I Know, Let’s All Film Our Mental Breakdowns
As Mr Trump unboxes his kettle in the White House, I’m going to offer this reminder of the meltdowns and moon-howling that greeted his election victory. Such were the feats of pretension and competitive neuroticism, some kind of historical document seems in order.
Among those traumatised was the novelist and Guardian contributor Francine Prose, whose mental health took a catastrophic turn, complete with hair loss and sudden-onset eye-twitching. Symptoms that were accompanied by agitated ramblings about Hitler, Stalin, dictatorship, people thrown from helicopters, and “the imprisonment and execution of those who disagree.”
Of course, Ms Prose was far from alone in her weird theatre of distress, and social media was ablaze with performative convulsion. Among the titans of the fabulist resistance was this tightly wound progressive chap, who envisioned internment camps for those like himself, i.e., tightly wound progressives, with the streets being patrolled by some Trumpian Sturmabteilung.
Oh, and let’s not forget the Ohio high-school teacher Danielle Mann, whose post-election demands, issued from her classroom, included a list of the addresses of likeminded progressives, all of them, everywhere, and the mandatory wearing of identifying bracelets. So that she would know how everyone else voted.
At which point, readers may wish to imagine an alternative timeline, in which society has been customised to accommodate the fevered twitching of our self-imagined betters. A world they would find congenial, shaped in their image, according to their compulsions.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
I suppose I should set the ball rolling.
Imagine, you say?
I thought we just lived it for the past decade.
Is that a bloke or a transbloke? The vocal fry, the exaggerated emotionality, the hand gestures…
Could be a chick on T.
He is, in his own words, “another gay lib.” One practised in the self-dramatising arts. There’s an eerily generic quality.
[ Slurps coffee. ]
It’s often struck me as strange, the cartoonish, identikit mannerisms – the same sighs and eye-rolling, the same tone and body language, the same camp uselessness.
Does it come in pill form or something?
If they’re all performing for the TikTok camera, then it’s not going to take long for the mannerisms to converge into sameness.
It’s a peculiar experience, watching these effete, cartoon creatures presuming some solidarity, some common cause. Some supposedly self-evident like-mindedness. As if they were the very embodiment of All Gay People Everywhere.
While I sit here thinking, you and I are not the same.
Oh, if only. If only.
It’s sexual availability signaling. Gays are less than 5% of the population. When your potential partners are that limited, you need to signal early and often what your preferences are, with mannerisms that are universally understood.
So much of the performative outrage and theatrical distress, as you describe it, is projection. They see this degree of fascism happening because it’s what they have been trying, or encouraging their leaders to do, for the last four years. And even somewhat before. It seems much more real to them because these actions are precisely the thing they have done. Look at the number of J6 people that they locked up, at the targeted prosecutions of not just Trump but much more chillingly his allies, the censorship. They have been doing these things and at some level they acknowledge it. Why wouldn’t they expect payback? Which itself is a purpose that these performances serve. It’s a framing of any potential prosecution for their actual crimes, their attacks on people’s liberties, etc. as political retribution and not legitimate prosecution for real crimes committed.
Heh. The grating horrors of Will & Grace did actually cross my mind.
That character was great. Could not stand the Will nor the Grace ones. I realize they had to be there for the…straight man…aspect but the less screen time for them, the better.
Yes, it must’ve been quite odd to be the least popular characters in your own show. Upstaged pretty much continually by the character of Karen.
That was the especially annoying aspect of Deborah Messing. She seemed to think the show gave her some legitimacy to spout off about other social/political issues. Hell, I didn’t even want to see her on her own show.
No, not really. I wasn’t an avid viewer and I don’t recall that much about the show, beyond Karen’s feud with rival socialite Beverley Leslie.
Regarding the aforementioned moon-howling:
Here, at Tim’s.
What does that even mean?
A huge problem in the West has been the mainstreaming of mental illness. Instead of treating certifiable lunatics in psychiatric institutions, we watched as they insinuated themselves into all levels of goverment, into the schools and universities, the news media, and, for the more dysfunctional among them, onto the streets of our cities. To borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, we let them become our priesthood when we should have been building madhouses for them.
Trouble in paradise already?
This woman at The People’s March in San Fran on the 18th is… oddly unconcerned about the plight of people not like her.
If commies don’t want to be traumatized by Pinochet helicopter memes, they should abandon their dreams of totalitarian power.
“If there actually is a Multiverse,
“How many iterations were required to lead to this moment?”
Heh. The fabric of reality has been taking some hits over the last few years.
Remember hanky codes?
Meanwhile, at the Vatican.
A “nice” helicopter meme, to avoid triggering commies:
I find myself wondering how Tightly-Wound Progressive Chap is doing.
Is he cowering in a broom cupboard, surrounded by canned goods, busily deleting his immensely radical TikTok videos?
Oh, and spare a thought for this terribly radical young woman, the one who intends to “move the world forward” by making us wash other people’s bin contents.
I find myself wondering how Tightly-Wound Progressive Chap is doing.
Related, having apparently just bought a DSM V, some winter survival tips (allegedly) are offered from a person who claims runs “the most dangerous blog online”.
Continuing……
Despite supposedly about “surviving winter” it is not at all clear what the point really is as all there is is the same old hackneyed leftist claptrap and everything is dueling cliches.- anarcho-capitalism and Che fit like socks on a rooster after all.
Sigh. It just occurred to me that I could have been referring to him as The Next-and-Ex for the last two months. Oh well. I can still annoy the wife for the next two hours.
The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade with iPhones
Politico and CBS are not trustworthy sources. Especially for things that are just rumors. We need to stop letting those institutions set the narrative with what could very well be made up BS. Plus, I heard it somewhere that Legal Insurrection shadow bans commenters…or something.
Sitcom writers refer to this trope as “the cheese”, from the children’s song “The Farmer in the Dell” where everyone links hands and dances in a circle around one child in the middle, the “cheese”.
Many sitcoms are premised on a normal character who is sympathetic and relatable to the target audience surrounded by an array of one-note comic characters who exist only to bounce off that character and deliver the punchlines. Chuck Lorre does this a lot, but it goes back to at least the 90’s. Arguably further; you can see it in shows like Welcome Back Kotter.
It is always, always, always about childhood sexual abuse.
LI is NeverTrump-adjacent. Their legal analysis is usually pretty solid – their coverage of the Gibson’s bakery incident was stellar – but their political commentary tilts to the NOKD side.