of deniable forces of the Fourth Reich such as the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers, and other organizations of white supremacist terror, and of their partners and infiltration agents within our police, military, and security services, in the January 6 Insurrection is by now well documented and will become more so as the greatest manhunt in our history exposes and entraps more of its perpetrators.

The images we have been witnessing of their assault on liberty during the Second Impeachment trial will be remembered in the history of the world as the true legacy of an era of fascist tyranny under the figurehead of Trump which nearly ended America as a guarantor of global democracy and universal human rights, and had we fallen as the primary domino and a beacon of hope to the world both democracy and human rights would be lost to humankind for unknown ages; the last time civilization fell it took a thousand years for the idea that government derives its authority from its citizens and not by divine right, the idea that no one of us is better than any other by right of birth, and that freedom, equality, truth, and justice are the foundational values of our society and truths of human being and meaning, to reawaken.

And it took centuries of wars and revolutions to do so; how if this time civilization falls not to hordes of barbarians seeking nothing but pillage and destruction, but to regimes of totalitarian force and control?

This is the great contradiction of the forces of repression and subjugation to authority which overran our capitol on January 6; they have been betrayed by their masters in believing they were acting to restore our traditional values and civilization, when in fact they had been weaponized in service to its destruction. Here is a clear and present danger, but also an opportunity; shared motives can be redirected to heal divisions, for they too want an American Restoration. As yet we just disagree on our definition of terms.

When fear is overwhelming and generalized, it can be shaped through submission to authority by lies, illusions, alternate realities, especially when pervasive and endemic surveillance, big data, and propaganda are available as instruments of state control. Authority achieves submission through falsification and the theft of the soul, but this is also the weakness of control which cannot stand against truth, just as the weakness of force is that it is powerless against resistance, disobedience, and refusal to submit.

The election of Biden and Harris, the failure of Trump’s sixth coup attempt on January 6, and the public exposure and shaming of his co-conspirators, collaborators, and enablers before the stage of the world of the Second Impeachment trial; in these events we have witnessed a turning of the tide from fascism to a restoration of democracy.

Once the Reckoning has been achieved, the Restoration must heal our divisions; and this means we must embrace and transform the fear that lives at the heart of hate, and drives the rage, violence, and need to conquer and dominate others which shadows our historical inequalities and injustices.

Fear, Power, Force; such is the Ring of Power which enslaves us, and which we must abandon if we are to become whole.

As I wrote in my post of June 2 2020, The Great Dictator: Trump’s Reboot of the Chaplin Classic; As the world is gripped by images of Trump’s expulsion of the priests from the church and brutal repression of protestors against racist violence, of his photo op holding a Bible while invoking the use of the military against citizens to silence dissent and bolster his failing regime of white supremacist terror and authoritarian state force and control, I believe it is time to consider the relative merits of our Clown of Terror’s performance of the role of the Great Dictator as compared to its originator, Charlie Chaplin.

To this end I recommend Robert Coover’s 1968 satire The Cat in the Hat for President, written originally about Nixon and republished as A Political Fable, and the luminous and feral 1933 novel on which Trump has modeled his revised Theatre of Cruelty, Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist by Antonin Artaud.

Let us mock and deflate all such absurd monsters who would enslave us.

Transcript of Charlie Chaplin’s Final Speech in The Great Dictator:

“I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone – if possible – Jew, Gentile – black man – white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness – not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost….

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men – cries out for universal brotherhood – for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world – millions of despairing men, women, and little children – victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.

To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. …..

Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes – men who despise you – enslave you – who regiment your lives – tell you what to do – what to think and what to feel! Who drill you – diet you – treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” – not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power – the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then – in the name of democracy – let us use that power – let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world – a decent world that will give men a chance to work – that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!

Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers – to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!”

Charlie Chaplain, Final Speech in The Great Dictator