http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-best-men/article/2000275The Best Men
Political life imitates cinematic art.DEC 28, 2015 |
By JOHN PODHORETZ
There is a video on the World Wrestling Entertainment's website called "Donald Trump's Greatest WWE Moments," which invites you to "Watch Donald Trump put his money where his mouth is in some of his most memorable WWE appearances." The video lasts for three minutes. In it, you can watch Trump slam into and pummel Vince McMahon, WWE's color commentator and commissioner, and later shave McMahon's head in the ring. This was all part of what the WWE itself calls a "storyline," in which Trump "bought" the fake sports league from McMahon and then sold it back to him in 2009.
Three years earlier, a movie called Idiocracy sent its protagonist, a totally average guy named Joe, from the present day into an America 500 years in the future. There he finds that five-time Ultimate Smackdown Champion and porn star Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho is the president of the United States. Camacho is the leader of a country that has gone almost literally brain-dead, because for hundreds of years stupid people have been reproducing mindlessly while smart people argue with each other over whether it makes sense to bring children into the world.
In his address to the nation, which takes place in the wrestling ring that has replaced the Oval Office, Camacho tries to be empathetic: "I know s—'s bad," he says. "We running out of french fries and burrito coverings." The world has become potato-free as a result of the fact that water has been replaced by Brawndo, a bright-green energy drink that has "what plants crave—electrolytes." What, Joe asks, are electrolytes? Well, he's told, they're what Brawndo has.
Camacho announces he has a plan to save everybody. An IQ test has proved that Joe is now the smartest man alive. "He's so smart, he's going to do it all," Camacho says. Joe will make plants grow. He will heal the economy. And he will cure acne.
No one saw Idiocracy when it was first released, and I mean no one. It was dumped into 100 theaters by its studio, 20th Century Fox, and went on to a total gross of $440,000. This happened notwithstanding the movie's impeccable comic provenance as the brainchild of its cowriter and director Mike Judge, one of America's visionary comic intelligences over the previous 15 years. Judge's work up to that point had included MTV's Beavis and Butt-Head, the landmark act of pop culture self-criticism about the banality of music videos and the stunted sensibilities of their teenage male audience. Aside from the successful 1996 movie Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, Judge also helmed the hit Fox animated series King of the Hill and 1999's Office Space, an instant satirical classic.
Idiocracy sent Judge into a kind of cultural wilderness from which he finally emerged when his brilliant HBO show Silicon Valley premiered eight years later in 2014. Like Office Space before it, Silicon Valley is a sun-dappled satire. Idiocracy was and is something entirely different. If anything deserves to be called Swiftian these days, Idiocracy is it—a "modest proposal" about a country and a culture that is entertaining itself into oblivion. There isn't even a sliver of cheer. It is cheerlessly dark, purposely ugly, and entirely uncompromising. Even its relatively happy ending is a bummer. You can't really blame Fox for taking one look at it and running fast in the other direction.
But, my God, is it brilliant, and frighteningly so, because at least one aspect of its vision of the future has now come true in the present—in the candidacy of Donald Trump. What is Joe, the average guy being tasked to solve every problem, but a prophecy of Trump's ready answer to every problem—that he will hire "the best men" to figure out what needs to be done and then he'll just do it and we'll be great again? The footage of Trump in and around that WWE ring is so uncannily similar to the scenes of Camacho strutting around his Oval Office ring it matters not a whit that Camacho is black and Trump is white.
Add to that the footage of Trump arriving late to the debate in Las Vegas on December 15 in a fleet of SUVs and then interviewed in the garage of the Venetian hotel on CNN with a camera at his feet looking up—not only similar to a shot in Idiocracy, but also to classic WWE camerawork. One is forced again to reckon with the fact that the Trump candidacy seems to be a giant put-on in the way the WWE is, except it isn't.
It will be up to Republican voters, beginning in February, to determine just how far down the road to Idiocracy the GOP has traveled. Trump is clearly betting we're almost there.
