BY SEAN WALSH
Did the Mob “Wise Guy” Bring it Home for Trump?
I knew that he was going to win when he secured the endorsement of the respected and much-loved former Mafia hit-man Sammy “the bull” Gravano (pictured). These embraces are always the result of a negotiation. No doubt a shadowy Trump consigliere had met for a “sit down” with Gravano’s people in some Italian café in Queens, and that deals were done and favours called in.
Gravano gave Trump his blessing following the fascist jolly at Madison Square Garden. You’ll have heard about it. It was the one now famously attended by Jews, Muslims, Catholics, WASPS, blacks, Hispanics, Mets fans, Italians, gangsters, police officers, Asians, Nicks followers, billionaires, servicemen, draft dodgers, former hipsters, current hipsters, hookers, pro-lifers, pro-choicers, teetotalers, potheads and strange-enough-to-be-mentioned-by-name Robert Kennedy Jr. The only people not represented at this celebration of America were, you know, actual fascists.
The Harris jamborees, to be fair, featured Springsteen, Beyonce, and a former stripper who read something off a mobile phone. All fine people, and well-schooled in the etiquette of entitlement, but there is no evidence they have ever “made their bones” with any authenticated “wet work”. These are not people who have worked with their hands. Not in that sense, anyway.
Here’s hoping that henceforth the pernicious electoral tradition of the “celebrity endorsement” will no longer be a thing. It’s time for the final curtain to drop on this theatre of the absurd. The endorsement is the ritualistic if inadvertent expression of the worst instincts of any political campaign. It uses a real division between us and them to falsely claim that they are just like us. And therefore, we must vote as they do. You’re worried about “divisiveness”? Then scrap this grotesque version of idolatry.
This valorisation of fame – not just in the US but here as well – is a form of spiritual sickness. And anybody who falls victim to it, be they famous or not, needs to be mercilessly and relentlessly mocked. Ridicule is not unkindness when it is the best treatment both for the self-delusions of billionaire rock stars who think they have a blue-collar worldview, and for the (thankfully) increasingly small number of struggling regular workers who bizarrely agree with them.
Politicians need to discard the celebrity-shaped comfort blanket. These attempts to turn the “power of fame” into electoral juice are not just electorally ineffective, they are morally wrong. They use confected empathy to articulate a faux wisdom, and have nothing to say when it comes to addressing the genuine concerns of the American voter.
Unless written in his own hand, you cannot use a jotted down Springsteen lyric to pay for a basket of groceries. Not even if it’s Hungry Heart.
Plato warned us about this nonsense, this genuinely fascistic culture of celebrity. In the Republic he argued that the poets and musicians should not be consulted when it comes to discussing what qualifies as a stable and just social order. Plato was a snob; he would have shared the elitist dispositions now paraded by the US political class. But he would have very different views about the composition of that class, and its rules of admission. The philosopher kings would not be breaking bread with an Athenian Beyonce, at least not in public.
The moral and the aesthetic usually go together. When something looks to be not right that’s usually because it’s dysfunctional in a deeper sense. You might go along with it, but only with some disquiet. There was something visually off-putting about those Harris rallies, and the way they kept the crowd guessing as to which, if any, celebrity android would condescend to give them two minutes of its time.
In the end people know if they’ve been played. The revelation might not come in the moment, but deceptions inevitably unravel over time.
Vice-President Harris’s advisors constructed the ultimate electoral fantasy machine, one which embedded fakery even at this level of “endorsement”. Millions of dollars, it seems (see the video below from about 25 minutes in), were made available to secure the public approval of what we might euphemistically call the “Diddy circle”. As if a bought endorsement is any sort of endorsement at all.
Meanwhile Trump, with the confidence that only comes with not giving a crap about what people think about you, mangled the grammar of the accepted campaign narrative, and showed that there was another way to do this stuff.
Trump is a perplexing and paradoxical character. I’ve written elsewhere that his was a victory of the authentic over the fake. He is the “blue collar billionaire” not because he claims to speak for the working family, but because he can speak to it. And, as important, also listen to it.
Trump has an authenticity which turned the election his way.
The celebrity endorsement was only ever meant to be the ribbon on the box, but Harris tried to make it the main gift. Her most famous surrogate was Robert De Niro, a guy who only ever got to act as a wise guy. In Sammy Gravano, architect and executor of 19 hits, Trump had the real deal. That just about sums up the difference between the two campaigns.
Sean Walsh is a former university teacher in the philosophy of mind. That was a while ago – but he keeps up with the subject. 2015-2017 he was slightly homeless. He now writes and is the very proud father of a wonderful child. He is grateful for everything he has.