Note: after the attempted shooting today, I considered removing this post as it may seem to be in poor taste given the seriousness of what has occurred. I’ve decided to leave it up but want to add the disclaimer that I had already made within the post which is that the narrative heuristic is just that, a heuristic: a fallible and partial model of reality.
Mostly on this blog I tend to talk about historical matters rather than current ones. But the recent US presidential debate and its aftermath reminded me of an idea I’ve mentioned before but have never fully fleshed out. It’s the notion that the Trump presidency, when viewed as a narrative or Hero’s Journey, is a comedy. That was true of Trump’s original victory and now it seems to be happening again, albeit with an interesting variation. In this post, I’ll sketch out what that means.
The big qualifier we should begin with here is simply to note that analysing events as a narrative, story or Hero’s Journey is only one perspective on the world. We can call it the narrative heuristic. A heuristic differs from a “solution” in that it is a potentially fallible way to get to an answer. Multiple heuristics can lead to the same answer or they can contradict each other. Heuristics are not right/wrong but useful/not useful. Thus, I am not suggesting that the narrative heuristic leads to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but is just one way of understanding. Having said that, it is quite fascinating how many things in life do seem to fall neatly in narrative form as if they were so determined. Stories might be much more important and fundamental than we think.
With these disclaimers in mind, let’s talk about narratives and particularly narrative comedy. In the broadest meaning of the term, a Comedy is simply a story in which the hero wins. This is contrasted with a Tragedy which is where the hero loses. Within this broad definition, a Comedy need not be funny. We’ll talk more about that shortly.
Stories almost always feature a hero (the protagonist) and a villain (the antagonist). Thus, we can extend the definition of Comedy to say that it is a story in which the hero defeats the villain. This encompasses stories where the villain is just as capable as the hero. Think of Sherlock Holmes vs Moriarty, Batman vs the Joker or Luke Skywalker vs Darth Vader. Those stories are not funny, but they are technically Comedies because the hero wins.
Since Comedy is any story where the hero wins, we need another word for stories which are funny. Let’s use Humour to denote a story designed to provoke mirth. Humour is a subset of Comedy, since the hero also wins in a Humour story. What differentiates Humour from Comedy is that the hero in a Comedy is supposed to win while the hero of a Humour story is not supposed to win. It is precisely this which generates the laughs.
Don Quixote is a prime example. He is, at best, a silly old fool and, at worst, a psychotic who is having a mental breakdown. The most likely outcome for such a man who goes round pretending to be a knight and getting himself into duels and brawls is that he will be severely injured or die. Yet Quixote somehow keeps defying our expectations, blundering his way from one adventure to the next.
This leads to another important property that separates a Comedy story from a Humour story and that is the archetype of the hero. In a Comedy, the hero can be any archetype. Sherlock Holmes is the Sage, Batman is the Warrior and Luke Skywalker is a combination of the two. As long as the hero wins, it doesn’t matter what archetype they manifest. What’s more, the hero of a Comedy wins because they are really good at what they do. Sherlock Holmes wins by his intellect. Batman wins by his determination. The hero of a comedy is victorious through virtue.
This is not true for Humour because, as we have seen, Humour requires the hero to win even though they lack the kinds of virtue that normally lead to victory. Thus, every Humour story features a hero who manifests the archetype of the Fool. The Fool’s ignorance is their main virtue. If Don Quixote knew how absurd and dangerous his position was, he would never have left is home in La Mancha. It is his ignorance that allows him to take the adventure.
(Note: technically, every hero is always partly a Fool since every Hero’s Journey requires a step into the unknown and we are, by definition, ignorant of the unknown).
So, we know that the hero of a Humour story is a Fool and we know that the story requires the hero to defeat a villain. This sets up one of the main tropes of a Humour story: because the hero is a Fool, the villain is the one who should win. Every Humour story must find a way to resolve the problem of how the Fool defeats somebody superior to them.
One of the main ways to do it is to make the villain just as incompetent and dumb as the Fool. This is the tactic of one of my favourite genres which is the stoner comedy. The original stoner comedy is Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke. The heroes of the story are two dropouts who spend the entire movie either getting high or trying to get high. These are not people who should win on a logical or rational level (whether they should win in a moral sense depends on your own worldview).
