I made the mistake of turning on MSNBC this morning. I wouldn’t say I’ve been watching it exactly. It’s more serving as background noise. It’s background noise that involves incessant mentions of Donald Trump. Apparently, the media is engaged in a debate with itself over whether or not Donald Trump is really going to run for president and whether they should or should not take his candidacy seriously. For some reason this called to mind something I read recently, which was a discussion by the author Jonathan Franzen (pdf) on the difference between the Contract and Status theories of meritorious fiction. It’s a complicated subject that boils down to one side who thinks really great fiction should require that the reader be both a genius and willing to work really hard to understand the author, and another side who thinks that the author and reader really ought to respect each other and that intelligibility is kind of a requirement for a book to be considered historically significant.
It’s probably a more interesting debate than I have given it credit for, but not interesting enough that I want to discuss it here. Franzen used the author William Gaddis as his launching point for discussing “hard-to-read” books, and he’s as good of a launching point as you could find. I read Carpenter’s Gothic and found it to be opaque and depressing, but also cleverly crafted. I’ve never attempted any of his longer works. Franzen enjoyed Gaddis’s first book, The Recognitions, but either hated or couldn’t finish the rest of his work. Near the end of his essay, he quotes one of Gaddis’s defenders in order to show how far some people are willing to go to defend an author’s cruelty to his own readers:
I imagine Gaddis’s disciples wagging their fingers at me, telling me I’m another Stupid Reader, explaining that the essays subvert my expectations of clarity, of pleasure, of edification; that I haven’t got the joke yet. They have postmodern apologies for his difficulty, such as this one by Gregory Comnes:
The narrative enactment of this epistemology shows readers how hard work is a necessary precondition for having meaning in narrative by forcing readers to participate actively in the construction of narrative meaning, requiring them to bring information to the text to read what was never written.
They tell me, in other words, that I just need to work a little bit harder. To which I can only reply that there is no headache like the headache you get from working harder on deciphering a text than the author, by all appearances, has worked on assembling it; and that I’m beginning to get that headache.
Which is to say that Gaddis eventually decided to play a joke on his readers by publishing gibberish and expecting them to make the attempt to not only make sense of it but reward him with a reputation for literary genius.
In other words, he was Donald Trump before Donald Trump
We’ve seen a number of countries in recent years go down the road of electing celebrities with no visible qualifications as their leaders. Most recently, Haiti, but there’s actually a long list. The European standard-bearer is Berlusconi. The most notable American example so far is Schwarzenegger; Obama’s election also had significant celebrity elements, though at least he’d held some previous elected office.
Some day soon, some wealthy American media megastar with the ego but without the negatives of Trump or Palin is going to figure out that in our new media universe, being liked is a much faster ticket to the most powerful job in the world than having coherent policy ideas or relevant experience. And at that point, all bets are off. We could get a reasonably thoughtful guy like Ahhnold; we could get an ignoramus like Palin; we could get a proto-fascist like Berlusconi; or we could get someone who doesn’t even have the public policy chops of George W. Bush. The prospects are mostly pretty bad.
You wouldn’t want some charismatic guy from off the street to be your brain surgeon. Why so many people assume that “anyone” can do politics so long as they (suppposedly) share your values utterly escapes me. But after a couple generations of particularly toxic cultural contempt for “politicians,” that’s where we are.
Trump/Palin 2012: “You’re fired.” “I quit.”
I’m surprised you didn’t mention Ronald Reagan.
Or Jesse Ventura.
I thought of Reagan, but he was more of a B-list celebrity, and the celebrity culture is far more intense now than it was when he was elected governor in the ’60s. But he certainly paved the way.
Ventura was better known in Minnesota as a local talk show host than as a wrestler. Of course, especially at the local level, there’s also a long history of media figures running for office.
Um, because the egalitarian values of a democratic society suggest exactly that? That anyone can serve as the representative of the people.
You might as well ask why so many people assume that “anyone” can serve on a jury – because the answer’s the same.
A better question is why we have a system where anyone can serve as a representative of the people and yet it doesn’t work to actually TRAIN everyone to be capable of serving as a representative of the people. That’s actually the real problem. If we want to give up the ideas of egalitarianism we might as well throw democracy out with it and set up an overt rule by elites instead of forcing them to pretend otherwise.
That’s not a perfect analogy.
Being president is less like serving on a jury than being a judge.
First of all, there are requirements beyond citizenship to being president. Most obviously, you have to be thirty-five years old. Age is supposed to confer some wisdom on you.
But, realistically, you also have to win the nomination of a major party or, at least. figure out how to get your name on forty or more state ballots. That means you have to convince a lot of people to do a lot of work for you and give you resources (unless you’re going to pay for it all yourself). So, you have to have certain qualities to make that happen.
But, being a good president requires more and different qualities than what is needed to be elected president. Or governor. Ahnold was a terrible governor but a good campaigner.
In addition to Booman’s response, I’d add that being an executive is not the same as being a legislative representative. Legislators need some specific skills, too, but executives need those skills (e.g., coalition-building, an eye for legislative detail, public policy knowledge) as well as managerial skills.
The President, to use the most obvious example, is not only Commander-in-Chief, but the boss of literally millions of civilian employees. Ahnold’s a good example, too. It’s not a job for the person with the prettiest smile. Even the mayor of my city (Seattle) oversees 10,000 employees, which is why I hold my breath when we elect a TV newsman (Charles Royer, who wound up serving two terms) or our current mayor, a former Sierra Club president with the best intentions who turns out to not be a very good manager.
You give Trump too much credit. He has a flare for attracting attention to himself and little else to offer. With the possiblity that he will run he has again taken the spotlight and trumped more newsworthy stories.
Hard work can be awesome in art if it is rewarded somehow. The how and the why of that reward is an infinite discussion. But as valid in critical evaluation is the cultural dissemination of a work. So if a work only appeals to an exclusionary group, that’s got to be an objective mark against it.
Lawrence O’Donnell dutifully reports on the possible Trump candidacy and then moans “How much time are we going to waste on this silly royal wedding?” Lately I suspect Trump is getting scammed into buying the network.
You’re lucky to have missed CNN’s snow job on the yumminess of Gulf seafood this morning. Why, did you know that according to experts you could eat 63 pounds of gulf shrimp a day for the next five years without suffering any health problems?
Now that’s entertainment.
That’s pretty funny. I suppose we can eat just as much Japanese-imported Sushi, too, without any ill effects.
they had Sarah Palin as a VP candidate…why is anyone even doubting that the GOP would push Trump?
Because Trump has too much baggage?
Palin was a complete unknown – Trump is a known quantity. He’s written books. And in those books he says things that are NOT the Party Line. He’s been pro-choice in the past (though he claims now to be pro-life), he’s said things like “we need to raise taxes on the richest people” in the past, he’s got all sorts of these things in the background.
If he really does run his past will come back to haunt him as bad as Romney’s will haunt HIM. The difference between Trump and Romney is that Trump is a celebrity and so might be able to dazzle people with his bullshit, but there will be a relentless campaign to get his words out there and kill him as a candidate.
If it even gets that far. I don’t think he’ll run, and if he actually does give up his Apprentice checks to run (which he’d have to do) he won’t get past Iowa.
Frankly I’m beginning to think that this run for the presidency serves two motives – it pumps up his ratings for The Apprentice and it gives him some negotiating leverage with NBC for the next season – get some more money out of NBC or he can go on the campaign trail. The fact that the egomaniac would have to give up his show that NBC claims to want to renew right now to go campaigning STRONGLY suggests to me that he’s not serious about this.