The long and tiresome electoral campaign of President Posterior revealed to home audiences (we can hardly call the unmobilized American masses anything else) the dyspeptic underbelly of the liberal-democratic fantasy.
Locked within the confines of their curated Internet timelines and baseless feel-good truisms about voting, clueless pseudorationalists speak about waking up to a new epoch. We cannot call it an awakening. Perhaps it is more like a fit of hypnopompic sleep paralysis and its accompanying suite of horrible hallucinations.
Despite a long line of successful and untouchable buffoons in the international political arena serving as test dummies (Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, Toronto’s Rob Ford, Vladimir “KGB” Putin) the vast majority of people have been taken utterly by surprise.
The New World Order? A goofy blend of reality television pacing with saber rattling, misogyny, racism, and media distraction. A new self-deprecating authoritarianism along the lines of Ubu, Gilliam’s Brazil and the regime of Rufus T. Firefly. A coalition of protectionist nuclear thugs and improvised bigots with shiny buttons. A wall-building bastion for the noxious identity of “whiteness.”
In the West, the Diffused Spectacle spoken of by Debord seems to be concretizing itself anew to make-up for the fall of the Soviet Union. The elites re-integrate genuine tensions by enacting a puppet show version in electoral politics to get us to play along.
Under the superstructure, our economics aren’t going anywhere. Financialization and managerial extremism are still the order of the day. Capitalism is pleased to do away with its democratic veneer, an outmoded tool of an early bourgeoisie, long since discarded in China, Russia, Singapore. Thuggery, private jails and weapons programs are good business. The markets have never rallied so strongly following an election of a U.S. President.
Are we angry enough yet? Is this the particular scandal we’re mad at, or the general system of exploitation? With Trump at the helm in America, it’s obvious where to throw our bricks. We enjoy the sight of America’s decay even as we fear the new authoritarian future that awaits us in its wake if we let it. A crisis of representation is at least a great opportunity to break things while the streets are hot.
But merdre! Just so there’s no beans about it. We denounce Presidents. Presidents general and particular. Presidents are steaming bags of green-candle-assed misogynist fruitfly fuckers; no, presidents are scarecrows stuffed with rotting smegma flesh and curdled earvomit written in blood drenched legalese; no, wait, all presidents past present and future are goofy shitstained bloodpuppets for the cash-nexus of capitalism and its diarrhoea smeared bearers, the capitalist class; no, this president is a gesticulating earwig on top of the previously enumerated effluvia; this president is a firecracker rapist and an acid aquarium of fentanyl eyeballs and sniffing nostrils; no, this is a racist and rapist and an exploiter and a heap of garbage doubling as a paranoiac image of an ice cream cone flavored with halitosis under a green moon signifying a vulture beak in the royal phynancial rectum.
All presidents are added to the rostrum of guillotinable offenders along with gods and kings.
The first President was a slave owner. The last President, a murderous drone technician. This President. The next President and the next, next President. Presidents are pestilential.
We want Presidents to go extinct. Not coral reefs and honey bees.
We stand with the majority who don’t vote. We stand in solidarity with those who are protesting Trump and the current world in all its rottenness, with Black Lives Matter, with no-DAPL.
As surrealists we are joining them in the streets, keeping an eye out for utopia and a new myth wherever they may appear in the midst of the fighting. Bring a fleshbloody cheesegrater. Bring your cats and dogs and birds. Old Pere Ubu’s got you covered.
Go out into the streets and fight your president.
EAT HIM ALIVE.