I recorded the show on Wednesday evening, so I could not comment on the Kanye West appearance on the Alex Jones show. Editing the show last night, after having watched a bit of the circus and the aftermath, it occurred to me that what we are seeing is the imagination of Andrew Anglin come to life. West is a weird post-modern Pinocchio that exists to lampoon the pieties of the current age. For those who did not see it, West was on the Alex Jones show with Nick Fuentes to make a big scene. West showed up dressed as a ghetto Spiderman. He was wearing what looked like a varsity jacket, if the varsity was gay prison gang, along with a black gimp mask that had no openings for his eyes or mouth. He also brought a tiny net that you would use to fetch fish from an aquarium.
In the course of the show, West tried to promote Hitler as a misunderstood character, wrongly slandered by the Jews. Alex Jones tried hard to keep the show on the topic of censorship, but West would have none of it. Laura Loomer was brought on to talk about herself and one of Sammy Davis Jr’s grandchildren spoke for some reason. Fuentes was a minor player in this theater of the absurd. Since this started, I have struggled to make sense of it, as the whole thing is an eleven on my ridiculous meter. It is impossible to take seriously a man who thinks it is a good idea to do a TV interviewed dressed as ghetto Spiderman. Add in the fact that he is playing the Clayton Bigsby character from that old Dave Chappell sketch, but taking the role seriously, and we are in a strange place.
The question that matters here is who benefits from this? Freak shows always have a short life and in time this will be forgotten. On the other hand, those who lampoon current pieties with absurd exaggeration can stick around, but eventually their target gets tired of the jester and has him thrown off the tower. Andrew Anglin has been ignored into extinction by the people he used to mock. On the other, other hand, this freak show is just the next step in the decline of our politics into the absurd. Is a black hip-hop Nazi any more ridiculous than a brain damaged hobo in the Senate? Maxine Waters is now a respected figure in Washington, so how absurd is it to imagine Kanye West as the new David Duke? This freak show is just the next logical step in the decline of politics.
That said, mockery and satire work as political weapons when there is a serious message baked into the mockery and satire. It is hard to find the serious message in any of this, other than maybe it was a bad idea to elevate hip-hop culture, but that was obvious since the Sugar Hill Gang came on the scene. Otherwise, this stuff just looks like weird for the sake of being weird.
Source: Selected Items | The Z Blog
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