Slavoj Zizek on Christian conservatives' tolerance for vulgarity // Is the American republic built to withstand a malevolent president? By Michael Goldfarb
Public obscenity is sustained by a concealed moralism, its practitioners secretly believe they are fighting for a cause, and it is at this level that they should be attacked... To paraphrase the old Marx brothers joke, apropos Trump or Kaczynski: you look and act like a vulgar clown, but this should not deceive us – you really are a vulgar clown...
How to account for the
strange fact that Donald Trump, a lewd and morally destitute person, the very
opposite of Christian decency, can function as the chosen hero of the Christian
conservatives? The explanation one usually hears is that, while Christian
conservatives are well aware of the problematic character of Trump’s
personality, they have chosen to ignore this side of things since what really
matters to them is Trump’s agenda, especially his anti-abortion stance. If he succeeds in
naming conservative new members of the Supreme Court, which will then overturn
Roe v Wade, then this act will obliterate all his sins, it seems. But are
things as simple as that? What if the very duality of Trump’s personality – his
high moral stance accompanied by personal lewdness and vulgarities – is what
makes him attractive to Christian conservatives? What if they secretly identify
with this very duality?
Exactly the same goes
for Poland’s current de facto ruler Jaroslaw Kaczynski who, in a 1997 interview
for Gazeta Wyborcza, inelegantly exclaimed: “It’s our f***ing turn”
(“Teraz kurwa my”). This phrase (which then became a classic locus in
Polish politics) can be vaguely translated as: “It’s our f***ing time, now we
are in power, it’s our term”, but its literal meaning is more vulgar, something
like: “Now it’s our time to f**k the whore” (after waiting in line in a
brothel). It’s important that
this phrase was publicly uttered by a devout Catholic conservative, a protector
of Christian morality: it’s the hidden obverse which effectively sustains
Catholic “moral” politics.
A couple of months
ago, Donald Trump was unflatteringly compared to a man who noisily defecates in
the corner of a room in which a high-class drinking party is going on – but it
is easy to see that the same holds for many leading politicians around the globe. Was Erdogan not
defecating in public when, in a recent paranoiac outburst, he dismissed critics
of his policy towards the Kurds as traitors and foreign agents? Was Putin not
defecating in public when (in a well-calculated public vulgarity apparently aimed
at boosting his popularity at home) he threatened a critic of his Chechen
politics with medical castration?
Was Sarkozy not defecating in public when, back in 2008, he snapped at a farmer who refused to shake his hand: “Casse-toi, alors pauvre con!” (A very soft translation would be: “Get lost then, you bloody idiot!” but its actual meaning is much closer to something like: “F**k you, prick!”)?
Was Sarkozy not defecating in public when, back in 2008, he snapped at a farmer who refused to shake his hand: “Casse-toi, alors pauvre con!” (A very soft translation would be: “Get lost then, you bloody idiot!” but its actual meaning is much closer to something like: “F**k you, prick!”)?
And the list goes on –
even the left is not exempted from this debasement. The communist side was
often not far behind in similar vulgarities. In his speech at the Lushan party
conference in July 1959, when the first reports made it clear what a fiasco the
Great Leap Forward was, Mao called the party cadre to assume their part of
responsibility, and he concluded the speech with admitting that his own
responsibility, especially for the unfortunate campaign to make steel in every
village, is the greatest – here are the last lines of the speech: “The chaos
caused was on a grand scale and I take responsibility. Comrades, you must all
analyse your own responsibility. If you have to shit, shit! If you have to
fart, fart! You will feel much better for it.”
Why this vulgar
metaphor? In what sense can the self-critical admission of one’s responsibility
for serious mistakes be compared to the need to shit and fart? I presume the solution
is that, for Mao, to take responsibility does not mean so much an expression of
remorse which may even push a person to offer to step down; it’s more that, by
doing it, you get rid of responsibility, so that no wonder you “feel much
better for it” – you don’t admit you are shit, but rather you get rid of the
shit in you. This is what Stalinist “self-criticism” effectively amounts to.
