There’s news from Cleveland, about to host the 2016 RNC Republican National Convention. Rage Against the Machine is planning a reprise of the show they PUT ON for DNC 2008 where they harnessed teen angst against America’s dystopian future (thus against its corporate party conventions) but FOR Barack Obama.
In 2008 the House of Bush was already falling. Now it’s 2016 and this time Immortan Joe is the ascendant Donald Trump apparently. Because Trump is a thought-criminal and troll racist, it seems that all pop, sub, and call-out culture agents agree that the next US president must not be Trump. I find it not in the least ironic that the machine thinks so too.
Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello is scheduling an encore performance of Denver’s DNC 2008, another counter-subversive star turn for the Democratic Party. In 2008 Rage quelled unrest to smooth the reception for Change Double-Agent Barack Obama. The corporate TM Rebels want to do the same for Hillary, this time directing their indignation at social injustice provocateur Donald Trump.
In 2008, Rage harnessed teen and counterculture angst and hitched it tightly to a stake in the mosh pit, a political assembly agitated but meant to go nowhere. Rage threw a free performance which drew thousands from the streets, as if a Rage concert memory would match the excitement of a protested convention. Of course those who were waylaid will never know. Even seasoned activists fell for the lure because Rage promised afterward to lead their stadium audience straight to the Pepsi Center to confront Obama and the DNC.
Not what happened. RAGE appointed Iraq Veterans Against the War as their favored antiwar agitants, whose MO has always been commemorative not rebellious, crowd participation encouraged only under a strict chain of cammand. With the IVAW, Rage members led the audience on stations of the cross “march” across downtown Denver exhausting protest energy and converting participants into spectators. It looks like Morello intends to do the same thing for Cleveland.
And I have no doubt they’ll succeed. Already social justice movements are feeding the trolls as if Donald Trump wasn’t merely another Westboro blowhard. Radicals from Antifas to Zapatistas think Trump is the face of US Fascism and must be stopped. Trump does spout ignorance and racism, though he hasn’t bombed or executed anyone. Does Trump embolden American racists and zenophobes or is that the machine’s framing?
Must Trump’s idiocies be rebutted? Must, for example, the Westboro Baptist Church be counterprotested? Normally everyone gets the wisdom of not feeding the trolls.
The problem is symbolized by him, not exactly led by him. On New Years I was willing to bet that he had exactly no chance, what with his outright hatred problems, racism a big part of it.
It goes against reason. But from time to time unreasonable things happen. Mostly in mass actions, because as Huxley pointed out, it’s easier to persuade a group. The other part of that is kind of grim.
It’s not easier to persuade a crowd to do something involving higher reasoning. Especially one in the most indoctrinated society in history. They’re indoctrinated to believe we are all free.
Showing them the difference might not be enough. I personally don’t recall the name of the football player with an obnoxious demeanour but he was the spokesperson for the “Tastes great” versus “Less Filling” campaign to sell a highly addictive and destructive drug.
But I do remember him speaking about an appearance where he was trying to talk sincerely and seriously about football. Not beer, football, the one thing he certainly knew anything concerning the subject. Accepting an achievement award.
And the crowd in the stadium shouted him down with that stupid chant. He said he was shocked and dismayed by it.
I suppose the majority of Americans know his name. And the name of the beer, the teams, other commercial ventures he entered, Probably more than those who know the names of Nixons vice presidents.
But that one interview stuck with me. Maybe the Emotional Engineers would be able to figure it out and correct my thinking.
Good thing Brave New World is pure fiction, right?
Then we come to this idea. What if the handlers for Ms Clinton and Monsieur Donald have played the Body Politic? Get two intransigent parties to devolve into mob action… then somebody rides in on a white horse and “saves america from itself”. Herr Schicklgruber for instance did a purge of the most radical of his followers. Called it the Night of the long knives. Neither candidate would be palatable to a majority of Americans, and IF it goes all the way to November, the winner would be ostensibly the one who had fewer people hating him/her. The last two presidents have been puppet dictators and it’s getting more obvious daily.
The badly misnamed “patriot act” serves mostly to hide money transfers from Public coffers to private accounts. The Cult of the Greedheads is being well paid, so far.