Commander-in-Chief: Episode 1

Even by the hard-to-please standards of the Society of the Spectacle channel, last Thursday night’s episode of America’s new number-one reality show, The Donald: Commander-in-Chief Edition™, was a real showstopper and ratings buster. Now part of a truly international franchise, Team USA’s favored leading man needs no simultaneous translation when he’s signaling Strongman’s Esperanto. Viewers tuning in from as far away as China, Russia, Germany, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Serbia, Romania, Italy, Spain, Cuba, Venezuela, Argentina, and Chile could easily read the repressed, twitchy body language. (North Korean cable unfortunately doesn’t carry the program at that moment, though one assumes viewers there would have no difficulty deciphering the code.)

This is the part of the season arc where the Resident Bully plays nice for the camera—I mean looks presidential. What he probably wanted to do during his post-bombardment remarks was to bust out some me-smash-‘em-good moves, but the angel of his better nature and her secretly libtard Semite husband, one surmises, advised against it. (Happy Pasach, y’all!) With the sanity patrol momentarily ascendant at the Winter Palace, the Czarevitch had no choice but to perform his role like an obedient, albeit chafing, schoolboy. (IT’S NOT FAIR!!! I WANT TO SEE THE MAN FLYYYYYY!!!) This performance of self-control was only betrayed by the periodic spasming of hands desperate to gesticulate.

However, if I were giving the writer’s room notes, I might point out that it did all feel a tad anticlimactic. Where were the klieg lights? Why not the stentorian strains of “We Are the Champions” like at the Republican National Convention? How about 59 Rockettes in phallic helmets doing splits in canon while high-def, 3D footage of the missile launch is projected behind them? The biggest stars of the WWE in a tag-team death match as every damn firework in the state of Florida simultaneously explodes? Panem et circenses, civitas. Bread and circuses, bitches.

Still, if he didn’t get the preening satisfaction of strutting about among scantily clad extras, he at least got to DO something. Merely banning brown-skinned people from Syria wasn’t enough to feed the insatiable hole of existential dark matter where a healthy ego should reside. Vetting, even the X-treme® formulation, is too passive-aggressive, too bureaucratic, too girly man for the brand. No, what this reality show needed was a high-grade action sequence squirting man-sweat all over the desert to keep its viewers hooked, tuning in, and rooting for the star to win. Fully embodying his destiny as avatar of our collective narcissism required that he bomb those Ay-rabs as well.

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster in her 2014 book analyzing reality television, Hoarders, Doomsday Preppers, and the Culture of Apocalypse, defines collective narcissism as a

…term that describes large groups of narcissists who are often connected by nationalism and hatred for other ethnicities and enjoy group displays of humiliation and bullying. Collective narcissism is most closely associated with fascist ideology and group aggression and a collective lack of empathy, and it is also ethnocentric by nature.

And while this description would seem to fit the core audience demographics of the show to a T (for testosterone), it appears the producers may have introduced one plot twist too many in the nationalist narrative, potentially alienating its most loyal viewers. Fan sites erupted with outraged trolling. Long-time supporters felt betrayed. The only ones apparently applauding were the critics.

Yes, the very Ivy League elitists who previously buried this performance under a fusillade of know-it-all cultural snobbery have now come to praise it as a genius work of outsider-art populism. They’ve finally bestowed upon its creator what he’s been craving: five-star, Grade-A reviews. Why, even brown-skinned person Fareed Zakaria from arch-nemesis CNN raved that the title character “became the President of the United States” and “was striking a blow against evil” in this installment. Kinda makes you wonder who the real narcissists are.

But, hey, this is Americuh, where any flim-flam man (or woman) can suck up suckers’ dollars as long as they're dazzled while being bamboozled. And, boy, does this show deliver on the razzle dazzle. The special effects budget for this episode alone cost somewhere around $94 million. Why it’s enough to make Michael Bay wet his undies with ammunitionlust.

To put that figure in perspective, it’s more than the budget of the Minority Business Development Agency and the US government’s contribution to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change combined. It’s 60 percent of the total budget of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and nearly one-third of the entire amounts earmarked for both the NEA and NEH. All of these programs are destined for the boneyard if the current administration gets its way. But in the evermore immersive Trumpian reality show, where everyone and everything else functions as mere background, African-American entrepreneurs, social equality, and Arctic polar bears are so last season, the only art is that of manipulation, and intellectuals and scholars have no place in a post-factual fantasyland.

What will the writers cook up next? An international spy ring infiltrating 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? The Caliph of ISIS abducting the First Lady and imprisoning her as a sex concubine in his secret subterranean haram? Nuclear holocaust? Don’t touch that dial.

No, really. Don’t.

#DonaldTrump #foreignpolicy #media #realitytelevision #Syria #military #commanderinchief