The Deal of the Art

Dave Eggers has a piece in the Fuck the Fucking New York Times that illustrates the rather obvious point that, among countless other things, one distinguishing feature of this metastasized tumor of an administration is that it has virtually no relationship with the world of the arts. There is much comparison with previous admins, and (surprise!) they are not favorable.

I covered this particular subtopic several times during the campaign and after the election, but it's been a while, and Eggers never quite gets around to the real issue. No doubt there's a shortage of artists who would be caught dead within a thousand yards of these scumbags, but there are plenty of washed-up miscreants who would jump at the chance to perform like dancing monkeys for the amusement of the emperor.

Comedians (or rather, "comedians") such as Rob ("Who?") Schneider and Tim ("Crybaby Narc") Allen have been outspoken in their support of this fucking failure of a roughly human-shaped object. And there's always Kanye West, who would never miss an opportunity to show up anywhere he and an interlocutor could suck each other off and pretend they're not completely useless.

It should be clear by now that Fuckface Von Clownstick is a perhaps uniquely empty vessel. Even his yokel fanbase, who would rather shoot themselves than read a book, do at least listen to music and watch teevee shows and movies. They might be bottom-shelf Honey Boo Boo / Duck Dynasty crap culture artifacts, but they're something. Normal people have things that they enjoy, whatever others' subjective opinions of those things might be.

So far the only people remotely associated with the creative arts who have been anywhere near the White House are Ted Nugent and Kid Rock. Does anyone seriously think that the fucking guy could name a single song from either of them? The only reason he knows who they are is because they vocally support him.

Clownstick literally does not enjoy anything that isn't about him, that doesn't function either as promotion or praise for him and his wondrous intellect and his heroic deeds. Real art requires effort from the consumer as well as the artist; the person enjoying the art has to be willing to concede at the door that the art might illuminate something greater, either within the person or out there in the great wide expanse of the universe. It requires a sense of curiosity and wonder, joy and engagement.

Clownstick has none of those traits, because he long ago decided that since he was the ne plus ultra of all human existence, past, present, and future, the rest of the world has nothing to offer him but handjobs and slavish obedience. Nothing else matters, or even counts. Whether he is praising or complaining about artists and performers, it is always entirely contingent on whether they have been sufficiently obsequious to his greatness. This is nothing short of a mental disease.

Incidentally, it is also a characteristic that subliminally welds him to his yokel cultists. Clownstick is the epitome of the ugly American who waddles into the Sistine Chapel or Sacre Coeur in cargo shorts and Ed Hardy tee-shirt, looks around for a minute and shrugs, not seeing what the big deal is, and heads out to find the nearest Burger King. That's exactly who they are, and that's what they love about him.

And it's the deeper problem at hand:  when you have an empty, needy narcissist who literally believes in nothing but himself, who never has anything new to learn or experience and is never wrong about anything, there's nowhere to go but down. And he's taking all of us with him, whether we support him or rightly see him for the dementia-addled psychopath that he really is.