That’s especially true since they are being tracked by a team of police intent on busting them. The police have the authority, the law, the resources, the numerical and logistical advantage. They should win. But they won’t win and a big part of the reason is because they are just as dumb as the two stoners.
There’s one other way to resolve the problem of how the Fool wins in a Humour story and it’s worth mentioning since it more closely resembles the Trump narrative arc.
In P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves series of books, the hero of the story is Bertie Wooster who is an English aristocrat from around the beginning of the 20th century. Bertie belongs to what was arguably the most privileged demographic in the world at that time. He should, therefore, be a winner. The problem is that Bertie is a moron (note that the Fool archetype is very often represented literally). If it was just Bertie by himself, he would lose. But Bertie has his trusty butler, Jeeves, to help him. Jeeves finds a way not just to ensure that Bertie wins but, more importantly, to make Bertie believe he has won through his own actions.
The brilliance of the Jeeves stories, and the reason why we need to include them in this analysis, is that they are a combination of Comedy and Humour. It depends on whose viewpoint you read the story from. If you read it from the viewpoint of Jeeves, the story is a Comedy because Jeeves is the ever-capable Butler who tries and succeeds in solving the very complex problem of how to cause a victory while not being seen to cause a victory.
From the viewpoint of Bertie Wooster, however, the story is a Humour since Bertie is a Fool who blunders his way to victory in much the same fashion that Don Quixote and Cheech and Chong do. Once again, we see that the difference between Comedy and Humour depends on the archetype of the hero.
Okay. Now we know the difference between the two story types. How does all of this apply to the story of the Trump presidency? Well, as it turns out, the combination of Comedy and Humour that Wodehouse achieved with the Jeeves stories is directly applicable to the Trump presidency. The difference rests on whether you think Trump is Jeeves or whether he’s Bertie. Is he a Fool or a capable and clever player?
Since Trump became president by winning an election campaign, the story is a Comedy in the technical sense of the term. It’s interesting to note that democracy provides us with a Comedy in a way that other systems of government do not. This follows from the simple fact that democracy provides a way for somebody to win and somebody to lose. You don’t win a kingship, you are born into it. That’s why stories about kings and queens revolve around the concepts of tragedy and fate. By contrast, democracy is inherently Fool-ish, and that’s how most traditionalists view it.
The modern party system has, nevertheless, removed most Fool-ishness from democracy and created a level of predictability based on certain unspoken rules of the game. Remember that a Comedy features a competent hero who should win. For all of the presidents prior to Trump, at least in recent memory, their victories were all standard Comedies featuring people who went through the normal process. Even if you didn’t like the politics or personality of Obama, Bush or Clinton, you probably still accepted that they were competent at the game of politics and their victory made sense at that level.
This was never true for Trump and the main reason is because Trump never belonged to the party system. His victory could never be a standard Comedy because that would have required him to be a proven capable player of the game. Trump did not fulfil the archetype of the Politician. Rather, his archetype was the Businessman.
A mismatch between archetypes does not belong to the Comedy story but it most definitely belongs to the Humour story. A big part of what makes the Fool a fool is that he or she is trying to take on an archetypal role to which they don’t belong. Don Quixote is a middle-aged member of the lower nobility who decides to go off and become a knight. He is trying to change archetypes and become the Warrior.
Bertie Wooster is the same. He is trying to play the archetype of the competent British aristocrat even though we know he is really a village idiot. In another of my favourite comedies, The Big Lebowski, the Dude, a prototypical stoner, is hired by a millionaire to be the bag man in a ransom case. In all of these Humour stories, the hero is taking on an archetype to which they do not fit.
Since Trump was trying to make the change from Businessman to Politician archetype, the story of his presidency was a Humour story from the very beginning. Rather than deny that fact, Trump embraced it. He came out and said one outrageous thing after another and generally refused to behave in a way that is appropriate for a modern Politician archetype. Thus, Trump embraced the Humour story reading. He owned the fact that he was playing the Fool.
Where the story takes a funny twist is that everybody else was happy to characterise Trump as a Fool too. Why wouldn’t they? Trump was auditioning for what is supposed to be the most powerful role in the world – the US President. There’s no way a Fool should be able to get that role. If the story was a Comedy, Trump would have to lose. But the story was a Humour story and the whole point of the Humour story is that the hero will win even though they are not supposed to.
Trump’s opponents then became the villains in a Humour story. They were supposed to win. They had all of the experience, institutional connections and archetypal resonance on their side and they were up against a guy who didn’t even pretend to play the game as it should be played. They were supposed to win, but they didn’t. That’s how Humour stories work.
Remember, again, that a common trope in the Humour story is that the villains are just as dumb as the hero and it’s their bumbling which allows the hero to win. It’s this trope that got me thinking about Trump again in recent weeks because the fallout from the recent presidential debate is evidence that the arc of the story is yet again turning back to Humor. Trump’s opponents are yet again blundering in ways that help Trump to win.
The way Trump won the presidency the first time around was by making sure that every single bit of attention was focused on himself. His outrageous behaviour ensured that the media had to cover him pretty much every day of the week. In addition, he used social media, Twitter in particular, to great effect. He continued to use these tactics during his presidency.
It took his opponents about five years to figure out his secret and to change their tactics to try and shut him up. With defeat in 2020, Trump was no longer going to be president anymore and he could easily be cut off from official channels. But there was still the problem of social media. They solved that by having him kicked off all the social media platforms. The powers-that-be seemed to have won the day and wrestled back control of the narrative from the man who had stolen it from them.
That didn’t stop Trump from remaining popular and becoming the Republican candidate again this time around. Note that Trump won the Republican candidacy by not even showing up to the debates. That was already a sign of a big shift. Trump was now winning without needing to draw all the attention to himself as he had done the first time around.
Fast forward to the recent presidential debate against Biden. Everything in the debate had been rigged against Trump, including the ability for the moderators to mute his microphone thus ensuring he couldn’t do his usual trick of hijacking the narrative. So blatant was the rigging that a number of pro-Trump commentators were saying Trump was a fool (there’s that word again) to accept the conditions. He should have refused to attend, they said. That makes logical sense, but remember that a Humour story does not need to make logical or rational sense. In fact, it works better if it doesn’t make logical sense.
We know what happened next. With Trump’s microphone muted, there was nobody to turn the whole thing into a shouting match. This meant that Joe Biden needed to be able to speak clearly, coherently and confidently all by himself. And that’s exactly what he failed do. A debate which had been rigged to negate Trump’s “strengths” had in fact revealed Biden’s weaknesses. This inversion of expectations is exactly what makes a Humour story funny. The media had finally won back control of the narrative from Trump but their carefully constructed story fell apart before our very eyes.
So it seems we’re seeing a re-run of the Humour story that played out during the first Trump presidency only now the details of the story are almost completely inverted. The first time around, Trump won by ensuring that all the attention was on himself. This time, Trump doesn’t have to do a single thing. He can just sit back and watch his opponents implode. All of this looks like a beat-perfect Humour story where the hero’s opponents hold all of the cards and yet somehow still lose through their own incompetence.
This raises the question: is Trump doing it on purpose? Did he accept what looked to be a rigged debate against him knowing that Biden was likely to fail? It’s possible and this brings us back to the difference between a Comedy reading and a Humour reading.
The Humour reading tells us that Trump is a Fool who somehow keeps blundering his way into becoming the president of the United States. The Comedy reading tells us that Trump is playing “4D chess” as he skilfully manipulates his opponents on the way to victory. He wins not because of luck but because of competency. Not that these two readings can both be partially true and, in any case, there’s always an element of the Fool in any genuine Hero’s Journey.
Another advantage of the narrative heuristic is that it allows us to think about the other side of the story: the villains. Trump may or may not be a Fool, but what does it say about his opponents that they keep losing despite having all the advantages on their side?
The US political system, and the political systems of most western nations, have removed all Fool-ishness in line with the globalist agenda to subvert democracy. Since democracy is a Comedy, it implies Fool-ishness .The globalists, and their supporters among the general public, think of themselves as being above all that. Democracy is for idiots. Ergo, Trump is an idiot and so are his supporters. It’s precisely that attitude that turns the story from Comedy into Humour.
It’s an interesting fact of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels that they were written at a time when the British Empire and the aristocracy who represented it had become decadent. Bertie Wooster was the outward representative of that empire, but it was Jeeves, the behind-the-scenes man, who kept the show running. That’s actually a very good representation of how the British system worked. It was very much the mandarins that held it together.
It’s arguable that the US empire has worked on much the same dynamic. I would argue, however, that the US empire has been run far more on propaganda than the British Empire ever was. That’s the reason why there is such an obsession with narratives. It’s also why Trump frightened the hell out of the powers-that-be since he smashed up their carefully-constructed stories. The British Empire was run by Jeeves-like mandarins. The US Empire has been run by propagandists.
That’s why the recent presidential debate was so catastrophic since it imploded the story that had been constructed by the propagandists. Previously, they had been able to blame Trump for such destruction. This time, there was nobody to blame but themselves and they’ve been arguing amongst themselves ever since. The puppet masters have become entangled in their own webs. Sometimes in a Comedy, all you need is a hero who’s either brave or stupid enough to poke the dragon for the façade of power to crumble. That seems to be where we are at right now.
I figure the point when our cultural narratives cease being dominated by comedies and switch to tragedies is when we’ll see some actual structural changes happening in politics also. I hadn’t made the link between comedy and democracy, but that would imply democracy may have a limited future also. I sort of intuited as much; but this neatly explains why that could be so thank you.
And I appreciate you leaving this up despite todays assassination attempt. Those who orchestrate such events fail to realise that if they succeed in turning the Trump story into a tragedy they’ll only create a much more powerful foe for themselves.
Daniel – it’s noteworthy, I think, that those who oppose the comedy of democracy do so with quasi-tragedy stories e.g. the climate/covid apocalypse narratives. I think there is always a certain segment of the population who require such narratives. Some people really are repulsed by a comedic victory.
To my mind the predominance of comedy at present is simply a reflection of a progress and a growth orientated mindset. As those falter there is a subconscious desire for more a more fitting narrative and thus the quasi-tragedies; a search for reasons to be feel good and appear heroic despite the inevitable bad outcome. A full blown tragedy will be a strong indicator that culturally the tip into decline is being acknowledged; and also finally give an opportunity to grapple with moral questions outside the realm of pre-determined success or victory.
That’s definitely a part of it. But even during times of growth and progress there are still a subset of people drawn to tragedy. I think boredom and meaninglessness are also closely related as drivers.
I also think the difference between Comedy and Humour is important here. Humour also breaks out of the pre-determined boundaries of success. So, the Fool is more useful than the tragic hero for changing the status quo.
I realised reading your reply I’m getting mixed up between the stories society tells or expresses of itself (film or literature), and a description of the archetype currently embodied as performance (our governments) which I think is closer to what you’re referring to. In deciphering my confusion it occurred to me that Trump represents both (or all) of Humour, Comedy and Tragedy depending who you are and one’s perspective as far as the stories or perspectives cast upon him, and possibly also the performance aspect again depending one’s perspective. No wonder I’m in a muddle looking at it!
As a general note, I agree Humour and Comedy are different. My comment above had a second paragraph I deleted in an attempt at trying to resolve that difference for myself. I think I would order them in importance or power as Humour > Tragedy > Comedy. I wonder if the draw of the tragic element is because pure mundane comedy is so boring. If you know the hero is going to win there is only limited entertainment, and very little philosophical potential in the narrative. Tragedy in comparison has both in spades, and then well done Humour skewers it all and puts it on a barbecue for good measure.
That’s a very important point because a big part of the mania going on these days is that you have often completely contradictory stories being told about the same person/event. I suspect this is mostly a byproduct of the new communications technology which means that we are exposed to radically different interpretations and we don’t know how to choose between them.
It’s interesting how rare the Humour category is in narrative fiction. Most book websites don’t even have a category for it. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Rabelais appeared on the scene at the exact same time as the Reformation. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any other Comedy/Humour narratives that had such a epoch-changing aspect to them as Rabelais.
The assassination attempt is gonna ensure that Trump is elected Prez again in November. Not that I WANT Krusty the Klown to win, but I’d just as soon see Grandpa Simpson shoved off the stage too. I gotta hand it to Krustrump — he was a baller after the shooting. Blood on his ear, fist raised in the air… Even better than that other showman Ronald Reagan did after he got plugged in 1981. The purported remark he made to his wife about “Honey, I forgot to duck” was probably as cooked up as so many “Albert Einstein quotes.” I’d say your post here about the Empire of Bogus Illusions which is Amerika resonates perfectly with the assassination attempt. Except you wrote it before that happened. Is “pre-sonate” a word?
