Perhaps it was always going to come down to this. A MAGA hat and a gun. Two pathways to the heart of America, two symbols of what the country holds most dear: celebrities and their brands, and the right to bear arms. Two emblems of Trumpism, a movement fueled by capitalist glamour and thuggery, the former providing cover for the latter, as in this tableau.
... use the tools you have and file a complaint with the powers that be: there aren't any cute of cheeky death threats, especially when the performer is advocating full-blown theocracy.
For the discussion of mandatory voting during the last Zoom ..
Turns out the UN has a vast storehouse of electoral information
"Launched at the United Nations in 1998 by International IDEA, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), and the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), ACE was initially created as the Administration and Cost of Elections project.. "
A *lot* of info on compulsory voting, so just putting the search results link:
RBG has identified and interpreted for us an important sign of the times. The tableau of the MAGA Hat and the Gun may also be interpreted from a perspective that is a step removed from our customary interpretation of political realities in verbal terms. It may be interpreted as a primarily visual symbol with a secondary verbal content, that makes its appeal primarily as spectacle.
From this perspective, the tableau may be seen as a coat of arms. The coat of arms was originally used in the middle ages to distinguish armored knights from one another (as the military uniform does for modern soldiers). Its original iconography was largely martial, often featuring a spear, sword, or helmet. As it has been variously adapted over the centuries, its original symbolism has expanded; the best-known contemporary coat of arms is probably that of the reigning British sovereign, which retains a medieval helmet at its center. Eventually the coat of arms became a marker of social status in a hierarchical social structure; it is to be understood in the context of a conservative conception of the nation as an integral whole, encompassing the state, the military, and implicitly the tribe and the national religion.
Many ordinary individuals in contemporary America, believing their family name to be somehow officially associated with a coat of arms, purchase "their" coat of arms in a shopping mall, thereby acquiring, in their own minds, an elevated social status in a stable, hierarchical social order. (Trump has invented a couple of coats of arms for himself.) This pseudo-democratization of the coat of arms represents the same kind of escape from an oppressive reality as joining a demagogue's personality cult. Unable to participate effectively in the complex, living web of self-development and relationships that constitute a healthy democracy, the demagogue's followers magically elevate themselves into members of an aristocracy or nobility led by a monarchical leader. This totalizing symbolism makes the coat of arms a template for a fascist movement that intends to remake the nation in the image of its reactionary, dystopian ideal.
The MAGA hat, arranged with the gun, becomes an element in a coat of arms. The gun recalls the original martial function of the coat of arms, as an insignia used in individual combat against a mortal foe. Symbolically the MAGA hat becomes the helmet of a knight (and also of a modern soldier, police officer, and blackshirt-brownshirt). The identities of the "us" and the Other against whom the Trump follower must wage mortal combat is indicated by the coat of arms' motto, "Make America Great Again." This motto indicates that the "us" are the white Christian descendants and heirs of the European nobility represented in their minds by the coat of arms. The "Other" are people of colors and religions other than those of White Christians. The MAGA hat, both as a shield and as a simple baseball cap, represents the Trump follower's innocent victimhood. As a shield associated with the gun, which symbolically is a spear or sword, the MAGA hat represents the status of the Trump follower as a warrior defending hearth and nation. The MAGA hat also symbolizes a crown, which expresses the grandiose self-image of the Trump follower, itself a reflection of the grandiose image of the monarchical Trump.
Like Trumpism, this tableau must be understood in terms of its historical origins. It represents among other things the massive militarization, in the interest of political domination both domestic and imperial, of the United States in the post-WWII era. The MAGA hat is a baseball cap, and sports are of course extremely significant in the emotional and social lives of a great many people, especially those who are most responsive to spectacle and performance. The Trumpists' transformation of a baseball cap into a symbol of military combat corresponds to the transformation the National Pastime as baseball into the National Pastime as football; the MAGA hat, in addition to its other symbolic affiliations, represents a football helmet, football being a violent, brain-damaging battle for territorial domination between two rigidly hierarchical, specialized, and coordinated teams of hyper-masculine men. America's great annual festival day is no longer the thoroughly commercialized Christmas Day, but Superbowl Sunday, which has become a televised super-Nuremberg Rally, redolent as well of the May Day parades of weaponry in the Soviet Union. Thus the complex of imagery of the MAGA baseball cap includes the football helmet.
