On Schadenfreude

(or, Welcome to the Fascist Body Horror Show)

This is quite a week for schadenfreude – and we’ll get to all that. But as it happens, I was already planning to talk about the horror of the alt-right body. And keep reading for some amazing, obscure October movie picks.

This is Alex Jones. You know that, of course.

But there’s something you might not know, and I won’t rob you of the pleasure of finding out for yourself, so please take a moment to go Google “Alex Jones age.”

Yep, that’s right, Alex Jones is 46 years old. These things are subjective, but if you ask me, he looks at least a decade older.

Here’s Katie Hopkins, a roughly equivalent figure in the U.K.

Katie Hopkins is 45 years old.

As a contrast (and perhaps palate cleanser), here is a not particularly flattering photo of Kamala Harris, who is 55.

Here are a few more random photos of white supremacists.

Okay, I’ll stop. But you take my point. These champions of pure blood are hardly themselves avatars of physical excellence.

Obviously I’m cherry-picking, and there are counterexamples – Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos both rose to the top of the alt-right movement in part by looking like actual human beings instead of the castoffs of failed medical experiments.

But the pattern is clear, and it demands a bit of moral introspection. After all, the reason we disdain these people is because they premise their worldview on superficial physical features such as skin color, with whatever light leavening of “Western cultural chauvinism” they’ve decided to gussy it up with.

So are we not stooping to their level to point out that Alex Jones looks like a beach ball wearing a William Shatner mask? Or that someone poked two holes in a pile of wet pork rinds and called it Andrew Arnheim? Or that Katie Hopkins could be thrown over the back of a Palomino and used to carry hardtack and tin ore? Or that Stephen Miller is just a nine year old cancer patient in a suit?

On the one hand, sure, such rhetoric could be buying into all the simpleminded patterns of thought that lead people to hate – not just racism, but transphobia, fat phobia, etc. Maybe it undermines the push for civility that has contributed to such genuine improvements for marginalized groups over the past few decades.

But that of course is the difference - “political correctness” is a push to defend the disempowered and the oppressed. Alex Jones for a substantial period of time had a direct line to the President of the United States, so if I want to call him a sunburned ham, I’m at least not punching down. He, Hopkins, Miller and their ilk actively sought influence and power over the lives of others, and at that point practically anything is fair game.

More fundamentally, white supremacists chose their belief systems, and had access to educations that would have made it easy for them to choose differently. Referring to Mexican migrants as a whole as “rapists” is hate speech, but pointing out that individual, powerful people’s physical appearance undermines their professed ideology is just … facts.

And while I have no scientific evidence for this, I also believe the hideousness of these men and women is not simply coincidental. In the case of middle-aged folks like Hopkins and Jones, it’s hard not to see the hate seeping out of their pores and taking its deserved revenge on their flesh. When it comes to the likes of Stephen Miller or Ben Shapiro, the dynamic is even clearer – these tiny, fragile men are attracted to power that they think will keep them safe as long as they are loyal to it.

But however fair it is, this mindset risks obscuring a broader truth. The problem is that many of the people who support these hateful avatars have themselves been ground down by the machine of late capitalism. They are sick, dying en masse, without options. They like Trump and Alex Jones in part because they look like them – hard ridden, put upon, old before their time.

But whereas those rich men have simply made a choice to look like shit, the people who are suffering under American late capitalism haven’t had nearly as much choice - they can’t afford to take care of their bodies. Given the failing educational system they inherited, they also didn’t on the whole have access to the kind of education that would give them a full spectrum of ideological options. Certainly, we can indulge in some appreciation of the irony that many of them have only worsened their own situation by drifting towards nationalism. But the grim fact is that both parties constantly profess they want to help, while doing, at best, far too little.

Now we face a parallel but even even deeper moral question – is it wrong to be happy that the President of the United States, a man who has lied both about his own health and basic health and safety, has Covid-19?

On the one hand, being happy about Trump’s diagnosis is equivalent to wishing him physical harm – given his risk factors, it seems unlikely that he comes out of this without, at best, some sort of debilitating long-term side effects. Wishing actual physical harm on someone seems indefensible on the face of it.

On the other hand, Trump, like Jones and Hopkins, has actively sought out his position – not just as President, but as a public and political figure, going back decades. He has himself explicitly wished harm on people far weaker than him – specifically, the Central Park Five. In 1989, Trump called for the execution of five young black men who had been accused of a violent attack. They were later completely exonerated on the basis of DNA evidence – but Trump has not only never apologized, but continues to double down on his mistake.

Some will say that even if we don’t owe such a man our thoughts OR prayers, we owe it to ourselves to rise above our own resentments and dark feelings. But that politesse denies us moral clarity about the nature of the struggle, and in turn, clarity about the politics needed to change things. This is a matter of life and death, not because we made it one, but because they did.

Personally, I think I’ve found a happy medium. I’ve experienced the superspreader event at the White House as a source of, if not quite happiness, at least some psychological relief. Not because I wish anyone harm, but simply because it proves that the fabric of reality is still intact. Or, if you so choose, that God is still in his heaven.

October is the GHOULEST Month

Yes, it’s October, it’s Halloween month. I’ll meditate more on what it means to celebrate horror while living through it, but for now, here are a few movies to, at least, distract you with their weird artistry. We’ve found Amazon Prime to be an absolute treasure trove of amazing, obscure, mid to low-budget horror movies, especially from the sixties and seventies. Here are some of them.

Wake in Fright (1971) - An absolutely brutal story about a white-collar Australian lost in the outback. Far from being tormented by the rough-edged locals, though, he falls in with them, and finds himself becoming a different person. The film is notable for using real footage of a savage kangaroo hunt, which amounted to a drunken mass slaughter. The film was successful in causing enough controversy that the practice was eventually legislated against. Donald Pleasance as a disgraced doctor who lives in a tarpaper shack and is aggressively drinking himself to death is an amazing, disturbing thing.

Death Line/Raw Meat (1973) - A thoroughly disturbing flick about a small group of miners trapped under London by the construction of a subway line - who then continue to reproduce for decades, until they are shambling semi-humans. All too appropriate to the questions above, this is a movie that convinces us that monsters are often victims, too. Also features Donald Pleasance, again great.

A Field in England (2013) - What is there to say about this movie? A surrealist, psychedelic, utterly bleak horror set in 15th century England, this rides the experimental edge that defines what I love most about horror as a film and literary gennre.