W.W.E. The People – Naomi Klein

link:http://writingforgodot.com/opinion2/277-75/45260-focus-wwe-the-people

W.W.E. the People

By Naomi Klein, Harper’s Magazine

more at the link…..

“….It’s hard to overstate Trump’s fascination with wrestling. He has performed as himself (the ultrarich boss) in World Wrestling Entertainment appearances at least eight times, enough to earn him a place in the W.W.E. Hall of Fame. In a Battle of the Billionaires, he pretended to pound wrestling kingpin Vince McMahon, and then celebrated his victory by publicly shaving McMahon’s head in front of the cheering throng. He also dropped thousands of dollars in cash into the audience of screaming fans. Now he has appointed the former CEO of W.W.E., Linda McMahon (Vince’s wife), to his Cabinet as the head of the Small Business Administration (a detail that has largely been lost amid the daily scandals).

Like The Apprentice, Trump’s side career in pro wrestling exposed and endeared him to a massive audience — in stadiums, on TV, and online. Pro wrestling might be invisible as a cultural force to most liberal voters, but W.W.E. generated $729 million in revenue last year. And Trump did more than pick up votes from this experience — he also picked up tips.

As Matt Taibbi pointed out in Rolling Stone, Trump’s entire campaign had a distinctly W.W.E. quality. He carefully nurtured feuds with other candidates, and handed out insulting nicknames (Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted). He played ringmaster at his own rallies, complete with over-the-top insult-chants (“Killary,” “Lock her up!”), and directed the crowd’s rage at the designated villains: journalists and demonstrators. Outsiders would emerge from these events shaken, not sure what had just happened. What had happened was a cross between a pro-wrestling match and a white-supremacist rally.

Reality television and professional wrestling are relatively new forms of mass entertainment, and they establish a relationship with reality that is at once fake and genuine. With W.W.E., every fight is fixed and rehearsed. But that doesn’t lessen the enjoyment. The fact that everyone is in on the joke, that the cheers and boos are part of the show, increases the fun. The artifice is not a drawback — it’s the point.

So Trump sees himself less as a president than as the executive producer of his country, with an eye always on the ratings. Responding to the suggestion that he fire his press secretary, he reportedly said, “I’m not firing Sean Spicer. That guy gets great ratings. Everyone tunes in.”

It’s with the same brash showmanship that Trump is now navigating — or failing to navigate — the promises that he would impose a “Buy American, hire American” policy, and thereby bring back the bygone days of booming factories and blue-collar jobs that paid middle-class wages. (Never mind that his own empire is built on exploiting outsourced labor.)

This posture is as authentic as the violence he enacted when he appeared to take on a W.W.E. wrestler in the ring, or when he was choosing among contestants on The Celebrity Apprentice. Trump knows as well as anyone that the idea of American corporations returning to 1970s-style manufacturing is a cruel joke. He knows this because, as his own business practices attest, a great many U.S. companies are no longer manufacturers at all but hollow shells, buying their own products from a web of cheap contractors. He may be able to bring back a few factories, or claim that he did, but the numbers will be minuscule compared with the need.

Trump’s plan, which is already under way, is to approach the unemployment and underemployment crisis in the same way he approaches everything — as a spectacle. He will claim credit for a relatively small number of jobs — most of which would have been created anyway — and then market the hell out of those supposed success stories. It won’t matter one bit whether the numbers support his claims. He’ll edit reality to fit his narrative, as he learned to do on The Apprentice, and just as he did on his very first day as president, insisting contrary to all objective evidence that his inauguration crowds had been historic.

So far it seems to be working, at least with his base. Some liberals have seized on this apparent tolerance for “alternative facts” to dismiss his working-class voters as “suckers.” But it’s worth remembering that a large portion of Barack Obama’s base was quite happy to embrace the carefully crafted symbols his administration created — the White House lit up like a rainbow to celebrate gay marriage; the shift to a civil, erudite tone; the spectacle of an incredibly appealing First Family free of major scandals for eight years. These were all good things, but too often these same supporters looked the other way when it came to the drone warfare that killed countless civilians; the deportation of roughly 2.5 million people; broken promises to close Guantánamo or dismantle George W. Bush’s mass-surveillance architecture. Obama positioned himself as a climate hero, but at one point bragged that his administration had “added enough new oil and gas pipelines to encircle the earth and then some.”….see link