At the beginning of Steve Onderick’s 2014 film, Who is Vermin Supreme: An Outsider Odyssey, we hear Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Secretary General of NATO at its 2012 summit in Chicago, state that his organization is “reaffirming our commitment to defending the freedom and security of all our citizens.” The film then cuts to images of angry police manhandling demonstrators outside the building. This is juxtaposed with Barack Obama addressing the same NATO meeting by proclaiming that “we share an unbreakable commitment to the freedom and security of our citizens.”
Cutting back outside the building, the camera pans across the street scene and we see more images of a brutal paramilitary force dragging away protestors, with well-disciplined soldiers standing in formation and fully armed, facing off against a disorganized and unarmed crowd. Suddenly, emerging out of the tension, there he is. Long gray hair sticking out from under a boot on his head, megaphone in hand, walking right along the front line of a US domestic paramilitary force keeping tight watch on the activities of its citizens, and ready to pounce if any should get out of line. We watch this lone madman lecturing them about… something. We then hear the voiceover: “My name is Vermin Supreme. I’m a friendly fascist. I’m a tyrant that you should trust. You should let me run your life because I do know what’s best for you.”
Later, at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics in 2011, we watch the same madman tell us “Yes I’m a politician. Yes I will promise you anything your little electoral heart desires. Because you are my constituents. You are the informed voting public. And because I have no intention of keeping any promise I make.” And with deadpan seriousness, states his intention to create a federal pony identification program, in which citizens are assigned a free pony they must keep with them at all times for identification purposes.
Who is this sarcastic clown? This is the question posed by the film, now over a decade old, but nonetheless an informative lens (Supreme ostensibly promotes time travel research, so let’s not discount the possibility of omniscient vision) on a lost era. It was an era of dashed “Hope” under the Obama administration, with, among other things and as highlighted by the film, the codification of indefinite detention of American citizens via the National Defense Act.
However, it was also the hopeful era of the Occupy movement, which, as the film demonstrates, provided a national stage for Supreme. In the film, while Supreme worked the crowd (and the police) at Occupy Wall Street in 2011, leftist political commentator Chris Hedges, channeling the hopes of perhaps the entire spectrum of left-leaning political affinity, made the claim “This movement is real. This one’s going to take them all down.”
In spirit, we were all right there with you, Chris. But it just didn’t happen.
Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek issued a statement that in hindsight proved downright prophetic: “The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are.” Oh Slavoj, how right you were. Things certainly didn’t go on indefinitely the way they were. They got even worse and the erosion of democracy more severe with the rise of an entirely different sort of clown – Donald J. Trump.
WTF happened, and what wisdom can that lunatic with the boot on his head in this old film possibly have to offer?
In a Scripps News interview at the beginning of Trump’s first term, and a couple of years after release of the film, Vermin Supreme satirically claimed to have paved the way for Trump by providing the template for a dictatorial clown-in-chief. But beneath this satire lies Supreme’s left libertarian/anarchist ideology, which many on the left will dismiss as naïve, hippie idealism or romantic anti-capitalism, and many on the right will simply dismiss for failing to condemn a cartoon boogeyman perception of the left. Yet it contains something critical and increasingly lacking in the political discourse of the decade or so since the film’s release – authenticity – and this is the very thing that makes it valuable and makes Vermin Supreme a radically different sort of clown than Donald Trump.
Vermin’s satire is in the service of a genuine, sincere and quite basic belief about how human beings should relate to and take responsibility for one another in a humane, democratic society. It’s simple and normative, and this is where its wisdom lies. We need it, or something very much like it, around which real political momentum might coalesce.
It’s worth mentioning that Supreme follows in the tradition of other left libertarians, including Hunter S. Thompson, who ran for Sheriff of Aspen, Colorado in 1970 as a self-described moralist posing as an immoralist. For both men, the outer craziness was a satirical shell over an internal authenticity used to lampoon and skewer the hypocrisy of mainstream political discourse, populated largely by immoralists posing as moralists. Neither Thompson nor Supreme created a blueprint for a political movement, much less fomented a political revolution. But both acted in the service of exactly that by holding up a mirror to an existing and inauthentic political charade.
In a recent article, author Jason Myles describes the descent of American political discourse in the Trump era to a current state of kayfabe – a term borrowed from professional wrestling to indicate a staged performance in which authentic worldviews or ideologies give way to pure spectacle rather than the possibility of meaningful, goal-driven political projects. To quote Myles, “Under Trump, politics is no longer a forum for governance but a stage where performance outranks truth, policy, and the show becomes the only reality that matters.” It’s a world in which the promo (promotion) is designed to produce heat (consumer attention), and in which heels (villains) square off against faces (good guys). But who’s a heel and who’s a face can change in an instant in the service of heat. It’s a world in which authenticity and contrivance, again quoting Myles, “…are not opposites but mutually reinforcing components of a system designed to sustain attention, emotion, and belief.”
