Image of the Week #10: The Ear Shot Around the World, by Adam Lehrer

I assume you've been waiting for me to address this?

In the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered widow, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylized glamour of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very different meanings. – J.G. Ballard

Every boomer or person old enough to remember the day when JFK was murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald can also remember exactly what they were doing and where they were when those shots were fired. 30 years from now, when people ask me where I was and what I was doing when Donald J. Trump was shot by Thomas Matthew Crooks, I will have to live with the fact that my truthful response will be:

”On my couch, watching 90 Day Fiancé: Another Day in Paradise.”

It dawned upon me in the aftermath of the shock of witnessing Trump’s defiant response to the attempt on his life in most epiphanic of manners: if he died, we’d be absolutely fucked.

There is truly no one else willing to lead. No one who can flout the authority of the ruling consensus more than he. No one who can energize the common man against their exploitative ruling bureaucracies better than the Donald. The image of him as he gathers and collects himself to let the shock of the bullet wear off and raising his black power fist to the air is one of utter glory. A masterpiece. Sublime. This is the Great Man theory made for the 21st Century. Did I even mention the fact that July 13 is Julius Caesar’s birthday?

Of course, this being the moment that we live through, the conspiracy mill started turning around the event in every direction within minutes of it happening. What stumps most people is the flagrant security breach of the whole thing: how in the fuck did Crooks end up on the roof while setting his rifle up unspotted?

It’s a good question, and likely speaks to either flagrant negligence OR commanded negligence on behalf of the National Security squad assigned to Trump. However, for the all too online goofballs that suggest that Trump is part of “the regime” because he shares some of the proverbial bureaucracy’s policy preferences: Trump is not part of the “regime”. In fact, he is despised by it.

To understand the deep state and globalist agenda pushers’ deep and irrational contempt for Donald Trump, the syndrome we all know as Trump Derangement Syndrome, one need not look towards political ideologies or agendas and instead towards Freud and psychology.

The bureaucrats, Gen X/boomer/millennial liberal voters and media consumers, and deep state denizens despise Trump not for any single one of his political positions. No, they loathe him for one reason: they think he’s trashy. They think he’s beneath them.

”HOW DARE THIS REALITY TV LOW RENT GAME SHOW HOST DARE TO GOVERN ME WITH ALL MY DEGREES AND ALL MY ACHIEVEMENTS!” declares an Obama era CIA hire/a non-binary middle school English teacher/an ill-tempered cunty Gen X woman running a PR firm/etc.

All of them unite behind the fact that they can’t believe the culture they wave their fingers at, otherwise known as AMERICAN CULTURE, would dare to rise to the executive office. It is an affront to their sensibilities at their deepest, inner cores. This is, of course, also the exact reason that millions of other Americans absolutely love the man and would be willing to commit Seppuku in honor of him: doing so feels like waving the middle finger in the faces of all those who look down upon them.

The other big group of conspiracists around the shooting are those who have ceased believing that reality itself is real. It is, to them, completely staged, lost in layers of mediated data and simulacra. I suppose, given the utter erasure of distance between media and reality, such a disposition can be understood, if not exactly sympathized with or accepted. Baudrillard’s old adage: “more information, less meaning.”

We were the generation promised the world by the one before us:

Work hard and achieve!
Go to college and pursue your passions!
Follow your dreams!

But when we came of age, all there was to inherit was a hyper competitive gigs market and a life time of hustling working jobs well beneath the degrees we earned to make money that situated us well below the poverty line. This economic depression played out against an increasingly cartoonishly cyberpunk media landscape that left us with the assumption that, at the very least, something was deeply wrong and, at the very most, nothing at all was “real”.

But, life is real. This really happened. To those who say the images of Trump raising his fist are “ too perfect”, I respond: no, he’s just that fucking good at PR. The man gets shot, is clearly shaken and scared, but remembers that the camera is rolling. He gathers himself, looks to his people, raises his hand and defiantly fists the air: “FIGHT,” he says. He’s unreal. He’s unstoppable. He’s an absolute force of charisma and endurance. Nothing — bogus trials, endless media blockades, fucking bullets — can stop him. It’s a sight to see, and it’s beautiful.

There is MEANING in everything that happens. Trump was shot! A supporter of his was fucking killed! We’re at a great precipice point in human civilization, and you’re a part of it.

This is all still happening despite all the digitized information swarming your senses, you are still living through the forward momentum of history. Brothers and sisters, you are fucking PART OF HISTORY! And you will all remember the exact moment that some crazy libtard tried to assassinate President Trump!

Is anyone really that shocked that this same media that has led some unfortunates to believe that everything is “FAKE” would also lead to some spazzed out libtards, or spazzed out conservatards for that matter, to get so worked up that they might take a shot at either Trump or Biden?

Don’t let perpetually no-stance, stand for nothing bozos like Michael Tracey fool you: Trump IS the most overly demonized figure in the history of American politics and it’s not even close. Not only has the media relentlessly taken to hammering the idea into the heads of their viewers that Trump is “literally Hitler,” (The New Republic just dropped a new Trump/Hitler meme mag cover last week, four years after Trump was already president and turned out to definitely not start a World War or genocide anyone) they have also destroyed the careers of media figures, artists, thinkers, scientists, musicians, athletes or fucking anyone who declared their political preference for a Trump presidency. How is anyone shocked that the shooter, Mr. Crooks, took the media at its word when others think everything in the media is entirely staged? It seems we’ve invented generations of lost ironists who have stopped trying to understand anything and utterly nuance deprived and damaged literalists willing to kill over what their media has agitated in them. It’s scary. There are some warped motherfuckers out there, man. Times are a-changing, and fast.

This IS history. This IS a cultural fault line. THIS IS A MOMENT OF CHANGE. It is happening, right before you.

Ukraine’s President and United States armament welfare queen Zelensky has already publicly declared that Russia should be represented at the upcoming Ukrainian peace summit, basically admitting that he knows his gravy train is ending. CNN finds itself forced to admit that what happened to Trump was, indeed, a political assasination and here clarifies the meaning of the term to its readers. Democrats are all but admitting that they know they are toast in this election cycle.

So many people just don’t “see” the attempt on Trump’s life in the way that they would another politician because his very name is one loaded with such a long lifespan in Americana and pop culture. They refuse, you see, to see him as the political force of nature that he so obviously is, incapable of reconciling the hybridization of media, politics, and reality TV that he represents. He is a perfect embodiment of the country in this moment, for better and worse, and that makes him terrifying to some and utterly powerful and seductive to others. And this refusal to see his fierce defiance as the actual POLITICAL LEADERSHIP that it is that liberals live and die by is of course only what propels us, the movement around him, to action and glory. We’re going to win.