War is an extreme, sadistic, perverted expression of sexuality, and this pathological sexuality, in addition to paranoia, pathological narcissism, a psychotic withdrawal from reality, and a predilection for violence, is essential to the demagogue-mob relationship. In the tableau of the MAGA Hat and the Gun, the gun partially protrudes from a lush, red, concave object; this is a hyper-potent image of the toxic masculinity that is always fundamental to war. Appropriate mottoes for the coat of arms in this aspect would be, "The Phallus Penetrant" and "The Phallus Emergent" (i.e., from trousers). The peeking phallus-gun is also a triumphal representation of the serpent, or dragon, of tyranny's cunning and violence. In late 2021 this serpent is creeping farther every day into a world it is planning to take over (i.e., rape), while the official guardians of our liberties dither, or even connive with it. The MAGA Hat and the Gun present a contemporary version of the millennia-old warrior code depicted in the Iliad (which we now call "toxic masculinity"), mediated through medieval knighthood, in which the victors enslave the women of the defeated enemy, both sexually and domestically, as their personal spoil.
Thus the simple picture of a baseball hat with a slogan and a gun presents us with a comprehensive symbolism of tyranny, whose most concentrated form is state religion. Under established tyranny, the monarch's temporal tyranny over his subjects is justified and maintained by his priests' mental tyranny over their flock; and the mental tyranny of the priests is guaranteed by the temporal tyranny of the monarch. The state tyranny in the present case is neo-fascism; the religious tyranny is the fundamentalist perversion of Christianity that Chris Hedges calls "Christian fascism."
While the version of the coat of arms discussed here may be understood as asking nothing more of Trump followers than the infantile narcissism that motivates them to purchase "the family coat of arms" at a shopping mall, it also marks an escalation. The next step after the still life of the tableau is the animated version, in which a thug wearing a MAGA hat is carrying a gun. People like the man-child who wore play horns to the Capitol on January 6 are now being openly summoned to become American blackshirt-brownshirts and engage in actual violence.
This next step is depicted in the Tucker Carlson video that RBG embedded in a tweet on October 28. This very brief video is a little masterpiece of hysterical, paranoid rabble-rousing. The psychological engine that enables fascist propaganda to render its audience emotionally super-heated, while simultaneously confusing and paralyzing its critical faculties, is paranoid projection. In this technique, the fascist's own malevolent aggression and evil are simultaneously disowned by the fascist and attributed to the enemy Other. The Other thereby becomes the embodiment of malevolent aggression and evil, while the fascist becomes his innocent victim, who has no choice but to respond with extreme aggression. In the disorienting emotional hysteria and cognitive hall-of-mirrors created by this piece of propaganda's bewildering, rapid-fire proliferation of emotionally supercharged images, voice-overs, and captions, one cannot distinguish truth from lies, friend from enemy, reality from fantasy, sickness from health.
Thus in Carlson's video, the coup attempt on January 6 (depicted in video) becomes a defense of White people. The US government's mobilization against Bin Laden (depicted in video) and the 9-11 attackers becomes a war against White people, which involves waterboarding them at Guantanamo (self-contradictorily depicted as being performed against a person of color in video). Biden's denunciation of White supremacists (depicted in video) becomes the government's declaration of war against White people. A Black man's implied declaration that he is a Trumpist (depicted in video) proves, as he himself says, that Trumpism is not a White supremacist movement. A Klu Klux Klan march with torches, white robes, and conical hats (depicted in video) represents the necessary response of innocent White people to this war against them. Patriotic music (on the sound track) presents the violent aggression called for by the video as patriotism. This video illustrates the overwhelming power of archetypal visual imagery supplemented by words and diabolical psychological cunning.
This sophisticated complex of propaganda techniques, paradoxically, comes naturally to fascists, because they themselves are, among other things, hysterical, paranoid sociopaths with a tenuous grasp of reality. Nevertheless, Carlson and his Goebbels, whoever that might be, are extremely talented. They are armed and extremely dangerous, a present threat to every human being on the planet.
The above commentary may seem like too much to read into a picture of a mere hat and gun. But in our logocentric culture, we tend of overlook how people are moved not by words, but by unconscious archetypal symbols, such as the swastika (symbolizing both the Christian cross and the rayed sun, and thus death); the goose-step (symbolizing smashing the human face under the military boot); the Hitler salute (symbolizing obeisance to the semi-divine ruler); and the white gowns, coned hats, burning crosses, and nooses of the Klu Klux Klan (symbolizing White Christianity as a death cult). Moved by such seemingly simple images, people will immolate themselves and the whole world with them. For these images are the demonic forms of the unconscious archetypes that govern us all.