Bukko: the weird thing is that I wasn’t going to write this post this week. I’d already started writing the next in my series on archetypal calculus but decided I wanted to change it up instead. It’s a strange synchronicity.
Perhaps it is because, while Comedy and Tragedy are traditional opposites; Humour is more akin to the inverse of Tragedy. That is the genius of Trump, whether intentional or not his actions are almost the perfect inverse of his opponents attacks. Expecting opposition; his opponents cannot grasp his performances and turn themselves into pretzels in the attempt, which Trump inverts again to endless effect. In essence I suppose that is the mechanism of the Fool.
By its very nature that makes Humour highly contextual; it thus must be used sparingly and against an already developed plot point, or at least against contemporary cultural canon. To complete an entire a narrative as Humour would be difficult; and nigh impossible to translate across cultures. I suspect (and I speculate here, this is well outside my wheelhouse – I admit I had to google Rabelais) that there is a lot more Humour in many older narratives that we (literally) cannot conceive.
> It’s a strange synchronicity.
I get a sense this post is a book waiting (wanting ?) to be written.
Daniel – that’s a very good point. It reminds me of one of my favourite Kurosawa movies, Sanjuro. The hero samurai does things so outside of the narrative that his allies (a bunch of aristocrats that are actually the Japanese equivalent to Bertie Wooster) can’t understand his motivations. Even though he is helping them to win, they sometimes think he’s against them. I hadn’t thought about it before, but it’s the exact same dynamic as the Jeeves novels. So, maybe Humour doesn’t appear in recorded history because nobody has the frame of reference to understand it when it does appear. Thus, history gets shoehorned into either Comedy or Tragedy. Maybe it’s a lot funnier than we realise.
I highly recommend Rabelais’ book “Gargantua and Pantagruel”. It’s surprisingly modern in tone, even though there is no doubt a lot of contextual stuff in there that we wouldn’t understand now. I was in tears of laughter the first time I read it.
As for a book idea, now I’m thinking of a epic modern comedy in the vein of Rabelais or Erasmus. The time seems right for it.
> Maybe it’s a lot funnier than we realise.
Given reality is, and always has been, a lot more absurd that we can consciously acknowledge, I think that is a given.
Thank you for the book recommendation, I see there is a translation on Gutenberg. Excellent.
I’ll be up for buying a book whichever direction you take it. I was assuming non-fiction, but fiction with events of a similar magnitude to our recent history would be great also – the fall of an empire is always going to be a fruitful time to write. It would have been too far fetched to attempt even 5 years ago.
Much like this essay I must thank you for the Plague essays and the Devouring Mother series; it has given me a context to acknowledge the reality of _that which must not be mentioned_ and thus be a lot more relaxed in the chaos. I look forward to a good tale doing the same.
Daniel – the fiction thing is just an idea at the moment. I don’t have any firm concept for it. In the meantime, I was planning to write more on the archetype/narrative side of things. I’ll have to try and hunt down some other Humour works throughout history.
Daniel (offlist): all good!
Hi Simon,
Cheech and Chong – tick
Bertie Wooster and Jeeves – tick
Former President Donald Trump – tick
The Dude – tick
That’s what a catnip essay looks like! 🙂 But I absolutely agree with your analysis of the narrative and had never considered the story arc from that perspective. Top insight. Competency and foolishness can exist within the same mind and story.
Wodehouse was a difficult read for me, although Sandra loves those books. I used to work at the top end of town, nuff said.
About a week before the debate I casually mentioned to someone that it was going to be an epic car crash, and the prediction came true. What interested me about the debate was that in attending, there were only downsides for the guy who was clearly struggling in that role. It says a lot that the handlers weren’t able to change tactics, even in the face of an almost foregone conclusion. I guess it’s well known that propagandists can fall for their own made up narratives, and then they become ineffective. It really stunk of the dominant minority, and badly.
Cheers
Chris
One more thing…
How is the quote: “You’ll own nothing, and be happy” not farce? It’s both ludicrous and highly improbable (or at least I hope so). Far out! Can you imagine trusting the authorities to deliver underwear by drone?
