This sarcastic piece from Sam Kriss makes for uncomfortable reading, at the edge of the usual left responses which simply repeat mainstream press predictions of the assassination attempt being a boost to the right and then tag on a reminder that we are against individual terrorism; this account keys into the ways in which we are hooked experientially by such events, and it is a reminder that for most people they respond outside the political coordinates we on the left take for granted.
ACR EB

I don’t know about you, but the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump has left me feeling elated. I really mean it. The sky seems brighter today; colours are more vivid. I never knew the world could be so beautiful.

I think it’s impossible not to admire Donald Trump in this moment. Watch the footage. Here he is, explaining a graph to a rally of his supporters in rural Pennsylvania, rambling about immigration—tedious stuff, Trump on autopilot—when something zips through his ear. Possibly a bullet, possibly a fragment of glass. He stops talking, touches the side of his head, and after a tiny aeon of hush the Secret Service throw themselves on him. Get down, get down, get down. More gunshots. The crowd screams in terror. Half-crouching in their seats, utterly exposed. The bodyguards decide to move Trump to his bulletproof car and speed him away. Stand him up, form a protective ring around him. But he won’t let them. Wait, he says. He stands still, he deliberately bares himself to anyone currently looking at him down the sights of a rifle, and he raises his fist. He shouts, still hoarse with shock. Fight! Fight! Fight! He knows what this moment is and what it means. He’s fighting off his own security detail so the world can see his fist.

Donald Trump is a showman. A huckster, who sells bad steaks and crooked cryptocoins and cruelty and lies—but he is dedicated to his hucksterism, and he’s willing to die for his showmanship. Like every true con artist, he wagers everything on the shining image of himself. It’s all a total fake, of course, a histrionic performance, a self-conscious pose; he’s doing it all for the cameras, but none of that matters. A performance is not just a performance once life and death are in play. Donald Trump knows that life is nothing; we only waste so much time living so there might be a few eternal moments like these.

Deleuze, glossing Nietzsche: ‘Laziness, stupidity, baseness, cowardice or spitefulness that would will its own eternal return would no longer be the same laziness, stupidity, etc.’

It would have been very chic of Donald Trump to have died, but this is even better. The attack is a triumph of the image over paltry things like life and death, and as an image it’s beautiful. He’s never seemed more Presidential than when he’s just been shot. Being shot looks amazing on him; for the first time he seems graceful, dignified, even statesmanlike. He wears his own blood like a medal. It’s pure summer; there’s something very summery about this shooting. The wide cloudless sky, the high American flag, and Donald Trump’s red American blood dripping down his cheek. Immaculate vibes. It’s preppy. It’s Ralph Lauren. It’s A$AP Rocky as JFK in Lana Del Rey’s National Anthem. It’s webs of white froth, white seabirds trilling over the sludgeplains of low tide. Sometimes the sun burns so hot the sky seems to darken. The whole world glows livid black. The Homeric season. Black ships, black blood, and the wine-dark sea.

Now look at the crowd. As soon as Trump’s fist goes up, they suddenly stop cowering. He punches the air; they stand and cheer and do the same. Remember that while none of the bullets really hit Trump, they did hit the people behind him. One attendee has died. As far as these people know, there is an active shooter somewhere nearby with a gun pointed directly at their heads. But they stand up in their seats and cheer. These are Americans, the most coddled and cowardly people on the planet, and he got them facing down death like it’s nothing. Joe Biden’s presidency might be one long walk into the final gloom, but he’s walking there alone. He couldn’t do that. Kamala Harris couldn’t do that. Could Gavin Newsom? Could Bernie?

Trump is a great man and a leader of men. This doesn’t make him a good man, or a clever man, or a worthy man. Napoleon and Alexander were frantic, thoughtless little perverts too. A great man is simply a man who sits so heavily in time that the era surrounding him sags under his weight. Someone who clearly has a very particular meaning, but that meaning is almost impossible to describe: it’s too big, it’s already bled into the meaning of the infinite world. Already people are speculating: if the bullet had been just an inch to the left, if Trump dropped down just a few seconds later… But there are no counterfactuals for great men. Napoleon could not have left Russia alone; Caesar could not have taken the Ides of March off. Like Avicenna’s God, all their predicates are necessary; they tear through history because they have no choice. In a way, great men are automata. Ruling-machines. You must have noticed how nothing ever hurts Trump: he can be disgraced, investigated, indicted, convicted, all for sleazy misdeeds that he’s absolutely guilty of, and it does nothing but make him stronger. He can be shot with a gun and it doesn’t slow him down. There was absolutely zero chance that those bullets could have ever popped Trump’s skull open, not as long as Trump living is more tragic or poetic than Trump dying. He’s not done yet. You’ll know when a great man is done, because you can brush him aside like a cobweb.

None of this has anything to do with politics. In fact, the ultimate political impact of the shooting is likely to be nil, or as close as makes no difference. Right now it feels like a massive, significant event that will be remembered for years to come, but you people think that about everything. Three months ago, Iran sent a swarm of drones and missiles in its first-ever direct attack on the State of Israel, and three months ago you thought that was a massive, significant event that would be remembered for years to come. But actually it was a strange performance piece in which the United States masterminded and then foiled an attack against its own ally so everyone involved could pretend to have done something, and you forgot it even happened until I reminded you just now. You thought you’d be telling your grandchildren about how you coped during the pandemic, but in the end we all moved on so fast that everyone’s covid novel went mercifully unpublished. This shooting will be the same: it will vanish into the vast archive of American violence.

