I agreed this last week to a writing assignment: a short piece about some kind of right-wing performance practice. It's for a special issue of an international theatre journal focusing on how the lurch away from liberal, plural democracies and toward authoritarianism and ethnocentrism expresses itself through performances.
I have to decide on what to write about in the next few days. As such, I've turned on my scholarly radar, opening myself to input from the universe about what kind of right-wing/authoritarian performances I can generate 2,500 words or so about.
The first possibility would be the U.S. Army Choir performing "Do You Hear the People Sing" for the White House Governors Ball. There's video of the event that went viral, with some people mocking Trump's team for choosing a song that critiques authoritarianism and endorses violent resistance against it. Others, however, point out that Trump is a fan of the big, bombastic, schmaltzy musical with the rousing chorus. His campaign even has a history of using the song; Les Misérables's creators asked him to stop back in 2016.
Zach Brand-Wiita on Bluesky summarized the debate well:
I think the idea the Army Choir was trolling Trump is wishful thinking. I love Les Mis and it's a much more progressive story than people realize, but it's also big and bombastic and over-the-top romanticism schmaltz -- the kind of stuff Trump loves. Sorry, this was just them singing a popular song.
— Zach Brand-Wiita (@zachbrand-wiita.bsky.social) February 23, 2025 at 8:55 PM
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Call it Poe's Law of protest: can't tell if subversive or just clueless. Of course, Trump's supporters believe they are standing up (violently, if necessary) against oppressive forces who seek to kill them.
Perhaps, then: call the performance of the song an empty signifier (in Ernesto Laclau's sense): compelling (spectacular in Amy Hughes's sense of makes you stop and pay attention) but also floating enough to be coded with whatever ideological content its producers (I don't know about its performers) would endorse.
I sense a disappointment with this openness in myself. It's similar to that expressed by the poster I mentioned yesterday who was livid that so-called universal human rights could be questioned or undermined. There's the same yearning for a more perfect system--or in this case a more perfect dramatic script--that would prevent usurpation by malign forces. But, again, that's just not how it works. Performance forms--song, dance, theatre, spoken word--can be wrenched from their original context and intention and repurposed for use opposed to that intention. Heck, "YMCA" is now a Trump standard, the Village People's only living member now insisting that the song has no homosexual subtext.
Speaking of homosexual subtext, my only other radar blip about a performance to write about would be the AI-produced video of Trump going to town on ("worshiping" would be the term of art) Elon Musk's bare feet propped up on the Resolute Desk. It showed on all TV screens in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. "Long Live the King," notes the caption, referencing at once Trump's "Long Live the King" post about (supposedly) freeing New York City from congestion pricing, Musk's clear-to-everyone-else control of Trump ("Trump actually defers to Musk," marveled my therapist today), and Musk's email last Friday arbitrarily demanding that all federal workers produce a report of five things they accomplished last week--or be fired.
I've not watched the video. I . . . would prefer not to watch it. Look: some people find feet gross. Some people find feet great. I lean toward the latter, and precisely for that reason I have no desire to have deepfake Elon's deepfaked feet--slobbered over by passionate Trump--uploaded into my brain. No thank you.
And yet. If I'm going to think of an activist-performance signifier that is absolutely full, one that Trump and Musk would be very hard-pressed to recruit to their ends--surely it's this one. What's the secret? Homophobia, obviously, drives the critique here (haw haw lookit how gay they are together!), spiked with a side of kink-shaming. And it's porn-y. Porn as threatening signifier--something beyond Trump's control--has haunted his campaign before. Witness the legendary "pee tape" supposedly floating around somewhere. There again we see the blemish of kink distorting the cishet sex god image Trump has long been keen to foster. Witness his first-term fixation on the size of his hands (with the clear implication about what that suggested about his genitals). Or consider the rumors about Vance's couch-humping.
Dagnabbit. I may have a paper here, somehow about both a Les Mis song and deepfake foot porn.
I guess I need to start working on clever puns to join those two.
I doubt I'll do better than this exchange on John Scalzi's Bluesky thread:
Perfection
— John Scalzi (@scalzi.com) February 25, 2025 at 5:06 AM
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