One headline I spotted in relation to that shooting deeply troubled me. If memory recall is correct it may have proclaimed that the person was alleged to have been a registered republican. Not that two people were dead and several injured. Nope. That headline seemed to me to display a very strange world-view.
Cheers
Chris
Chris – yeah, I think there’s definitely a thing called “too much narrative”. When every single thing that happens is just an excuse to push your narrative, then you’re not living. I wonder if we won’t see a lot of people “drop out” in the years ahead, meaning they will deliberately try to unplug from the narrative machine.
As for the own nothing and be happy thing, it always sounded to me like the old “noble savage” myth rehashed in modern techno garb i.e. fully automated space communism 🙂
Hi Simon,
Fully automated space communism! 🙂 That’s funny.
I believe that people are already dropping out based on what I’m observing in day to day life. The thing I’m wondering about is, how are they affording to do that dropping out business?
As you pointed out in your book, it is one option to defeat the devouring mother archetype. Took down the former Soviet Empire. No blood, just complete apathy and disregard. You’d think that that folks pushing the narratives would comprehend the wider arc of history?
Cheers
Chris
Chris – a story I’ve heard several times in relation to the NDIS is that practitioners, eg. physiotherapists, are switching across because about 50% of the time the patient doesn’t show up, but the practitioner still gets paid. That’s alongside the more obvious rorting that’s going on. I’ve heard similar stories from other government programs. The size of government has been increasing in recent years, too, so I’d expect this trend to continue until something breaks. To me, the underlying problem is the same it’s always been. Industrial capitalism causes oversupply. Therefore, there’s not enough real jobs to go around. This is all just another way to solve the problem of unemployment.
Simon,
Don’t you think that the humour narrative is worthy when it functions as a bridge between a failing value system and an emergent (and ideally superior) replacement, but dangerous if the tom-foolery is advocating chaos and triviality themselves to be solutions? I think in the latter case what we have is a “jackass story”.
If Trump is both Bertie and Jeeves simultaneously we have humour. If he is only Bertie, then I hope that the ancient occultists were correct to say that transmutation of asses back to the human is possible.
Jinasiri – it’s a good question. Despite its Fool-ishness, democracy seems to do a better job at preventing jackasses from getting into office. I can think of plenty of kings/caesars who were jackasses (or worse) but very few presidents or prime ministers. (Maybe democracy just makes it easier to get rid of jackasses before they cause trouble).
It’s impossible to know from a distance, but it seems to me most likely that Trump is a Jeeves pretending to be a Bertie while Biden is a Bertie pretending to be a Jeeves.
I reckon democracy (as universal sufferage) is a great way to stretch out tolerable mediocrity in times of resource abundance – ie during times when the massive wastage created by devouring mother beauracracies is “affordable”. It won’t make it for long once it becomes clear that that the resource situation has changed. Then it will be back to relying on human integrity to balance the systems humans create. We will simply be forced to work on our humanity again instead of on social systems and technologies designed to replace it.
I love that line from Agent Smith in the first matrix film: “You know what I can’t stand about this place? It’s the SMELL!!!”
Well, Mr. Sheridan, it seems that your foresight is more on target than the Crooks that took aim at Trump.
The archetypal transformation to which you alluded has now been sanctified and it’s clear that, on some level, everybody felt it. The efforts on some sides to assert that Trump wasn’t grazed by a bullet, but by a flying shard of glass, or that his pumped fist was somehow a calculated political gesture rather than an instinctive show of defiance, feel like desperate attempts to deflect from the palpable force of that moment. The fall below the podium followed by the triumphant reemergence was classic solar-deity-resurrection energy and Trump is now, archetypally speaking, immortal. The Apprentice has become The Master.
In magical cabala there is the transformation of tetragrammaton, YHVH, into pentagrammaton, YHSVH, the addition of the ‘S’ symbolising the descent of the Shekinah or holy spirit, transforming the wrathful demiurge, Yahweh, into the god of love and redemption, Yeheshua or Jesus. Watching Trump walk out at the Republican National Convention yesterday, where many commenters observed he appeared to be ‘glowing’, I noticed that the slogan Make America Great Again (MAGA) has quietly morphed into Make America Great Once Again (MAGOA). It will be interesting to see if Trump follows through on his promise to deliver a ‘unifying’ message in his speech tomorrow…
I only wonder why the gods chose this rather grotesque little man as the vehicle for such grandeurs but then, I suppose that is the essence of a Humour story hero.
