In The Era Of Trump, We’re Lost In The Monkey House The monkey house should be the signature analogy of the Trump era, in which we've become so used to the insanity that we no longer notice it.By Robert Tracinski
July 27, 2017 I’m going to ask you to bear with me while I tell a brief story that seems irrelevant but actually has a lot of application to our tumultuous politics, particularly after this past week.
A while back—please don’t ask how—I happened to find myself watching an episode of the fashion-design competition show “Project Runway.” However dubious this viewing decision might have been, it fully redeemed itself with a very useful analogy from the mouth of Tim Gunn. He’s a sort of advisor and den mother for the wannabe designers on the show, and in that role he has become something of a minor celebrity. In this case, he was giving advice to a designer who had spent a lot of time pursuing a very dubious idea.
This being the twenty-first century, I found someone’s transcript of his speech in about five seconds by way of Google. Here it is:
I have this refrain about the monkey house at the zoo. When you first enter into the monkey house at the zoo, you think, ‘Oh my god, this place stinks!’ And then after you’re there for 20 minutes you think, ‘it’s not so bad,’ and after you’re there for an hour it doesn’t smell at all. And anyone entering the monkey house freshly thinks, ‘this stinks!’
You’ve been living in the monkey house.
If the dumpster fire was the signature analogy for 2016, evoking a particularly smelly and unpleasant kind of out-of-control disaster, then the monkey house should be the signature analogy of 2017—the pungent mental image most appropriate for the era in which we’ve become so used to the insanity that we no longer notice it.
Anyone entering freshly into the monkey house that is the Trump administration would be overwhelmed by the stench. But too many people who have been living with this day in and day out find their senses distorted by the weird priorities and mental habits they have grown accustomed to regard as normal over the past year and a half.
I’m trying to say this kindly, in that nurturing, nice-guy way Gunn has, because it has happened to people I like, and I really want them to snap out of it. I’m hoping the latest development—Donald Trump’s bizarre Twitter campaign against his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions—will be the thing that makes them look around and realize where they are.
The mental habit people have come to regard as normal is a kind of reflexive, combative partisanship: Donald Trump does or says something, the Left and the mainstream media overreact with exaggerated claims, and people on the Right dutifully respond by attacking the Left and the media and defending Trump. If I have complained that the anti-Trump “resistance” has no OODA Loop, well, neither does the Right. They are also stuck in this cycle of reaction, overreaction, and counter-reaction, of Trump, Anti-Trump, and Anti-Anti-Trump. And they keep on doing it when it is no longer appropriate. They are still reacting in July in a way that might have been appropriate in January.
So Let’s Look at Some LandmarksSo as a guide to those who are lost in the monkey house, let me point you to a few landmarks of your current environment, things that simply are not normal and would not be regarded as acceptable if you came upon them with fresh eyes, mind, and nose.
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http://thefederalist.com/2017/07/27/era-trump-lost-monkey-house/
