Violence is “the trump card of the stupid, since it is that form of stupidity to which it is most difficult to come up with an intelligent response.”
Violence is not subtle. And this is not subtle:
It is easy to ignore subtlety. It is not easy to ignore violence.
It is hard not to talk about Trump’s meat (according to his butler, he likes his steaks cooked so well-done "it would rock on the plate.”)
You can’t ignore phallic symbols. Silence is not an intelligent response to being told to be silent.
Phallic symbols work when everyone sees It, but nobody says what they saw, when we carry the weight of the knowledge but we don’t speak it.
Unspeakable knowledge is another way to talk about trauma. (Obedience is what the powerful call trauma.)
When people say what they see, we laugh, to pretend we don’t see It.
The word lol looks a little like if you turned a penis inside-out
Laughter is a potent form of gas-lighting. (“Trump insists tweet that Obama would’ve attended Scalia’s funeral “if it were held in a Mosque” was just a joke”)
Everyone knows what Trump meant by “schlonged.” Trump was not speaking Yiddish. (In 2006, Dick Morris said that President Bush was “going to get schlonged” in the midterms.)
Jacqueline Rose: “psychoanalysis starts from the premise that we are freighted with a form of knowledge we cannot bear.”
The “emperor’s new clothes” parable: the naked emperor struts and nobody says anything because power has trained them to be silent.
The Emperor’s subjects see but are silent, are not heard.
The little boy in the story speaks up (“But the emperor has no clothes!”) because he is a little boy: He doesn’t understand the threat.
(He disobeys accidentally. It’s a little boy because he can be forgiven for not knowing. A girl or woman could not be forgiven for seeing It and speaking out.)
When everyone is not talking about the same thing, at the same time, constantly, that’s power.
If you see something, say something. Saying makes it something.
If you didn’t say something, if you were silent, then there must not have been anything. If you saw it, you must be crazy.
Hegemony is when the threat of violence remains implicit. Hegemony is when the empire silences itself into obedience.
(They’ll think I’m crazy if I say something; they’ll laugh at me.)
The Washington monument is a masonic symbol, and the Freemasons were men who had a variety of signs and symbols that everyone saw, but no one was supposed to talk about. Metaphorically speaking, masons erect buildings.
“Beyond the more obvious examples of the priapic Washington Monument, one finds a slew of nicknames attached to US presidents whose phallic nature is difficult to dispute. Aside from the relatively subtle nicknames attached to Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Franklin Pierce – all of which involve the term Hickory, which is not just a tree, but one known for its exceptional hardness – one finds the somewhat more overt Abraham ‘The Rail Splitter’ Lincoln, not to mention Tricky Dick Nixon and Slick Willie.”
Lots of American presidents have belonged to secret groups, but a larger percentage of American presidents have been men.
“in the course of an interview with a journalist, Johnson was asked why he was in Vietnam. By way of a reply, he removed his penis, proffered it, and rejoined, “This is why.”
But the first rule of empire club is that you don’t talk about empire club. You keep the club in your pants.
Theodore Roosevelt was famous for saying “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”
Hegemony is to have a big cannon but to keep it in your pocket.
To speak so quietly that everyone silences themselves, straining to hear.
You can speak softly, because no one is fucking with you. Because you could, you don’t have to.
“Big Stick Diplomacy” is an extremely Victorian sense of power. It’s all about sex, and sex as power, and the powerful sexual body as violence that silences.
Officially, it has nothing to do with sex. It’s saturated with sexuality.
Theodore Roosevelt liked to shoot animals and eat them. When he left the presidency, the first thing he did was go to Africa where he shot everything and anything that moved.
Officially, Roosevelt only shot animals to eat them, or for some other necessary use (This is obviously not true, but no one pointed this out.)
Just before he left the presidency—having worked hard to modernize the United States’ navy and make it equivalent to the imperial British navy—he sent “The Great White Fleet” on a world cruise, a soft-spoken demonstration of America’s big stick.
“The Great White Fleet, consisting of 14,000 sailors on 16 battleships and accompanying vessels, was sent around the world for fourteen months by President Roosevelt…The Great White Fleet was an important show of America’s naval power to the rest of the world.”
Officially, the word “white” is a simple description: “Called the Great White Fleet because the ships were painted white instead of modern gray.”
Why were they painted white, I wonder, instead of modern gray?
Theodore Roosevelt spent a lot of time worrying about the white race’s virility. He called it “race suicide” when white women chose not to have babies, and it really worried him.
If manhood is all about babies and softness, that makes men nervous.
To be soft is to have a latent erection, an erection that has not manifested itself.
To have an erection is funny, because it betrays desire and need. An erection is a reaction to someone else’s erotic power.
If you have an erection in public, you try to hide it. You don’t have control over it.
Men are afraid of sex when they don’t know how to talk about it.
Sex is about border crossings, liquids, and becoming someone else’s object. Trump always knows what to say about everything: we must secure the borders (but not to the immigrant women he has made a habit of marrying).
