Sarah Huckabee Sanders is leaving us. She is turning in her tin star to ride off into the sunset. The hornswoggling daughter of an accomplished Arkansas hoodwinker, Sanders made the big time by fronting for the ultimate flimflan man, Donald Trump. It’s the great American story. From PT Barnum and Buffalo Bill to Bernie Madoff and the TV evangelists (and TV Generals too) America’s history is littered with “heroes” whose only great talents were for fooling us, sometimes for a quick buck, sometimes for political or ideological gain, sometimes for both.
How do they do it, especially in this time when we supposedly have access to all of the data we need to make informed judgments right at our finger tips?
In this age of media saturation we live in a country that has defined itself through its deceptions. We the people are delusional about who we are and who we’ve been. The spirit of our age is firmly rooted in a seedbed of contrived stories consumed through mass communication. We are never satisfied because our extravagant expectations rarely match up with reality and so we are forever searching for the next big thing, or hitting it big, or making the big time. Our story is fed to us through the filtering medium of the lens and the slanting pens of editorial offices.* Kennedy won the election because Nixon didn’t have a close enough shave, but Nixon really won because Kennedy cheated in Texas and Chicago. Kennedy was a good guy killed by a lone outlaw and Nixon was an outlaw killed by a two good guys, a deep throat and a tape recorder. Kennedy goes down as hero, Nixon as villain. As unseemly as it all sounds it has become national folklore. Within this communal hallucination “all that is solid melts into air.” The real has become laborious, its minutiae too difficult to comprehend and its details too boring to memorize. The condensed, filtered, repackaged fantastic interpretation becomes more appealing, more exciting, easier. It’s almost as if we like to be duped. As if, like Barnum told us, being suckered is part of the experience of being American. The art of the con itself is based on creating illusions, and the best artists are the most deceptive ones.
A by-product of this simulated reality is the creation of the celebrity. A person who, as Daniel Boorstin points out, is well-known for no good reason other than for his/her well-known ness. The existence of public relations and marketing (fantasy image makers that have actually made themselves into a fantasy image–Madison Avenue and Mad Men) is largely dependent on convincing the masses to admire people who have never done anything to help them and to buy things that they don’t really need. (See Boorstin, Daniel. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America. Atheneum: New York, 1962). In this they have been wildly successful. Celebrities occupy the highest rung on the status ladder in America today, higher than teachers, higher than workers, higher than doctors (although many celebrities have become famous for playing them on TV), firefighters, architects, reporters, politicians, higher than pretty much everyone who actually contributes to the well-being of society. Only businessmen rival celebrities in popularity, many of whom have become celebrities themselves, thanks again to the sleight of hand of public relations and marketing.
In Gunfighter Nation, Author Richard Slotkin posits convincingly that, when considering our culture, politics, and foreign policy, the myth of the frontier has been, and still is, the primary frame within which our imaginations are stirred to action. The role of the frontier hero, usually represented as a tough lawman, tirelessly fighting against outlaws and savages in the name of progress is a dominant theme taken up by leaders from Teddy Roosevelt (The Winning of the West ) to JFK, LBJ and Ronald Reagan to justify everything from gunboat diplomacy to fighting Communism in far away lands, i.e., on the frontier. That skewed worldview has been faithfully supported by the culture industry, promoted in fiction and Dime novels, and in Hollywood, especially in westerns, but also in war and crime genres. Slotkin argues that simulated heroes played by the likes Buffalo Bill (playing himself), William S. Hart, Gary Cooper and John Wayne are so closely associated with Americans’ conception of the frontier myth because they were such important components in its evolution. There is a reason that Hollywood is called the Dream factory. (see Gunfighter Nation: Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America Atheneum: New York, 1992)
These threads converge in the Trump scenario. The ascendance of Donald and Sarah, both celebrities, both only recognizable for being recognized in the media, neither with any appreciable “real” talent, represents the reappearance of two of the foundational forms in the American drama- the con man and his trusted sidekick. For Trump, the outlaws are the Democrats and the savages are immigrants, corporate regulators, climate advocates and people seeking assistance from the government. But Trump takes it to a new level by representing the merger of several of the archetypal character types found in the American mythological narrative. Depending on who you ask he assumes the role of con man, outlaw or tough lawman. Sometimes all three at once, and that is somehow ok for many of his supporters. The fact that he seems to stand out above the sordid crowd alerts us to what is most sinister about him. He and Sarah spin up a show that is patently outrageous, they are the attention getters. Yet the true crime, the ongoing stagecoach robbery and swindling of the passengers, continues relatively hidden behind the scenes.
American history is a mythical history. From the frontier days to the modern world the outlaw, the con man and the lawman have been, and continue to be, central characters in that myth. The overarching theme is the struggle for the acquisition of wealth, property and security between the powerful and the powerless, haves and have nots, whites and nonwhites, bosses and workers etc. Depending on the time and circumstances the fortunes of the groups have changed in relation to each other. But the long term trend, albeit not entirely linear, has been the consolidation of victory for the few, many of whom are mere celebrities, Trump being the poster child, Sarah gracing the handbill. Historically a reliable brake against the greed of the powerful, many of them legalized outlaws, con men and law men, has been their fear of the masses. That is, the fear of democracy. Now the stage in the theatre of democracy, upon which our national mythology has been acted out, is in danger of being condemned for its rotting foundations. Historian Eric Hobsbawn put it succinctly– “One of the worst things about the politics of the past 30 years is that the rich have forgotten to be afraid of the poor.” Not only do they no longer fear us they have actually convinced many of us that the outlaw con man is the best lawman. And every good sheriff needs a loyal deputy–adios senora Sarah…
With so many unfilled posts in his administration the next feature on the Donald double-bill: The Searchers…
* A side note: one space where the real continues to transfix us is in the realm of true crime reporting. We are fascinated with the spontaneity of crime, it’s one of the rare experiences that is not totally contrived, that’s why its influence is outsized proportionally in the news cycle. We love to make fun of the incompetents, we secretly admire the masterminds, but we are always afraid of being a victim, thus we are easy targets for the personal security rackets. This may also be why sports are so popular. They are one of the few remaining forums for spontaneous non-contrived experiences. That’s not to say that the spectacle surrounding sports isn’t the equivalent of a PT Barnum event– a circus– but the game itself still maintains a sense and tension of the real. Anything can happen. The popularity of pro wrestling on the other hand informs us that the power of the contrived still remains immense in the American psyche, even in the domain of sports.
Related:
McLuhan, Marshall Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1964
https://parallelnarratives.com/2016/07/11/the-century-of-the-self-bbc/
We know a lot less than we think about the world – which explains the allure of “simplism”
Parallel Narratives 