Excellent piece. Absolutely correct & a warning of what is coming for those of us not interested in living under a theocratic fascist state ruled by violence. Thank you for writing this.
What is so disturbing is that 74 million people don't realize that what they're supporting is fascism. Trying to convince these people of the truth in this matter is an effort in futility. The MAGA hat might as well be a swastika hat because the mindset is the same (jingoism, a cult of masculinity, social Darwinism, lamenting the nation's mythical past greatness, inability to discern fact from fiction, etc).
This relates quite obviously to the antivaxxer protests where protesters rail against the tyranny of mask mandates & vaccines imposed on them by the government at any level from school board to the President. That’s why they wear the yellow star and distort the history of the Holocaust. It would be justified to use those guns on government actors if you felt you were going to be rounded up & persecuted. After all the Nazi’s are the quickest shorthand for demonization. Holocaust denial and distortion is specifically linked to the far right wherever it appears.
Authoritarians always try to maintain a veneer of respectability so they don't spook elites. Trump's ability to do that may be waning as some investors in his new media venture pulled out. Last week, the "[Boaz] Weinstein's Saba Capital group pulled out after they learned their venture was investing in a Trump entity. Weinstein "I knew that for Saba the right thing was to sell our entire stake of unrestricted shares, which we have now done. Many investors are grappling with hard questions about how to incorporate their values into their work. For us, this was not a close call," he explained. Another investor who held a 10% stake sold out too. "The idea that I would help [Trump] build out a fake news business called Truth makes me want to throw up," they said.
But among the base in MAGA world, Trump remains a powerful charismatic figure. His followers are enthralled by him and his big lie that the election was stolen from him. Many have joined para military groups and are in survivalist mode -- locked and loaded to take their country back. Violence and the threat of violence has always been a key component of Trump's authoritarian appeal as it is for all strongmen and authoritarians.
ICYMI, I posted my response to this post to your Twitter
https://twitter.com/haleba07/status/1454637570596429825
... use the tools you have and file a complaint with the powers that be: there aren't any cute of cheeky death threats, especially when the performer is advocating full-blown theocracy.
For the discussion of mandatory voting during the last Zoom ..
Turns out the UN has a vast storehouse of electoral information
"Launched at the United Nations in 1998 by International IDEA, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), and the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), ACE was initially created as the Administration and Cost of Elections project.. "
A *lot* of info on compulsory voting, so just putting the search results link:
https://aceproject.org/main/english/es/search?rtype=&country=&topic=&SearchableText=compulsory%20voting&language=
Their outline-formatted "Electoral Systems" overview page:
https://aceproject.org/ace-en/topics/es
Main page:
https://aceproject.org
Will post to the Facebook (Meta :) page as well
1/2
RBG has identified and interpreted for us an important sign of the times. The tableau of the MAGA Hat and the Gun may also be interpreted from a perspective that is a step removed from our customary interpretation of political realities in verbal terms. It may be interpreted as a primarily visual symbol with a secondary verbal content, that makes its appeal primarily as spectacle.
From this perspective, the tableau may be seen as a coat of arms. The coat of arms was originally used in the middle ages to distinguish armored knights from one another (as the military uniform does for modern soldiers). Its original iconography was largely martial, often featuring a spear, sword, or helmet. As it has been variously adapted over the centuries, its original symbolism has expanded; the best-known contemporary coat of arms is probably that of the reigning British sovereign, which retains a medieval helmet at its center. Eventually the coat of arms became a marker of social status in a hierarchical social structure; it is to be understood in the context of a conservative conception of the nation as an integral whole, encompassing the state, the military, and implicitly the tribe and the national religion.
Many ordinary individuals in contemporary America, believing their family name to be somehow officially associated with a coat of arms, purchase "their" coat of arms in a shopping mall, thereby acquiring, in their own minds, an elevated social status in a stable, hierarchical social order. (Trump has invented a couple of coats of arms for himself.) This pseudo-democratization of the coat of arms represents the same kind of escape from an oppressive reality as joining a demagogue's personality cult. Unable to participate effectively in the complex, living web of self-development and relationships that constitute a healthy democracy, the demagogue's followers magically elevate themselves into members of an aristocracy or nobility led by a monarchical leader. This totalizing symbolism makes the coat of arms a template for a fascist movement that intends to remake the nation in the image of its reactionary, dystopian ideal.