The important lesson
here is that this coming open of the obscene background of our ideological
space (to put it somewhat simply: the fact that we can now more and more openly
make racist, sexist and generally xenophobic statements which, until recently,
belonged to private spaces) in no way means that the time of mystification is
over, now that ideology openly displays its cards. On the contrary, when
obscenity penetrates the public scene, ideological mystification is at its
strongest: the true political, economic and ideological stakes are more
invisible than ever. Public obscenity is always sustained by a concealed
moralism, its practitioners secretly believe they are fighting for a cause, and
it is at this level that they should be attacked.
To paraphrase the old Marx
brothers joke, apropos Trump or Kaczynski: you look and act like a vulgar
clown, but this should not deceive us – you really are a vulgar clown. All this in no way
implies that we are hopelessly delivered to the space of media manipulations
which carefully orchestrate such vulgarities: miracles can happen; the fake
universe of manipulations can all of a sudden crumble and undo itself.
In the campaign that
preceded the 2017 UK elections, Jeremy Corbyn was the target of character
assassination by some sections of the conservative media, which repeatedly
portrayed him as undecided, incompetent, unelectable and so on. So how did he emerge
victorious out of it? It is not enough to say that he successfully resisted it
with his display of simple honesty, decency, and concern for the worries of the
ordinary people. One should add that he won because of the attempted character
assassination: without this attempt, he would probably remain as a slightly
boring and non-charismatic leader lacking a clear vision, merely standing for
the old Labour Party.
It was in reaction to
the ruthless campaign against him that his ordinariness emerged as a positive
asset, as something that attracted the voters disgusted by the vulgar attacks
on him, and this shift was unpredictable: it was impossible to determine in
advance how the negative campaign would work.
Corbyn’s accentuated
ordinary decency may be an argument for him (for the voters tired of the
Conservative media blitz) or an argument against him (for those who think that
a leader should be strong and charismatic). The mysterious je ne sais
quoi which decided the outcome is what escapes the domain of the
well-prepared propaganda.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/donald-trump-vulgar-tweets-republicans-christian-conservatives-jeremy-corbyn-a7841531.html
the US has, over the past quarter of a
century, become ungovernable at the national level.
The Trump
administration, having passed the six-month milestone in office, kicked off the
next phase of his presidency with an explosion of crazy, spread over the past
seven days. Like sweeps week on The Apprentice, every day saw
some headline-grabbing event to garner ratings. It started with leaks against
his former bosom buddy, attorney general, Jeff Sessions. President Trump,
“sources” said, was planning to fire him. It moved on to a speech to the Boy
Scouts of America jamboree, where Trump told the story of a property developer
who lost a fortune and was lurking at a New York party with the “hottest
people”. Later, there was a tweet announcement banning transgender people from the military.
This explosion of
crazy concluded with his new White House chief of communications, Anthony Scaramucci, calling the New Yorker’s political
correspondent Ryan Lizza to trash virtually everyone in the White House. He
compared himself positively to the president’s dark lord and special adviser,
Stephen Bannon: “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock. I’m
not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the president.” Doesn’t Scaramucci, or
“the Mooch”, as he was known on Wall Street, have a mother? Won’t she be
ashamed to see him talking like that in public? The week ended with a big name
fired: White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus.
And up on Capitol Hill
things weren’t a lot less calm. There was the closed-door interrogation of
Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, on Russian connections to the Trump
campaign. Then came the Republican Senate majority’s inability to repeal the
Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, featuring John McCain voting yes, to debate
the bill, then no, to kill it stone dead – until The Apprentice goes
into reruns. All of these events,
and a dozen more I don’t have space to mention, create a picture of utter chaos
across the American government. Trump has ridden roughshod over not just the
customs and norms of presidential behaviour but also basic standards of human
decency… read more:
