Donald Trump as Lieutenant-Colonel Kilgore, Robert Duvall’s combat-loving character in Apocalypse Now.
You’ve probably seen the meme by now. The President of the United States social media declaration of war on the city of Chicago, another ‘crime’ crackdown on another blue city in another Democratic state. Another projection as confession, a lawless chief executive threatening to deploy federal troops and the national guard to fight alleged out of control criminality.
And yet another implausible moment in an implausible moment in history.
That’s not really a thing, right? It can’t be an actual thing, signed off on by the President, the actual President of the United States. It has to be a fake, an actual fake, created to mock the insanely easy to mock President of the United States, Donald J. Trump. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
But, no.
It is a thing. A real thing. The real mckoy.
An actual Vietnam draft-dodging, wannabe warrior, let’s call him Lieutenant-Colonel Bone Spur, re-envisioning himself as the fictional blood-thirsty, surfing crazy commander of the 1st Cavalry airborne. ‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning’, Trumpgore intones, his choppers hovering on the fire-red horizon over the Chicago skyline.
My first thought upon seeing this image in my social media feed, my second thought, on second thought, the first being—The president’s threatening to bomb an American city?!—followed almost immediately by, Did he not see the movie? Or probably more accurately, as if accuracy matters at this juncture, Did the guy who created this meme (Stephen Miller’s fingerprints are all over it) ever see Apocalypse Now?
Lieutenant-Colonel William ‘Bill’ Kilgore is not the hero of the movie. In no way, shape or form. In fact, you could argue the character represents the mindless, indiscriminate violence that inevitably results from a lost cause colonial war waged by a flagging empire. The kind of ‘horror’ that’s driven another mad American officer deep up the Mekong Delta to establish himself as a petty tyrant of a cruel, inhuman kingdom. The very heart of darkness.
This is not the kind of pop culture symbolism the office of the President of the United States really means to trumpet, is it? A nihilistic killing because we can ethos. Killing because that’s the only thing we know, the only tool in our toolbox. Dishonourable artillery discharges. The military industrial complex in all its full gory.
President Donald J. Trump as the bad guy, the anti-hero.
But then, the slow realization.
Of course, it is. It is most certainly the intent. Whoever’s manning Trump’s social media presence (Stephen Miller, it bears repeating, the despicable, deplorable, soulless splooge of a human being in modern Josef Goebbels form), knew very well what they were doing with this Trump-as-Kilgore volley. The bad hombre. The bringer of death and destruction to the Other, any Other will do. The scarer of gooks and all racialized people. The manly man, standing bare-chested to explain the nuances of wave breaks, unflinching as enemy bombs drop around him, sending the mere mortals cowardly scrambling for safety. Since when is it a war crime to stand tall in the face of danger, in the face of an implacable foe, an utterly manufactured foe that represents nothing more than the abscesses eating away at your heart and brain?
An absolute absence of morality.
Self-righteous villainy.
Mad, bad and proud of it.
Embracing your evil side means never having to justify or rationalize your actions and behaviour. Shitty human beings do shitty things. What other explanation are you looking for? There’s no interesting origin story behind it, behind the comic book transformation from Norman Rockwell to The Joker. Unless you count the slow burning realization of mediocre white men that the world no longer recognizes the cracked genius of their own mind. That the amassing of money and wealth may confer power but does little to garner respect or admiration except from the circle of fiends possessing an even flimsier sense of humanity, and who find the stench of sulphur an aphrodisiac.
Team Trump love them their cinematic level of bad guyness, your Lt.-Col. Kilgores, your Darth Vaders, your Hannibal Lecters, because they think it elevates their malevolence to 4-D, Hi-Def, Technicolour brilliance. What fourteen year-old boy doesn’t love blowing up things and playing the heavy, the gun-toting wiseguy, the deliverer of vigilante justice? It’s easy. It’s one-dimensional. No mess. No qualms. You breezily sleep through the night.
More sinisterly, the cartoonish effect of Trump and his allies, both inside and outside the administration, evil deeds and misdeeds is to render their statements and actions unbelievable, beyond comprehension. “It is inherent in our entire philosophical tradition that we cannot conceive of a ‘radical evil’,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. We dismiss such a notion, of a ‘radical evil’, as not possible, unbelievable. They didn’t really do that, did they? They couldn’t really think that, could they? They’re just clowning around, acting out, playing make-believe. They don’t really mean it.
Well,
they do. They have. They will continue to do so.
They put on their bad guy costumes and spout their bad guy catchphrases in order to distract us from their baleful intentions and ghoulish souls. Heros in their minds. Nothing more than pure, distilled evil, ‘radical evil’, by any honest, objective measure.