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The Lord of Misrule
New York Times | 17 January 2017
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| David Brooks |
King
David was most compelling when he danced. Overcome by gratitude to God,
he stripped down to his linens and whirled about before the ark of the
covenant — his love and joy spilling beyond the boundaries of normal
decorum.
His
wife, Michal, the daughter of King Saul, was repulsed by his behavior,
especially because he was doing it in front of the commoners. She
snarked at him when he got home for exposing himself in front of the
servants’ slave girls like some scurrilous fellow.
The
early Christians seem to have worshiped the way David did, with
ecstatic dancing, communal joy and what Emile Durkheim called
“collective effervescence.” In her book “Dancing in the Streets,”
Barbara Ehrenreich argues that in the first centuries of Christianity,
worship of Jesus overlapped with worship of Dionysus, the
Greek god of revelry. Both Jesus and Dionysus upended class categories.
Both turned water into wine. Second- and third-century statuettes show
Dionysus hanging on a cross.
But
when the church became more hierarchical, the Michals took over. Somber
priest-led rituals began to replace direct access to the divine. In the
fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus urged, “Let us sing hymns instead
of striking drums, have psalms instead of frivolous music and song, …
modesty instead of laughter, wise contemplation instead of intoxication,
seriousness instead of delirium.”
When
elites try to quash the manners and impulses of the people, those
impulses are bound to spill out in some other way. By the Middle Ages
the cathedrals were strictly hierarchical, so the people created
carnivals where everything was turned on its head. During carnival
(Purim is the Jewish version), men dressed like women, the people could
insult the king and bishops, drunkenness and ribaldry was prized over
sober propriety.
As
Ehrenreich puts it, “Whatever social category you had been boxed into —
male or female, rich or poor — carnival was a chance to escape from
it.”
Sometimes
the celebration took on an enthusiasm that is hard for us to fathom. In
1278, 200 people kept dancing on a bridge in Utrecht until it collapsed
and all were drowned. [In 2010, more than 340 people died and at least 550 were injured during a stampede over Koh Pich bridge during Carnival Hun.]
The
carnivals were partly a way to blow off steam, but in hard times they
served as occasions for genuine populist revolts. In 1511, a carnival in
Udine, Italy, turned into a riot that led to the murder of 50 nobles
and the sacking of more than 20 palaces.
Carnival culture was raw, lascivious and disgraceful, and it elevated a certain social type, the fool.
There
were many different kinds of fools: holy fools, hapless fools, vicious
fools. Fools were rude and frequently unabashed liars. They were willing
to make idiots of themselves. The point of the fool was not to be
admirable in himself, but to be the class clown who had the guts to talk
back to the teacher. People enjoyed carnival culture, the feast of
fools, as a way to take a whack at the status quo.
You
can see where I’m going with this. We live at a time of wide social
inequality. The intellectual straitjackets have been getting tighter.
The universities have become modern cathedrals, where social hierarchies
are defined and reinforced.
We’re
living with exactly the kinds of injustices that lead to carnival
culture, and we’ve crowned a fool king. Donald Trump exists on two
levels: the presidential level and the fool level. On one level he makes
personnel and other decisions. On the other he tweets. (I honestly
don’t know which level is more important to him.)
His
tweets are classic fool behavior. They are raw, ridiculous and
frequently self-destructive. He takes on an icon of the official culture
and he throws mud at it. The point is not the message of the tweet.
It’s to symbolically upend hierarchy, to be oppositional.
The assault on Representative John Lewis
was classic. He picked one of the most officially admired people in the
country and he leveled the most ridiculous possible charge (all talk
and no action). It was a tweet devilishly well crafted to create the
maximum official uproar. Anybody who writes for a living knows how to
manipulate an outraged response, and Trump is a fool puppet master.
The
sad part is that so many people treat Trump’s tweets as if they are
arguments when in fact they are carnival. With their conniption fits,
Trump’s responders feed into the dynamic he needs. They contribute to
carnival culture.
The
first problem with today’s carnival culture is that there’s an ocean of
sadism lurking just below the surface. The second is that it’s not
real. It doesn’t really address the inequalities that give rise to it.
It’s just combative display.
This
is a resolution I’m probably going to break, but I resolve to write
about Trump only on the presidential level, not on the carnival level.
I’m going to try to respond only to what he does, not what he says or
tweets. I really wish some of my media confreres would do the same.
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