Men prefer games.
“Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.”
To have an erection is to be reminded that most of the time, you don’t. Virility is intermittent, short-lived. It comes and goes.
"The 'true body of the fascist is the phallic body, existing a state of preparedness for war"
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Fascism is all about form (sex is about deformation).
A gun is much more phallic than a penis.
You see the big stick and know what it is, and because you know what it is, you shut your mouth about it. You act like it’s just a stick. But of course it isn’t.
We all know it and because we know it, we don’t say it.
Historical note: Roosevelt once attributed the big stick saying to “a West African proverb” and later to an old Irish saying. Seems most likely he just made it up.
It is not, however, a coincidence that he linked that phallic expression of power to non-white/“savage” bodies.
Phallic symbols are always real, and they are never a coincidence.
The famously foul-mouthed Donald Trump often complains about protesters who use “nasty” language.
Donald Trump also likes to call his opponents and critics “babies.”
“In the uncensored version, Trump is adorned with a micro-penis, also known in slang terms as a “baby dick.”
The painting of Trump’s micro-penis has been censored, boosting its sales.
Trump has always hated being called a “short-fingered vulgarian.”
The “vulgarian” part doesn’t seem to bother him very much. But he talks endlessly about how there is nothing to say about his hands.
Trump is good at twitter, because he thrives in the short form.
“A hand with little fingers coming out of a stem. Like, little. Look at my hands. They’re fine. My hands are normal hands. I was on line shaking hands with supporters, and one of supporters got up and he said, “Mr. Trump, you have strong hands. You have good-sized hands.” And then another one would say, “You have great hands, Mr. Trump, I had no idea.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “I thought you were like deformed, and I thought you had small hands.” I had fifty people … Is that a correct statement? I mean people were writing, “How are Mr. Trump’s hands?” My hands are fine. You know, my hands are normal. Slightly large, actually. In fact, I buy a slightly smaller than large glove, okay? Everybody was saying to me, “Oh, your hands are very nice. They are normal.” I don’t want people to go around thinking that I have a problem. I’m telling you, Ruth, I had so many people. I would say 25, 30 people would tell me … every time I’d shake people’s hand, “Oh, you have nice hands.” Why shouldn’t I? And, by the way, by saying that I solved the problem. Nobody questions … I even held up my hands, and said, “Look, take a look at that hand.” And by saying that, I solved the problem. Nobody questions. Everyone held my hand. I said look. Take a look at that hand.”
Trump hates when people give him the finger, which he uses almost charmingly euphemistic language to describe: “From what I understand, he was sticking a certain finger up in the air. And that is a terrible thing to do.”
When it comes to penises and hegemony, it’s always “you know what they say, don’t you?” They say it; you don’t. You obey the injunction to silence.
When it comes to phallic symbols, everything is a phallic symbol. You can’t unsee them.
Why does the USA have such a gigantic military? It doesn’t do anything (at least when it works). Why will Trump make it bigger? The same reason.
Fantasies about big dicks are often adjacent to fantasies about hurting women.
In fact, penises are small. Every positive penis-analogy compares a penis to something larger than a penis, because penises are small. (A big penis is a penis that’s larger than a penis).
This is a good metaphor for what capitalism is supposed to be: it grows and magically becomes bigger than itself.
But whether it actually does, of course, is beside the point. Big dicks don’t care if they’re big enough. Showers don’t need to be growers.
Successful capitalists are good at exploiting other people’s labor, and then erasing it.
When he left office in 1909, the first thing he did was go to Africa and shoot an astounding number of animals. The headline at the NY Times reads: “Average of 40 Vertebrates a Day for a Year Killed.”
The foundation of Trump’s run for president was his demand for Obama’s birth certificate: submit the intimate, naked facts of your origin to my scrutiny! Show us that you are African!
The accusation was that Obama was hiding something, something shameful. (The accuser has power; the person who obeys, not so much.)
There is a picture of Barack Obama pointing at the micro-penis painting of Donald Trump, supposedly in Cuba, supposedly “peak no fucks given.” The picture is photoshopped: people want it to have happened, but it didn’t.
Power is to whip it out and no one says anything.
“The way an event feels on the ground, and the way media—including new media— depict an event can diverge a lot...To Trump supporters in the room: an energized rally, many lighthearted moments. Next day media: protester punched. There: you don't see it.”
The size of Donald Trump’s seventy-year old penis is possibly the most unimportant, most offensively irrelevant facts in the world.
There is nothing you can say about it that stops it from being the subject, including silence.
Making us care about something of such tiny, tiny importance: that is power.
We have to talk about Donald Trump’s meat, because silence ratifies the phallic.
"Remember when Bernie Sanders, they took the mic away from him? That’s not going to happen with us. He watched these two young girls talking to the audience… he was standing in the back as two women took the mic away… That doesn’t happen here.”
