"Against boredom the gods themselves struggle in vain. against laughter every tyrant must fall."
----Quotations of Chairman Joe
When President Joe Biden announced that he was stepping aside and that he is throwing his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris it was as if a millstone had been taken from our collective necks. There was an immediate relief, indeed an exultation, the stench of Barron von Shitsinpants no longer fills the nostrils, at last to breathe free once again.
Thousands gather at her political rallies as she smiles and openly laughs with the audiences.
At a campaign rally where she introduced Tim Walz Her Vice Presidential choice put it most succinctly: “Thank you Madame Vice President for bringing Joy back to our politics”. In this pithy yet telling observation Walz has captured the essence of the contest.
For nearly a decade Caesar Disgustus has been the Merchant of Death. Always gloomy, always moving behind a thinly veiled threat of violence, always the harbinger of disasters real and imagined, and mostly imagined, on the immediate horizon, Disgustus has parlayed fear into political capital. Journalist turned historian Bob Woodward put it clearly with the simple title of his first book on tRUMP: “FEAR”. Disgustus terrorized the country then turned on his own party driving out what little intelligence, courage and honor it possessed and distilling the Grand Old Prostitute into a full blown fascist enterprise with the Donald as the supreme leader. What remains are sniveling lickers of boots and kissers of ass, Donald's ass.
Caesar Disgustus has miscalculated. He has always thought that he could institute a reign of terror and thereby rule not understanding the culture in which this country's political institutions operate. At some point we will have had enough and that point has now been reached.
Psychologists John Gartner and Harry Segal host a weekly podcast called “Shrinking Trump” in which they catalog the mental and emotional decline of our 45th 'president'. In this weeks edition Gartner made the observation that in a contest between joy and despair or, more precisely, joy and victimization, joy will always win.
In sum, this is why: victimization implies powerlessness. One is constantly victimized and, in the fascist fantasy the strong man emerges to assume agency for the powerless. But, unlike Hitler, tRUMP has internalized the powerlessness by himself becoming the victim, the martyr. “They are doing it to me because they want to do it to you”, he constantly tells his people. “I took a bullet for you” he proclaims in his faux messianic persona in a secularized version of “I nearly died for your sins”. His hero Adolph Hitler, it must be observed, never said that he was the victim, that he was stabbed in the back at Versailles. This is tRUMP's tragic miscalculation. The bond that Disgustus has forged with his following is one a mutually shared grievance and thirst for revenge, but it is born of a naked powerlessness, a powerlessness that can find no relief through any form of revenge, it is simply naked rage, a howling at the moon.
Biden had been making the mistake of empowering tRUMP by highlighting his threat to the republic and, by extension to the nation. Yes he is an existential threat and extremely dangerous one at that, but to inflate his persona is to play into his hands. The answer is belittlement. In the words of our psychologists, the answer is “Shrinking Trump”.
Along comes Harris. Kamala is tRUMP's kryptonite. She is black. She is Asian. She is Indian. She is a woman. She smiles. She laughs. And, devastatingly, she laughs at him.
Poor Donald has no idea how to handle such a force. He rails against her. He belittles her name. He questions her ethnicity claiming that she only recently “turned black”. He tries to mock her laughter telling the great unwashed that he never heard such a laugh and that her laugh makes her sound crazy and that her advisers have put a muzzle on her laughter claiming that if she ever laughs again the race will be over. The truth here is that our fearless leader, a man who is never seen to laugh, is terrified of her laugher.
And this is telling. Laughter is a sign of joy. It is a visceral reaction not easily faked. It communicates not only the absurdity of the moment but the liberation from it. It liberates the audience from the oppressiveness of everything tRUMP represents. Against boredom the gods themselves struggle in vain; against laughter every tyrant must fall. To turn the Dear Leader, the Fuhrer if you will, into a laughingstock is to render him impotent.
In this ridicule is simply not enough. One must bring Joy to bear. Joy is optimistic. Joy gives one Agency, Joy is empowering. It is for this reason that civil rights demonstrators danced and sang songs of hope and promise.
Kamala Harris has plumbed the depths of the national crisis. The battle lines being drawn now, at base, have become a contest between not simply between fear and hope, nor between despair and joy, but between impotence and agency.
There is no doubt where America will turn.
Thank you Kamala for kicking open the doors of the dungeon. We can see and breathe again, we can laugh and dance again.
Imprison the Bastard.
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