Not least because it’s still not clear who to blame, although you do keep trying to find someone. In the immediate aftermath, Trump’s political supporters went into a very predictable frenzy. The blood was still flowing when the survivors at the rally turned on the press, screaming. Fuck you. You did this. And it’s true that the respectable, responsible not-fake-news outlets have lately been engaged in a campaign of utterly deranged hysteria, to the extent that millions of people seem to genuinely believe that if Trump wins this election there’ll never be another election again. They think he’s about to stuff all the liberals into concentration camps. They think he’s going to lead nationwide pogroms against sexual minorities and people of colour. If someone inhales enough of this stuff, maybe they would come to the reasonable conclusion that someone just needs to take Trump out. That’s what you’re risking with all this paranoia, and now the libs have finally overreached: their hateful rhetoric has borne fruit, some discourse-addled antifa gendergoblin has had a deadly tantrum with an AR-15, which means they never get to talk about January 6th again… But it’s not at all clear that this is what’s actually happened. Unlike most crazed gunmen—unlike most people—the man who shot Donald Trump doesn’t appear to have posted any deranged ideological gibberish online. He doesn’t seem to have posted anything at all. He’s a registered Republican, but he also once donated $15 to something called the Progressive Turnout Project. Everyone wants to know what his politics are, as if that would make it all make sense, but most people’s political opinions are totally incoherent and confused. We live in incoherent times! Consider that the shooter was twenty years old, which means he was around eleven when Donald Trump, raw as a turd, first slid down his golden escalator and plopped permanently in front of everyone’s eyeballs. He lived nearly half his life in a world utterly obsessed, whether positively or negatively, with this one man. He grew up as an involuntary extra in the Donald Show. And now the star of the show was coming to where he lived, and he had access to a gun. Famous people of every kind attract bullets. Can you really think of no other reason except politics that someone might want to kill Donald Trump? Do you really have so little imagination?

Apparently not: everyone just keeps mouthing the same line, which is that it’s actually bad to shoot people, even when you really disagree with them. Politics must not be contaminated with violence. Barack Obama called on Americans to ‘use this moment to recommit ourselves to civility and respect.’ Joe Biden declared that ‘there is no place in America for this kind of violence.’ Sympathetic messages from world leaders. ‘Violence has no place in politics and democracies,’ says India’s Narendra Modi, who has been cleared of any complicity in the 2002 Gujurat pogroms that killed hundreds of people. In Egypt, Abdelfattah al-Sisi expressed his hope that the election could continue in ‘an atmosphere free from terrorism, violence and hatred.’ In the days after he seized power, the Egyptian security forces gunned down thousands of peaceful protesters. Israel’s Yair Lapid said that ‘political violence is an existential threat to democratic systems,’ and, well, you get the point. Grandly declaring that violence has no place in a democracy doesn’t make it true; sooner or later you have to contend with the real world. Whether it was invited or not, violence is what’s there. It can be on the surface, it can be buried deep, but nobody’s yet found a way of doing politics without it.

But, again: this is not politics. Politically, this event is meaningless, totally insignificant. One man with a gun, representing no one: it couldn’t matter less if Trump had his ear bitten off by a stray dog instead. It belongs to the other world, showmanship and the luminous image. The shooting of Donald Trump does open up a very clear distinction, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with friend or enemy. It’s this: either you love America and the world, or you don’t.

If you don’t love America and the world, that’s fine. It’s a perfectly respectable gesture, and there’s a lot that’s wrong with both. You’re free to worry about how dangerous this is, how bad things are getting, how big the pit in your stomach keeps getting. You might even be right to. But I’m elated by the beautiful image of Trump raising his fist into an infinite sky while blood trickles down his cheek. Nietzsche says that if you want to affirm anything, any tiny moment in your existence, you have to affirm the entire world. ‘If our soul did but once vibrate and resound with a chord of happiness, then all of eternity was necessary to bring forth this one occurrence—and in this single moment when we said yes, all of eternity was affirmed.’ This is impossible to actually do, because all of eternity also includes the negation of everything you affirm. The smart way to go about things is the dialectical, critical way, in which you start by negating everything until you finally negate the negation and then slowly build things up from there. But Trump’s been shot and the sun is hot and today I don’t much feel like being smart.

If you love America and the world, you have to love everything there is about America and the world. As far as I know, there are no longer any actual Americans capable of doing this. But I am. I love Donald Trump. I love Joe Biden. I wish they could both win. I love Kamala Harris too. I love the spectacle of politics. I love the deranged propaganda on every side. It’s vivid. I love everything vivid. I love the enormous supermarkets, the barren hills, the opioid crisis, the treacly voices in the public service announcements, the bureaucracy, the violence. It takes courage and ingenuity to call that stuff cheese. I love this senseless empire, sprawled across the face of someone else’s continent like a bird-eating spider, and I love its mandibles that inject the planet with venom until everything liquefies and it can feed. I love the rallies. I love the chants. I love the prognathic children of the Pittsburgh suburbs. I love the cold starkness of its red white and blue. I love the alienation, the sense that you have everything in the world except what you actually need, the terrible hollow at the heart of the entire project that you keep trying to fill with entertainment and death but none of it even seems to touch the sides. I love hot dogs and hamburgers and the Fourth of July. I love America and the world. I love everything there is about America and the world.

Source >> Sam Kriss Substack

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