The MAGA hat, arranged with the gun, becomes an element in a coat of arms. The gun recalls the original martial function of the coat of arms, as an insignia used in individual combat against a mortal foe. Symbolically the MAGA hat becomes the helmet of a knight (and also of a modern soldier, police officer, and blackshirt-brownshirt). The identities of the "us" and the Other against whom the Trump follower must wage mortal combat is indicated by the coat of arms' motto, "Make America Great Again." This motto indicates that the "us" are the white Christian descendants and heirs of the European nobility represented in their minds by the coat of arms. The "Other" are people of colors and religions other than those of White Christians. The MAGA hat, both as a shield and as a simple baseball cap, represents the Trump follower's innocent victimhood. As a shield associated with the gun, which symbolically is a spear or sword, the MAGA hat represents the status of the Trump follower as a warrior defending hearth and nation. The MAGA hat also symbolizes a crown, which expresses the grandiose self-image of the Trump follower, itself a reflection of the grandiose image of the monarchical Trump.
Like Trumpism, this tableau must be understood in terms of its historical origins. It represents among other things the massive militarization, in the interest of political domination both domestic and imperial, of the United States in the post-WWII era. The MAGA hat is a baseball cap, and sports are of course extremely significant in the emotional and social lives of a great many people, especially those who are most responsive to spectacle and performance. The Trumpists' transformation of a baseball cap into a symbol of military combat corresponds to the transformation the National Pastime as baseball into the National Pastime as football; the MAGA hat, in addition to its other symbolic affiliations, represents a football helmet, football being a violent, brain-damaging battle for territorial domination between two rigidly hierarchical, specialized, and coordinated teams of hyper-masculine men. America's great annual festival day is no longer the thoroughly commercialized Christmas Day, but Superbowl Sunday, which has become a televised super-Nuremberg Rally, redolent as well of the May Day parades of weaponry in the Soviet Union. Thus the complex of imagery of the MAGA baseball cap includes the football helmet.
War is an extreme, sadistic, perverted expression of sexuality, and this pathological sexuality, in addition to paranoia, pathological narcissism, a psychotic withdrawal from reality, and a predilection for violence, is essential to the demagogue-mob relationship. In the tableau of the MAGA Hat and the Gun, the gun partially protrudes from a lush, red, concave object; this is a hyper-potent image of the toxic masculinity that is always fundamental to war. Appropriate mottoes for the coat of arms in this aspect would be, "The Phallus Penetrant" and "The Phallus Emergent" (i.e., from trousers). The peeking phallus-gun is also a triumphal representation of the serpent, or dragon, of tyranny's cunning and violence. In late 2021 this serpent is creeping farther every day into a world it is planning to take over (i.e., rape), while the official guardians of our liberties dither, or even connive with it. The MAGA Hat and the Gun present a contemporary version of the millennia-old warrior code depicted in the Iliad (which we now call "toxic masculinity"), mediated through medieval knighthood, in which the victors enslave the women of the defeated enemy, both sexually and domestically, as their personal spoil.
Thus the simple picture of a baseball hat with a slogan and a gun presents us with a comprehensive symbolism of tyranny, whose most concentrated form is state religion. Under established tyranny, the monarch's temporal tyranny over his subjects is justified and maintained by his priests' mental tyranny over their flock; and the mental tyranny of the priests is guaranteed by the temporal tyranny of the monarch. The state tyranny in the present case is neo-fascism; the religious tyranny is the fundamentalist perversion of Christianity that Chris Hedges calls "Christian fascism."
2/2
While the version of the coat of arms discussed here may be understood as asking nothing more of Trump followers than the infantile narcissism that motivates them to purchase "the family coat of arms" at a shopping mall, it also marks an escalation. The next step after the still life of the tableau is the animated version, in which a thug wearing a MAGA hat is carrying a gun. People like the man-child who wore play horns to the Capitol on January 6 are now being openly summoned to become American blackshirt-brownshirts and engage in actual violence.