Jinasiri – yes, but there’s no necessary connection between democracy and bureaucracy. The ancient Greeks had democracy but no bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the origins of modern democracy can be seen in the Protestant movement which wanted direct democracy at the local church level in opposition to the Church bureaucracy run from Rome. So, I’d say that it’s in bureaucracy where “tolerable mediocrity” (and often downright incompetence) reins.
Tres bla – hah, even the name Crooks is too perfect. Let’s name the assassin “guy who can’t shoot straight” (and also crook = criminal = villain).
I agree that the story seems to have changed now into something more serious. Looks like there’s now a group of elites getting behind Trump in a very public fashion and some young blood who can continue the movement after him. I don’t remember that happening the first time he was elected.
Such a bizarre place the USA. Trump seems to now have the full and open (may have been hidden before) support of the Wall st/New York faction that since Powell got into office at the Fed has been sticking it to the other factions. Makes sense since he is a New York Real Estate mogul but this is the actual reality of power and politics; you choose your who rules you not who represents you.
Although in a roundabout way The Wall Street faction are actually about Making America (Wall Street) great again as they untethered he USA from Europe via switching the overnight interest rates from LIBOR to SOFR, so there is some truth behind the madness. The head of JP Morgan has been saying similar things for a while now.
On a side note, either the shooter was an absolute amateur or the purpose wasn’t to just kill Trump. At that range, if he had used a hunting rifle with optics chambered in .30 or above, or even one of the flatter trajectory smaller rounds, it would have been a point blank centre of mass shot and Trumps odds of survival would have been very low. Instead it seems he has gone for a head shot with a lower calibre AR, which is a very strange choice. Weird times.
Skip – looks like incompetence all round. You’d think the secret service of all agencies would be run by ex-military people who actually know how things work. Instead, it’s run by an ex-Pepsi executive. The dumb idea that corporate execs can just freely swap industries and domains seems to have infiltrated even to the highest levels of government. Maybe we should go back to putting people in charge who actually understand the domain and have worked their way up from the bottom instead of dopey fachidiots with fancy university degrees.
Simon – brilliant, isn’t it? The potential for wordplay is endless: Crooks shot Trump, the CIA are Crooks… Note also that it’s plural, ‘crooks’, which makes for an amusing counterpoint to the ‘lone gunman’ narrative.
Tres Bla – in Australian slang, crook can also mean sick (eg. I’m feeling crook). It’s a fittingly crook sentence, but you could have something like – Crook Crooks’ crooked shot.
Simon,
I’m a fan of democracy, but with reservations. The main problem is the bland assumption that universal sufferage must be a good thing and, per say, an indicator of advancement in civilisation. Universal sufferage is good when there is such a strong culture of goodness that the majority of the population are authentically motivated to vote in the interests of the common good and are wise enough to identify what that is in context. We’re not there yet (though many like to think so … but that’s changing fast too). In our current circumstances, it is plausible to posit a strong connection between universal sufferage and bloated beauracracy. The majority are easily fooled by appearances, and the growth of government gives the impression that everything’s gonna be fine, so they vote for it. But I agree that autocracies and oligarchies are not immune from the same problem.
I think almost any structure can be made to work if put into the hands of those trained in wisdom and goodness. At the heart and the root, our problems aren’t ecological, political or economic. They’re spiritual: in the sense that authentic spirituality is concerned with how to train to be good and wise – especially when things get tough and when in positions of power. The issue of why there is such a weird lack of holistic and integral approaches to anything these days leads inevitably to this crossroad … will humour lead to yet more tragedy or to a long term comedy? What can we do to increase the chances of the latter? In art and in life humour, while necessary, can only be an interregnum to more serious things. Comedy is where their is understanding, reintegration and forgiveness after schism.
Jinasiri – I think Winston Churchill said it best – democracy is the worst system, except for all the other ones. In any case, we don’t have a “pure” democracy such as the Greeks did and that’s probably not a bad thing. A healthy system has room for a variety of approaches which can be put to use when the time is right, in just the same way that there’s a time for humour and a time for seriousness.