Hyperreality 2024: Assassination

Why it doesn't seem real

I've had the hardest time thinking of a way to cope with the abnormal events of the past month in American politics, not just because of the way they've thrown themselves at us one after another, without giving us a chance to reflect on one before we're fully occupied with another one. My machine is full of false starts abandoned when I thought I had to move on to something different, right away. I also find myself assaulted with a bunch of philosophical, often postmodern thoughts about what's going on. Looking at one of those drafts, I'm thinking, instead of trying to "cover" the situation, maybe I should be trying to look at one thing at a time, before I start trying to pull it together.

AP Photo by Gene J. Puskar.

One of the strangest things about the attempt on the life of Donald Trump that started off Crazy Week on July 13, I guess it was, was how weirdly hard it seemed to take it seriously.  I mean, technically it was extremely serious, if you accept the story we've been given, as I have no good reason not to do. It was (apparently) a round from an AR-15, of a kind that instantly killed Corey Comperatore, sitting a couple of rows behind Trump, when a different round hit him in the head during the attack, and if Trump's bullet had hit him less than half an inch further to the left than it did, or (perhaps) if he hadn't woggled his head in that parrot-like side-to-side way he has, at just the right moment, it would have more or less blown his head off. That's pretty serious!  

But I watched that video, or side-eyed it, so many times, as all the TV stations turned into CNN imitators and tried to keep the story going, the way they do with a school shooting or earthquake porn, as the Secret Service agents lift him (it's pretty heavy) from the stage, with the blood dripping from his right ear, photobombing his way from among the agents trying to protect him, and makes that upraised fist with a furiously angry face, mouthing the words, "Fight! Fight! Fight!" (I read his lips as "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"). Trump didn't look scared, he looked really angry, And I'd seen video of Trump experiencing physical fear, that time he was threatened by an annoyed eagle, so I had an idea what it would look like,

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and it didn't look like that. At the shooting, Trump looked like an actor, not a good one but not an especially bad one either, who had made a conscious choice on how to handle the scene—not to try to convey what it's like to realize you've just had the most intimate possible brush against real death, but to go with the easier emotion of rage.

Which is not to say, again, that he's faking it, or pushing a fiction on the audience, or that he didn't really feel some or all of these obvious emotions. It's plausible he had shaken the natural fear by the time the Secret Service detail had raised him from the floor and from whatever happened to his shoes to hustle him off the stage, understanding or correctly assuming that the shooter was neutralized and the danger was past. The strange quality that only began to reveal itself later was subtractive, like a matter of elements being removed from the story until there wasn't, properly speaking, any story left. 

I mean, by the time Trump was telling the story, in his star turn at the Republican National Convention, after ceremonially kissing the helmet of the murdered Corey Comperatore on the top of a mannequin wearing his reconstructed firefighter's uniform (with his name spelled wrong), it wasn't his story but a parody of a boys' adventure book from a hundred years ago, composed by Stephen Miller (Miller's novelistic prose style isn't as florid as his oratory, but it's mostly funnier), to which Trump mostly stuck without many of the usual interpolations

It was a warm, beautiful day in the early evening in Butler Township in the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Music was loudly playing, and the campaign was doing really well. I went to the stage and the crowd was cheering wildly. Everybody was happy. I began speaking very strongly, powerfully and happily [note this perfect evocation of Osgood's Semantic Differential in the three dimensions of strength, activity, and goodness]. Because I was discussing the great job my administration did on immigration at the southern border. We were very proud of it.

in a tale of divine intervention

Bullets were flying over us, yet I felt serene. But now the Secret Service agents were putting themselves in peril. They were in very dangerous territory. Bullets were flying right over them, missing them by a very small amount of inches. And then it all stopped. Our Secret Service sniper, from a much greater distance and with only one bullet used, took the assassin’s life. Took him out.... And watching the reports over the last few days, many people say it was a providential moment. Probably was. When I rose, surrounded by Secret Service, the crowd was confused because they thought I was dead. And there was great, great sorrow. I could see that on their faces as I looked out. They didn’t know I was looking out; they thought it was over.

that doesn't always make much physical sense (where was he supposed to be looking from, as he watched the audience thinking he was dead?).

I think it's important that it should not merely be fiction, but bad fiction, not because that's Miller's intention, obviously he's not setting out to be a bad writer, that's involuntary, but because that's the way the material wants to be expressed; or let's say the way the culture wants it to be expressed, in the form of what the great semiotician Umberto Eco referred to, in a 1975 essay, as "hyperreality", as one blogger described it:

he examines a reproduction of former President Lyndon Johnson's Oval Office, and goes through a reconstruction of a Medieval witch's laboratory, in which the recorded screams of what sound like witches at the stake can be heard in the background. He travels to wax museums, where artistic masterpieces are re-created and, often, reinvented in unexpected ways, resulting in such cultural mutations as a wax statue of the Mona Lisa and a "restored" copy of the Venus de Milo, with arms. He also enters what he refers to as "toy cities," including Western theme towns, where the buildings are stage sets, and actors in costume, engage in mock gunfights, for the benefit of visitors.

—the creation of a world in which the anxious desire to "get real" dumped customers in the world of the Absolute Fake. (I was a young semiologist myself in those days, with an opportunity to observe how Eco was treated when he came to conferences in the US, as not entirely "serious" because he wrote things ordinary people enjoyed reading, weekend feuilleton columns and music criticism, long before he started on the ultimate sin of writing novels; which was not so different from what happened to me in my own academic career, except that I didn't have tenure, to say nothing of an Italian publisher—I don't just wish I'd known how great he was, I wish I'd attached myself to him as a caro maestro.) This may be the best way to look at the world the Trumpery has made, as a political hyperreality.