This next step is depicted in the Tucker Carlson video that RBG embedded in a tweet on October 28. This very brief video is a little masterpiece of hysterical, paranoid rabble-rousing. The psychological engine that enables fascist propaganda to render its audience emotionally super-heated, while simultaneously confusing and paralyzing its critical faculties, is paranoid projection. In this technique, the fascist's own malevolent aggression and evil are simultaneously disowned by the fascist and attributed to the enemy Other. The Other thereby becomes the embodiment of malevolent aggression and evil, while the fascist becomes his innocent victim, who has no choice but to respond with extreme aggression. In the disorienting emotional hysteria and cognitive hall-of-mirrors created by this piece of propaganda's bewildering, rapid-fire proliferation of emotionally supercharged images, voice-overs, and captions, one cannot distinguish truth from lies, friend from enemy, reality from fantasy, sickness from health.
Thus in Carlson's video, the coup attempt on January 6 (depicted in video) becomes a defense of White people. The US government's mobilization against Bin Laden (depicted in video) and the 9-11 attackers becomes a war against White people, which involves waterboarding them at Guantanamo (self-contradictorily depicted as being performed against a person of color in video). Biden's denunciation of White supremacists (depicted in video) becomes the government's declaration of war against White people. A Black man's implied declaration that he is a Trumpist (depicted in video) proves, as he himself says, that Trumpism is not a White supremacist movement. A Klu Klux Klan march with torches, white robes, and conical hats (depicted in video) represents the necessary response of innocent White people to this war against them. Patriotic music (on the sound track) presents the violent aggression called for by the video as patriotism. This video illustrates the overwhelming power of archetypal visual imagery supplemented by words and diabolical psychological cunning.
This sophisticated complex of propaganda techniques, paradoxically, comes naturally to fascists, because they themselves are, among other things, hysterical, paranoid sociopaths with a tenuous grasp of reality. Nevertheless, Carlson and his Goebbels, whoever that might be, are extremely talented. They are armed and extremely dangerous, a present threat to every human being on the planet.
The above commentary may seem like too much to read into a picture of a mere hat and gun. But in our logocentric culture, we tend of overlook how people are moved not by words, but by unconscious archetypal symbols, such as the swastika (symbolizing both the Christian cross and the rayed sun, and thus death); the goose-step (symbolizing smashing the human face under the military boot); the Hitler salute (symbolizing obeisance to the semi-divine ruler); and the white gowns, coned hats, burning crosses, and nooses of the Klu Klux Klan (symbolizing White Christianity as a death cult). Moved by such seemingly simple images, people will immolate themselves and the whole world with them. For these images are the demonic forms of the unconscious archetypes that govern us all.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, by. Issac Asimov
Excellent piece. Absolutely correct & a warning of what is coming for those of us not interested in living under a theocratic fascist state ruled by violence. Thank you for writing this.
What is so disturbing is that 74 million people don't realize that what they're supporting is fascism. Trying to convince these people of the truth in this matter is an effort in futility. The MAGA hat might as well be a swastika hat because the mindset is the same (jingoism, a cult of masculinity, social Darwinism, lamenting the nation's mythical past greatness, inability to discern fact from fiction, etc).
Another valuable observation. It pairs well with Timothy Snyder’s Lesson #6: Be Wary of Paramilitaries.
This relates quite obviously to the antivaxxer protests where protesters rail against the tyranny of mask mandates & vaccines imposed on them by the government at any level from school board to the President. That’s why they wear the yellow star and distort the history of the Holocaust. It would be justified to use those guns on government actors if you felt you were going to be rounded up & persecuted. After all the Nazi’s are the quickest shorthand for demonization. Holocaust denial and distortion is specifically linked to the far right wherever it appears.
Authoritarians always try to maintain a veneer of respectability so they don't spook elites. Trump's ability to do that may be waning as some investors in his new media venture pulled out. Last week, the "[Boaz] Weinstein's Saba Capital group pulled out after they learned their venture was investing in a Trump entity. Weinstein "I knew that for Saba the right thing was to sell our entire stake of unrestricted shares, which we have now done. Many investors are grappling with hard questions about how to incorporate their values into their work. For us, this was not a close call," he explained. Another investor who held a 10% stake sold out too. "The idea that I would help [Trump] build out a fake news business called Truth makes me want to throw up," they said.
But among the base in MAGA world, Trump remains a powerful charismatic figure. His followers are enthralled by him and his big lie that the election was stolen from him. Many have joined para military groups and are in survivalist mode -- locked and loaded to take their country back. Violence and the threat of violence has always been a key component of Trump's authoritarian appeal as it is for all strongmen and authoritarians.
This is so hard to stomach. But we must be clear about all of it. About what this fight will entail.
Thank you, my daily dose of sanity. No maga hats or weapons needed, wanted or necessary.
Great article Ruth.