it is the most American possible photo

pleeease do

The stance is what gets me. It's some fucken weird jazz hands slash gameshow host thing and it looks so goddamn weird. Mixed in with this fake smile that doesn't reach the eyes. Man. Imagine putting your life on the line for this half-melted Madam Tussaud's wax sculpture of a failson.

Next time someone will sack the capitol it will be to get the mcdonalds

lincoln looking at the chandelier thing that looks like a noose is really what elevates an already great picture to the highest level

it's only like 70-80 pages, you can read it in one night

Here's a decent podcast accompaniment to it. The prose style is a pain in the ass.

Two parts of it are relevant to this. The general idea of spectacle, a social relationship mediated by imagery, is generically relevant to the far-right. They're given the imagery of rebellion but its meaning has been recuperated by the state to reinforce its own interests. The imagery of masculinity, of religious and historical cause, of prosperity, and of civic privilege/duty are all wielded as ways of controlling them and placing them in a contradictory state. Freedom is slavery and all that. Deviating from the underlying social relationship's boundaries, posing an actual challenge to the state or racial/economic dynamics, turns it against you at all levels with all the various elements of that spectacle being weaponised against you. You're a soycuck so you lose the masculinity important to you, you're a commie so you lose the entrepreneurial success that's important to you, you're a traitor when you're only primed to accept nationalism and national identity. The imagery of American splendor and your promised participation in it are then used to mask how depraved and hostile that government is toward anyone who isn't wealthy.

Debord also dissected the mechanics of celebrity and that sort of parasocial relationship that allows an alienated person to live vicariously through an unalienated person by way of imagery. Social media is the big thing he predicted but when you combine it with the kind of mythological heroism of fascism then aphorisms like this describe the Trump-chud relationship:

The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Being a star means specializing in the seemingly lived; the star is the object of identification with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations which are actually lived. Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society unfettered, free to express themselves globally. They embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption, which are the beginning and end of an undiscussed process. In one case state power personalizes itself as a pseudo-star; in another a star of consumption gets elected as a pseudo-power over the lived. But just as the activities of the star are not really global, they are not really varied.

The concentrated spectacle belongs essentially to bureaucratic capitalism, even though it may be imported as a technique of state power in mixed backward economies or, at certain moments of crisis, in advanced capitalism. In fact, bureaucratic property itself is concentrated in such a way that the individual bureaucrat relates to the ownership of the global economy only through an intermediary, the bureaucratic community, and only as a member of this community. Moreover, the production of commodities, less developed in bureaucratic capitalism, also takes on a concentrated form: the commodity the bureaucracy holds on to is the totality of social labor, and what it sells back to society is wholesale survival. The dictatorship of the bureaucratic economy cannot leave the exploited masses any significant margin of choice, since the bureaucracy itself has to choose everything and since any other external choice, whether it concern food or music, is already a choice to destroy the bureaucracy completely. This dictatorship must be accompanied by permanent violence. The imposed image of the good envelops in its spectacle the totality of what officially exists, and is usually concentrated in one man, who is the guarantee of totalitarian cohesion. Everyone must magically identify with this absolute celebrity or disappear. This celebrity is master of non-consumption, and the heroic image which gives an acceptable meaning to the absolute exploitation that primitive accumulation accelerated by terror really is. If every Chinese must learn Mao, and thus be Mao, it is because he can be nothing else. Wherever the concentrated spectacle rules, so does the police.

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you would live forever in the legends

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