Kanye Comes to the Oval Office
I really don’t want to but I guess we should talk about the pure idiocracy on display in the (once-respected) Oval Office yesterday. Trump hosted Kanye West at the White House this week, because of course he did. These two knuckleheads were made for each other, considering they both love to ego-stroke as much as they disdain facts. It was a pas de deux for the ages, and perfectly emblematic of the cartoon presidency through which we’re currently living.
But 45 was uncharacteristically silent on this occasion. It was Kanye who did most, nay, all of the talking. He’s not very good at it. Talking, that is. I suspect he’s even worse at listening, to say nothing of critical thinking. It’s no wonder the two are so palsy-walsy around one another. Amid blank stares and doubtless suspicion of altered states from those in the room, a few things happened.
The long and short of it was this: Kanye riffed for 20 minutes on everything from Superman to Adidas, dropping the F-bomb and unwittingly revealing his iPhone password (it’s 000000, but you already knew that) along the way, the press took photos and video, Trump called him a “smart cookie,” and they left for lunch. The whole episode was surreal, like a slow-motion trainwreck but where the only victims were brain cells. Don Lemon couldn’t even get through it.
Suffice to say, Macklemore’s historic collaboration with Obama on addressing the opioid crisis this was not. (That documentary can be viewed in full here.) One was a societally productive dialogue that sought to shed light on the mounting crisis of drug addiction. The focus of Kanye’s visit, at least nominally, was police procedure and broader issues surrounding race relations and law enforcement. Those are important conversations, without question, and none of them were well served by the bush-league fraternizing that actually took place.
There’ve been a few spicy hot takes on what exactly we saw during this episode. You have some folks saying that we witnessed in Kayne’s manic babbling a cry for help. He did admit to being diagnosed as bipolar, after all. Other people are saying it’s not mental illness, that he’s just your average addlepated moron for which America is so well known and that we shouldn’t conflate the two. Don Lemon and S.E. Cupp argue that Trump is exploiting Kanye, using his fluctuating sanity to channel the black vote.
I do think we need to be careful in ascribing mental illness to people whenever they exhibit prodigious levels of ignorance à la Kanye. But I honestly can’t quite bring myself to care anymore. Whether Kanye’s actually bipolar or is suffering from some other disorder matters less to me than the fact that huge portions of this country think that what happened yesterday was a manifestation of genius. Some 30 to 35 percent of the country sat through that nonsense and approved.
Who are they? Glad you asked. They’re the ones who show up to Trump rallies covered in MAGA garb with their brains fogged by Fox News, like this one in Tampa, Florida. They’re the ones who think #HimToo is a clever slogan in the wake of the Kavanaugh hearing, like these folks at an Erie, Pennsylvania rally. And they’re the very same Trump-adorers who still think, against all logic, the Donald is a self-made man, as we also observed at the Pennsylvania rally. That’s Trump’s base, and their perspectives are as immutable as the arrow of time.
They’re also the group that would be beside themselves with outrage had a previous sitting president done something like this. Can you imagine if Obama had a rapper visit him in the Oval Office who launched into a nonsensical tirade filled with expletive after expletive and had the press in there to capture all of it? Can you imagine the right-wing response? Fox News & Co. would have rhapsodized endlessly about Obama defiling the sanctity of the office and other such drivel.
In fact, as CNN’s Don Lemon points out, Hannity and his band of hypocrites did exactly that when Obama featured Common at a White House poetry night. Except Common didn’t embarrass the nation like a lunatic; he shared compassionate, inclusive if politically charged verse designed to unite America. This appears to be the far-right’s Hypocritical Oath: Celebrities and politics shouldn’t mix except when said celebrity is on our “side.”
Once again, none of this is surprising. These are daily symptoms of the post-truth era in which we live, one that regards ignorance as a virtue and refuses to see truth through anything but a partisan lens. It is the inevitable result of the decadeslong disesteeming of education and intelligence in our society. And it is the culmination — metonymic with the religious right — of a generational cultivation of fundamentalist thinking that prides itself on rejecting science and science policy and fact- and evidence-based inquiry and that fosters a general distrust of fact-reporting communities, to the extent that scientific facts are reduced to culturally dependent descriptions of nature and journalistic integrity can exist only insofar as it confirms partisan bias.
The loss of the honest pursuit of facts is something we’ll be coping with for many years to come. Looking ahead, perhaps nothing short of a new intellectual renaissance will do, a revitalization of our innate curiosity and our unquenchable desire to understand the world around us. Only a society-engulfing recommitment to fact-conscious living, to free inquiry, to educational improvement, to acquiring knowledge for its own sake, and to objectivity and fairness can serve as a critical advance upon the blind partisanism and enculturated ignorance that so define our times.
As I’ve written previously, this is also why our Great Problem is not something Facebook and Google and Big Data can solve alone. It’s not just about getting information in front of those who need to see it. It’s about fundamentally resculpting the epistemic resolve of ordinary Americans — a generational task if ever there was one.
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