Gonzo Reality

We need a Hunter Thompson to give us some perspective

Take a minute to think about how absolutely nuts it is that the most powerful military and economy in the world is being run by these crackpots and ignoramuses. We needed a Hunter Thompson to give us a sense of the insanity of the Nixon years, but this is so, so far beyond anything gonzo that the Nixon era produced. It’s utterly astonishing that we have devolved so far so quickly since then.

Ten years ago as Trump began his first term we all anticipated the worst, and it turned out even worse than we feared. I would never have thought that the economic and political elites would have allowed it. I guess I gave the Deep State more credit than it deserved. But we got rid of him in ‘20, and I, at least, assumed that America learned its lesson and that it could get back to grappling with real problems, not made-up ones.

Biden was old, but he did a pretty good job. Got stuff done nobody thought he could. Maybe even more than Obama did in two terms. He had the good sense to push the party more toward the Bernie wing. He was boring but relatively competent. But he was old, and he probably should have stepped aside, but he didn’t. So the Dems called an audible at the line of scrimmage, took a risk with a trick play, thought for a minute it might work, but alas. Game over. The Trump fans come charging onto the field, tear out the goal posts, and stream out into the streets looting and smashing everything in sight. Not just locally, but everywhere in the world. Astonishing, and yet it continues, and we haven’t seen how astonishing it has yet to get. And most astonishing is that the American establishment is completely powerless to do anything about it. How did it become so passive and powerless?

Well, Kurt Anderson does us a service in telling the story of the establishment’s surrender in his 2020 Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History. I missed it when it first came out, and it’s an entertaining, lively read. He’s not Hunter Thompson, but he captures some of the insanity of the last several decades, and writing in 2020, he’s hopeful that a return to sanity is still a possibility for us. I doubt Thompson ever thought a return to sanity was ever really a possibility. I wonder if Anderson still does in 2026.

Had I read the book when it came out, I would have shared in his hope, and I would have agreed with his analysis almost completely. He has a good, broad grasp of the pertinent “facts” and has an interpretive frame that maps pretty closely to what Bernie Sanders works with. He’s a sane, center-left Liberal of good will. If he comes up short it’s in his failure to understand the importance of religion. But he has some very interesting things to say about the homogenization of culture since the 80s. He blames it on a compulsive collective nostalgia that impels American culture to keep recycling the same old stuff. He talks particularly about pop music and how the sixties/early seventies was the last moment when anything really ‘original’ came into the culture. I agree, but he makes an argument that’s more accessible than the one I’d make.

He references Simon Reynolds’ 2011 book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past that tracks the decline in pop music and how startling new sounds that typified the music from decade to decade earlier in the 20th Century just stopped in the 80s, and all we got since then was ‘revivals, reissues, remakes, reeneactments, and rampant recycling.’ He quotes Reynolds—

as the eighties rolled into the nineties, increasingly music began to be talked about only in terms of other music; creativity became reduced to taste games. What changed from the mid-80s onwards was the level of acclaim that blatantly derivative groups began to receive. Retro-styled groups had generally been a niche market, for people unhealthily obsessed with a bygone past. But now these heavily indebted bands [such as] The Stone Roses, Oasis, [and] The White Stripes, could become “central.” In the 2000s the pop present became ever more crowded out by the past, [with] bygone genres revived and renovated, vintage sonic material reprocessed and recombined. There has never been a society in human history so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past.

Evil Geniuses, (p. 252).

Then Anderson goes on to say—

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose always meant that the constant novelty and flux of modern life is superficial, that the underlying essences endure unchanged. But that saying now has an alternative and nearly opposite meaning: the more that underlying structures change for real (technology, the political economy), the more the surfaces (style, entertainment) remain the same.

Evil Geniuses, (p. 255).

Yes, I agree, the underlying structures are changing quickly and profoundly, but the goal of these changes is homgenization, to make everything a machine-like. It’s a cliche to say it, but it doesn’t make it less true: the machines don’t serve humans, but humans serve the machine. And the machine is becoming more sophisticated with each passing year in imposing its totalizing project to make us more machinelike. And we’re just letting it because, well, what else is there to do? Ooh, look. That cat video is hilarious.

I like Anderson, but I think his explanation, while partially true, is weak. He wants to argue that we are no longer original because, as I suggested above, we’re caught up in nostalgia—we want our cultural comfort food instead of exploring uncharted waters. But I’d argue we’re nostalgic because we long for the the original, and we don’t have access to it in the way even our recent ancestor did. If we don’t have access to it, we turn to those in the past who were still in touch with Reality in a way we no longer are. We rarely produce anything genuinely original anymore because we have allowed ourselves to become sealed off from its sources as we become evermore inured to life in hyperreality.

If you’re interested in reading two longer essays in which I develop this argument, see “Originality vs Novelty” and “Genotext, Phenotext, and the TCM” . The terms ‘genotext’ and ‘phenotext’ are from Julia Kristeva. Genotext derives from a source that transcends the consensus reality (as in poetry and religious language). It’s virtue is richness and depth; it’s problem, ambiguity and its vulnerability to multiple possible interpretations including very bad ones. Phenotext is circumscribed by its contemporary consensus reality as in science, scholarship, and responsible journalism. It’s virtue is clarity; it’s problem is one-dimensionality. There is a vertical dimension to genotext, but meaning in phenotext is primarily lateral—the denotative meaning of any word, as in the dictionary, is defined by the meaning of other words which are defined by other words—they need not be grounded in reality, but only in lateral reference to one another.

In the last paragraph of “Genotext” I write:

My argument in the Cathedral Talks focused primarily on Baudrillard’s ‘Precession of the Simulacra’, which, translated into Kristevan terms is the slow shriveling up of the primary legitimacy of genotext as it gets supplanted by phenotext after the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, and later in Capitalism and its Transhumanist project. For our ancestors genotext is what gave language its felt legitimacy, but our condition as postmoderns lies in that very few of us have any feeling for genotext anymore, and so we don’t have any sense of what is True anymore, and this is largely why we live in a post-Truth world.

Anderson’s Evil Geniuses describes the way that contemporary culture in the post WWII era became increasingly sealed off within a phenotextual membrane. He doesn’t use that language, but that’s the story he’s telling. And it explains why we’ve allowed Donald Trump to turn the White House into Animal House. But what neither he nor I saw in 2020 is clear now—there’s no way we’re recovering our sanity until we find a way of getting grounded again in real Reality rather than the hyper version of it in which people like Trump thrive.