Hooligans, hooligans, more hooligans!

On January 6th, The New York Times has it bad, real bad

Witness the gate crashers at the well-meaning dinner party.

There is Xi, glaring from the corner, practically hiding behind a Christmas tree while maintaining a truly disconcerting silence.

There is Putin, sitting at the assigned seat of an innocent foreign dignitary, cooing terrifying threats into the ears of the guest to his right.

And there’s Trump, hogging the hor d’oeuvres platter, leering at female guests and eating foie gras with his bare hands.

Oh, the disgrace!

These poor dinner guests, today’s panoply of pearl-clutching New York Times opinion writers, feverishly checking their bank accounts because of course they should be concerned given what’s going on here at this “civilized” gathering.

Poor Ben Rhodes, whose headline today reads, “Trump is Falling for a Trap We Can All See Coming.”

It’s true, Ben: this lug is a real nincompoop!

There is Jamelle Bouie, whose headline today reads, “There is a Sickness Eating Away at American Democracy.”

I know Jamelle, these criminals had no right to crash this democratically assembled dinner party. They weren’t even on the guest list!

Always scandalized Michelle Goldberg, with whose pearls no one else’s can compete in size, has a headline that reads, “Don’t Call it Regime Change. This is Something Else Entirely.”

Unprecedented! Yes, Michelle, we have never seen this desecration at cocktail hour before. How rude!

Oona A. Hathaway writes about an “unraveling,” which is technically true, I guess, if by unravelling you mean a changing of the rulebook her department head at Yale didn’t inform her of.

Many of those inflamed guests decided to team up and call themselves “The Editorial Board” and write about the five year anniversary of when all those hooligans got a little too rowdy and started breaking windows during an “insurrection” (read: riot). “Lawlessness” is apparently reigning, though, if you read this article from an author who long ago received his vaccine for TDS, you might see that there’s just a new set of laws being observed, ones that probably offend the “innocent” dinner guests, but a set of laws all the same.

Let’s let David French have the last word from the dinner party, whose headline today reads, “Trump is Unleashing Forces Beyond His Control.”

True, all too true, David, this madman has no clue the fire that he’s playing with.

Let us have compassion for the dinner guests. After all, they are very sick. You wouldn’t walk into the lounge at Bellevue and try to berate all of the patients as they genuflect at invisible specters and twitch over perceived insect bites. Instead, you would try to find the cure.

Or not. Maybe they’re incurable. Maybe they will go down with their sinking Fantasy Island cruise ship, chardonnays in hand, as their pearls jingle and then stop, while they doggy paddle in the deep ocean, waiting for a skiff to come and scoop them up so they can go have brunch at some overpriced cafe in the West Village.

After they leave their crashed dinner party, they can rest their heads on their sateen sham encased memory foam pillows as Stephen Colbert soothes their frayed nerves and affirms their delusion with his own delusion broadcast more widely than anywhere their pens could ever reach. The president can’t run two nations, Colbert insists, because “he can’t even run.”

The problem with this joke is not that it isn’t funny. It kind of is. The problem is that it doesn’t really say anything other than that the President likes to eat cheeseburgers and ice cream.

Yet, it might rankle them a bit, but the beginnings of a cure for this severe outbreak at the New York Times today might consist in a simple half-hour’s viewing of one of the episodes of the current season of South Park.

In it, the President is depicted as a conniving, manipulative, bloviating child with a tiny penis and an ability to cuck Satan himself. The depiction is infinitely more funny than anything a late night TV show host or SNL writer’s room might pull off. Yet, its virtue lies less in its uproariousness and more in its ability to actually foist a meaningful critique.

The Trump of the Trey Parker and Matt Stone imaginary is an amoral voluptuary guided only by libidinal reward, but—and this is the crucial part—along the way of the satisfaction of his desire he is capable of unmasking the attendants around him vying for control as the hypocritical sycophants they really are. No one is able to get ahead of him, not because of his intellect, but because of his cunning.

It is a vision of the kind of hedonic maximalism laid out long ago by one Marquis de Sade, whose own fiery vision of desire and instinct was a logical response to the challenges of the Enlightenment period. Absent the superegoic diktats of paternalistic society, the feudal hierarchy which the modern era began to dismantle, Man is left to tarry with the totalitarian grip of his unconscious needs, so would the Marquis have us remember. All attempts to legitimize power from this point forward will need to scrutinize the dark drives inhering within all of us. Leaders of large polities, though they are tasked with greater responsibility, should nonetheless face examination according to yardsticks which are used universally. The challenge comes from the establishment of a consensus. But, thanks to the Enlightenment’s bourgeois overthrow of kingly prerogative, that consensus is always in flux. What is a “civilized” man to do?

South Park got the Marquis’ memo. When will everyone else?