I’m linking to this because it’s my point of reference, but don’t watch it: the people who made it will get paid.
I’ll describe it for you: it’s a pair of twenty-something social media performers who go by the name Cheeky Boyos who decide to take a challenge to “cook a meal inside of Walmart”. So they take a folding table off a shelf, a folding chair off a shelf, a propane camping stove off a shelf, a propane tank for the stove, some eggs, some bacon, a frying pan, a fork, a spatula. One of them proceeds to sit down and start cooking in the middle of the aisle, the other films on the smartphone.
They do it twice, I think, and both times Walmart staff come to stop them. As the manager in the second case says, with puzzlement, “How do you even think this is ok?” He also observes that it’s basically stealing, which they deflect by saying they’ve paid for it all. (I’m not at all clear that this is the truth at the time they’re being confronted.) But it doesn’t matter whether they’re stealing it or not, it’s just an asshole thing to do. It’s not remotely witty, it’s a transgression against underpaid retail workers rather than anybody who really might deserve to have some kind of plucky subversion happening under their nose. It’s a pair of young men being entitled assholes in return for monetized attention—it doesn’t even have the relative innocence of climbing flagpoles, eating goldfish or stuffing people in telephone booths. Most of the attention they get is from people like me, I would guess: not folks who find them funny or clever, but who loathe what they do.
And yet I think it’s more than just the Cheeky Boyos collecting their simoleons from YouTube. It’s an apt snapshot of our political zeitgeist. It’s Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert. “How do you even think this is ok?” Answer: we do it because we can. We do it because it’s fun. What, you’re bringing the cops because we’re cooking eggs and bacon? What’s your problem, Walmart Manager Guy? What, you’re complaining because I’m crippling the federal government as a stunt? What’s your problem, dude? Why so serious, you globalist elitist killjoy?
Unmerry pranksters, unite. You have nothing to lose but your our future.
American conservatives like to call anyone they oppose a “socialist” (a habit not limited to their fringe). Ok, to flip the table here, Gaetz and company are plainly some form of absurdist anarchists. Conservative Yippies, out to heighten the contradictions. Nihilists who just want the world to burn.
The sober centrists who dominate American political commentary have no idea what to make of them. They keep looking for some instrumental purpose inside of their antics, they keep assuming that it’s all about a deal, about something concrete they want. But that’s why McCarthy just gave up, more or less: these folks don’t really want anything. What they’re doing right now is what they want. Even if McCarthy gave them a full-blown impeachment process and every other 3-ring circus they want to stage, gave them an unlimited lifetime supply of clown make-up, they’d be as confused as a dog who caught the car he was chasing. They don’t want any of that because of what it leads to. They don’t want anything to happen other than the spectacle. If you gave them the spectacle they ask for, they’d just move on to a new demand for something even more dsyfunctionally crippling.
There are times in political struggle where this refusal to have a concrete goal is precisely the right strategy for people who believe that everything about the system as it stands needs to be destroyed. It’s applied millennarianism: don’t wait for a comet or a messiah or lizard people to end the world and reset it. DIY eschatology. You can’t tell a mundane who is still vested in the status quo why you want everything torn down. You probably can’t even tell yourself, because honestly, you have no idea what you actually want. You just know what you don’t want, which is everything as it stands.
“Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?”
“What have you got?”
Is that what their constituents really want? Maybe, for now. Probably they think it sounds great for their congressperson to be sticking it to All Them Folks. Until they actually get stuck along with everybody else, which would make them like more than a few other groups of millennarians. It’s one thing to wait on the mountaintop at midnight for heaven’s chariot and then slink away home when it doesn’t happen and another thing once the Kool-Aid and guns are put into play. Gaetz and Company are well on their way to moving to that kind of Phase 2 stage of DIY apocalypse, now the peculiar evacuation of anything like actual politics on the Republican side of things has put them in the driver’s seat.
Extending the metaphor, I have to say that I’ve never been in the passenger seat of a car driven by a suicidal person under the influence of hallucinogens, but like the majority of Americans, I’m beginning to get a good sense of what that might feel like. That’s bad enough, but while it’s in motion, there doesn’t seem to be any chance of getting off.
Yes, the point is the act. It leads to nothing; it means nothing. What’s the old Robert Anton Wilson phrase? They are “immantizing the Eschaton.” Not that they know it. But they sure do feel it.