Anxiety of the Future #4: Trumpocalypse Part One
https://youtu.be/E-z9djgthqE?si=UU9vcNxc6-M2xFZp
During the late summer of 2020, I read the McSweeny’s publication The Future Dictionary of America, featuring the work of hundreds of big names in literary circles, published to “benefit progressive causes” around the 2004 presidential election. The book was on my to-read list for years, so I felt it would be an interesting work to include in the next entry of my “anxiety of the future” series I was preparing at the time, under the working title of Trumpocalypse. Three years later, after the 2020 election and everything that happened after, the Future Dictionary is still an appropriate place to begin, as it has been both unsettling and fascinating to look at such works from a point where some form of the fears they imagined for us happened.
A harrowing collection to read in the face of the looming election of that year knowing the results of 2004, The Future Dictionary of America felt like a time capsule of US “liberal” culture during that particular time and place. As such luminaries as Jonathan Franzen and Joyce Carol Oates attempted to “voice their displeasure with their current political leadership, and to collectively imagine a brighter future,” it was fascinating to see where they seemed any way prophetic, and where they were unable to anticipate the coming darkness. Framed as a dictionary for people of the far utopian future to understand the cultural origins of various terms from the dark ages of the early 21st century, including such dated items as “Ashcroftian,” “Bliar,” (a reference to Tony Blair) or more like “faction,” the work as a whole has the tongue in cheek, dry arch humor that McSweeny’s specializes in.
The satirical focus of The Future Dictionary proved a relevant choice, as looking back, a humorous and exaggerated approach to imagining the future ramifications of current political trends was common, across all the themes I’ve focused on. Some look at the current tensions to imagine how things can only get worse, often including that ultimate post-apocalyptic signifier of nuclear war, like the comics Apocalypse Nerd and Post-Apocalypto, and the novels Tell Me How This Ends Well and Trump Sky Alpha. Whether looking at the absurdity of Peter Bagge and Tenacious D’s comics or the darker, more dramatic accounts of David Samuel Levinson and Mark Doten, these works all look at society’s collapse through a tongue in cheek, humorous lens.
Both Apocalypse Nerd, a 2008 graphic novel by alt-comics legend Peter Bagge and comedy rock band Tenacious D’s 2018 comic Post-Apocalyto, for instance, involve nuclear war, and both trade in hypermasculine tropes of wasteland survival, with women often being obstacles to the protagonist’s needs. In both cases, these comics draw deeply from long-standing pop cultural depictions of the end of the world, to varying degrees of seriousness.
Inspired by increased tensions between the US and North Korea during the Bush administration, a situation that seemed all too familiar early in the Trump administration, Bagge sets his grim but slapstick scenario after Kim Jong Il nukes Seattle, ruining the camping trip of a pair of hapless Microsoft workers. As the situation escalates and our milquetoast IT guys become willing to go to any length to survive, people murder each other over candy bars and pop and begin to rape and pillage at will, a common motif of what happens when society breaks down. Betraying a fairly cynical view of human nature, in Apocalypse Nerd banding together for mutual aid only makes you a bigger target for those more ruthless and violent than yourself.
Post-Apocalypto, in contrast, is a manic, zany, silly romp that sends Jack Black and Kyle Gass’ alter egos across a post-nuclear wasteland full of mutants, Amazonians, and Nazi KKK members led by Donald Trump Jr on a meandering quest for the future. Published by Fantagraphics, the comic delivers Tenacious D’s brand of joyful stoner vulgarity packed with random pop culture parodies drawn in a brightly colored childish mspaint style, riffing on the power of friendship to solve any problem (along with a helpful Terminator). As a tie-in with the band’s latest album of the same name, the comic definitely misses out on Black and Gass’ expressive vocals and oddly catchy tunes, available to view on YouTube, making it feel less interesting than the sum of its parts.
A more serious, disturbingly prescient work, David Samuel Levinson’s novel Tell Me How This Ends Well, published in 2017, is a dysfunctional family dramedy that uses a deteriorating political climate as a backdrop for an acrimonious but darkly comic Passover celebration. Taking place in a (near future) 2022 after the destruction of the state of Israel sent millions of Hebrew-speaking refugees to a hostile US, where antisemitic violence has become endemic, the estranged Jacobson siblings return home to suburban LA to spend time with their dying martyr mother and their overbearing, abusive dad. Along with the youngest son’s new German boyfriend, they confront the trauma of their own lives as anti-Jewish hatred explodes around them. While a little “both-sidesy” in its depiction of antisemitism, it always seems that in times of social and political stress, Jewish citizens become scapegoats. While writing his acerbic, entertaining novel Levinson himself had no idea how quickly it would return to the US with racists the very year of his book’s publication shouting “Jews will not replace us” at Charlottesville, in a demonstration that seemed ripped from the pages of his novel.
All in all, I think it’s pretty well established that Trump and his administration are beyond parody. Novelist Mark Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha is, I think, the most successful such work I’ve seen, but how successful it is may be a little bit subjective. Dense and difficult, there is a lot going on in this dark, tangled vision of a world devastated by Trump’s instigation of global nuclear war after an attack shut the internet down for days, making it a thought-provoking but muddled work.
In the confused aftermath of the war, a journalist holed up in the Foshay Tower in a Minneapolis under the nominal administration of some military authority is tasked by the surviving editor of the NYT (now based out of Modesto) to report on internet humor at the end of the world, in exchange for passage to the place her wife and daughter died. Doten utilizes a variety of writing style choices to tackle the absurdity of Trump, making the choices, for instance, to begin the novel with something like 20 pages of stream-of-consciousness type narration broken up by only four or so periods and a smattering of commas, a grueling passage depicting Trump’s great zeppelin from which he issues his televised messages and ushers in atomic war. Even more than on Trump himself, Doten aims much of his scathing ire towards the internet culture that birthed the Trump administration in the first place, which brings to mind the subject of my last entry. As the journalist tracks down those responsible for the apocalyptic online humor that some are convinced led to the war itself, she is dogged by memories of the before times, grief for her family, and for a world lost to a breakdown of reality.
At the same time, these elements of exploring the present and drawing on memories of the past to inform visions of the future, reflected through the satire of the above works, also fuel contemporary political goals, whether by looking to a more progressive future or desiring to return to an idealized past. The political concerns cited by editors of The Future Dictionary as the target of their satire, “the Bush administration’s assault of free speech, overtime, drinking water, truth, the rule of law, humility, the separation of Church and State, a woman’s right to choose, clean air, and every other good idea this country has ever had,” also make it a useful comparison. It’s a good reminder that things have been tense politically in the US for a while. While GWB might have had the more affable, avuncular evil of “compassionate conservatism” in place of Trump’s open hostility and indifference to standards, they each represented the forces of authoritarianism. I think it’s safe to say, though, that the present social climate in much of the world has become a fair bit more preoccupied with the end of the world than we were in 2004, or at least the end of the world that we knew.
This sense of the present as an apocalyptic moment is what I’ll focus on in the second part of this entry, exploring novels that grapple with capturing the fraught social feeling of the present, its zeitgeist in other words. The anxieties of progressives worried about four more years of Bush seen in The Future Dictionary echo this feeling of the present as an apocalyptic moment, but the books I will include in part two look at the absurdity of our society as it is rather than extrapolating a future.