Myles presents a compelling description of the pure spectacle of Trumpian political discourse, in which heels can become faces and faces heels, and back again, and that, along with incoherent and malleable public policy, become weapons wielded in the service of stoking an emotional response from feckless public marks. All that matters is the spectacle itself, and the maximization of attention. There is no authenticity, thus no possibility for democratic change in the service of the public. It’s just a show designed to benefit the showman, and the public pays for it with what remains of its democratic currency. When it’s all about the spectacle, there’s no room for democracy, and power is ceded to the showman.
Kayfabe creates the illusion of democracy for a public swept up in its nonsense and unable or unwilling to differentiate the promo from reality. While it fully blossomed as a political strategy under the showmanship of Donald Trump, as convincingly described by Myles, its origins can be found in the performative politics on both left and right, and is perhaps best seen as an artifact of the broader social transformation of what authors from Walter Benjamin to Jean Baudrillard, and from Charles Taylor to Lionel Trilling, have variously described as an abandonment of a search for authentic reality and self in favor of spectacle and inauthenticity. Vermin Supreme, on the other hand, with campaign promises of free ponies and zombie-powered industrial infrastructure, gives us a model in which nonsensical façade is differentiated from an authentic, shared and mutually beneficial worldview.
Throughout Who Is Vermin Supreme, we see brief moments in which Supreme’s showmanship recedes and the authentic core emerges. For example, outside the Republican National Convention in Tampa in 2012, we see armored paramilitary troops with assault rifles and tear gas, and with little intention other than thwarting peaceable public protest. Speaking through a megaphone directly to these soldiers, Supreme announces “I’m a friendly fascist. A tyrant you can trust…” then the timbre of his voice changes slightly and becomes more somber; the sarcasm fades for a moment and we hear “... and I’m also an anarchist. I believe we can all live better together if we cooperate and that mutual aid is the most important thing in our lives to help one another.”
In another example, in a conversation with Dangerous Conversation Radio during the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney, another moment of clarity: “The beauty of my campaign, as I’ve discovered this year… it was perceived to be a non-partisan critique of the system at large and therefore attracted support from across the board. It’s amazing that people are willing to vote against their own self-interest. That the differences between the parties are so few but the few that are there are the ones people latch onto and get extremely passionate about.”
The misdirected passion Supreme mentions - the tendency to let emotional response and pure sectarianism drive political affinity and decision making, is an important and accurate observation of the foundation upon which the kayfabe presidency described by Myles was built, and an example of how Supreme works against it with his unmistakable authenticity. It’s worth noting, as an example of the power of Supreme’s satirical social mirror, the film contains a clip of future Trumpian podcaster Tim Pool, who says approvingly of Supreme, “He’s highlighting the lies of the political system that everyone sees.”
This abandonment of the democratic responsibility of informed, rational decision making in exchange for emotional stimulation has long haunted American democracy. Nearly a century prior to events of Who Is Vermin Supreme, at the dawn of the electronic information age, political thinker Walter Lippmann analyzed the public’s use of radio and newspapers, and concluded that an epistocracy would be necessary to manufacture the consent of the populace to vote in its own best interest, as the public would be too easily swayed by showmen making an appeal to stereotyped opponents and issues, and emotion. Such an epistocracy developed throughout the 20th century via the centralization of news media and government bureaucracy, which, as the Internet age was just beginning to dawn, Herman and Chomsky railed against in their influential and popular work Manufacturing Consent.
Now, after 30 years of Internet, the availability of cheap and easy multi-way communication between all citizens has broken the old, centralized media infrastructure of radio, TV and newspapers, and the entire corpus of human knowledge is available on the smart phone everyone carries in their pocket. Yet we’ve arrived at the Trumpian kayfabe. The political right has become a soulless, empty pantomime led by Trump, while the left seems split into warring sectarian factions, each chasing a social media profile-driven emotional high by demonstrating that it alone has escaped Plato’s cave and seen the true light.
How did this happen?
The answer is complex and will be the subject of inquiry for many decades, I suppose. But there’s one thing I feel confident about: We need more Vermin Supremes. We all need to take a lesson from the moralist posing as an immoralist, the outwardly nonsensical oddball with the boot on his head who acts as a satirical foil against which the inauthentic are exposed, in the service of a simple, authentic message of individual autonomy and mutual support.
That’s who the madman is. He’s the fool on the hill we want to ignore but who conveys a wisdom that won’t allow it. I want my pony.
About the author: John Milton Bunch spent several decades studying the psychology of learning, writing courseware, delivering corporate training and consulting in computer science and data analytics. Now he writes on things he finds interesting, including political philosophy.