REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE

May 2, 2020

“Most of them have gotten really good at saying absolutely nothing. They’ve all got some kind of program, but when you listen to them, you still don’t know what they’re talking about.”
- President Donald J. Trump, “Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again”, 2015

Of course Donald Trump doesn't know what they're talking about. He doesn't know anything about anything. He's an uneducated dolt who holds the fate of a nation in his pudgy little hands.

Trump is an adolescent boy, wrapped in a tantrum, inside a “hostile branding tactic” of his own design. He is morally ambiguous, and displays a juvenile masculinity that has imprisoned us in an inexhaustible game of chicken. And now the cliff. Will we put the pedal to the metal, or will we sober up in order to grow up?

Dr. Robert Linder’s 1944 book entitled: “Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath” describes this species of criminal bad-boy as a “rebel without a cause - an agitator without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program”. The 1955 eponymous movie, starring James Dean, probably helped shape Trump’s early persona, not to mention his pseudo-greaser pompadour.

Trump rose to prominence hawking his garish luxury hotels during the Reagan era of the 1980s - the era of new money. His brand was conspicuous consumption, and his personal style was that of a somewhat younger version of Hugh Hefner’s American Dream. He was someone you couldn’t take anywhere but seemed to pop up virtually everywhere. But because his new-money refugia - grande dame relics such as Mar-a-Lago - let everyone in, it became impossible to sustain his brand of exclusivity. Whom could he exclude in the era of alternative everything: grunge, raves, and hip-hop millionaires? His culture of elitism became the stuff of satire because it was hard to be exclusive when everyone was now posing as a prole. Steve Jobs in a black T-shirt; Jeff Bezos, a blue jean entrepreneur who started out in his garage. Everything became casual, and old marketing tactics became old hat. Smith Barney’s: “We make money the old-fashioned way. We earn it!” morphed into “Capitol One's: “What’s in your wallet?” And Trump moved on to greener pastures, containing new trends and new suckers to skin. He swerved from luxury branding to a new personal brand known as hostile or maverick branding – from conspicuous consumption to non-conformity. From sticks and bricks to selling his name. As Trump wrote in 2011:

“Building a brand may be more important than building a business.” - Donald Trump, “Midas Touch”

Donald Trump became a rich bad-boy with the assistance of famous greasers like Howard Stern, Vince McMahon, and later, Steve Bannon. As luxury became pedestrian, populism became red hot, and the trappings of the underdog became fresh and authentic. While Seinfeld’s “Soup Nazi” was satirical social commentary in the 90s, everybody laughed, but nobody seemed to get it. And we still beg to be rejected now. We loved the humiliation of Trump’s “You’re fired”. It hurt so good. And we loved Donald Trump as the reconstituted embodiment of the American Dream – the authentic Tea Party hero who gobbled up Thanksgiving dinner and then picked up the table and slid the whole shebang into the lap of the hostess. And, as anti-establishment trends caught fire - as pot-bellied, middle aged, James Deans began to wear semi-automatic rifles as jewelry - we entered this inane era of adolescent rebellion, of anti-vaxxers, and a new iteration of conspicuous consumption: natural foods, Goop, and enormous, enhanced buttocks.

While some of us are old enough to see the hallmarks of fascism that emerged in Charlottesville and The Tree of Life Synagogue, and as armed hate cults parade in state legislatures pretending to be patriots for freedom, America is oblivious to the fact that we’ve been skinned once again. We bought Donald Trump’s hostile branding thinking it was authentic, and the crowds literally went nuts.

But now we’re closing in on 100,000 deaths because we simply can’t get our realities straight. Do we vaccinate, or do we go natural, (whatever that means)? Do we wear automatic weapons as jewelry, or do we take the fight inside the capitol building? Do we fight for change, or do we just burn the whole thing down?

We don’t differentiate between subjective reality and objective reality anymore. We’ve been had by this grifter. He genuinely doesn’t know anything. And now, what was bad-boy entertainment for a self-absorbed generation of couch potatoes, is now a murderous rampage brought to us by a rebel without a cause - an agitator without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program”. We’ve been had by this ad man, and we’re dying in droves. When Donald Trump marketed himself as the avatar of the American Dream, a star was born. Now, we’re going supernova, and nobody seems to know why.

Note: the above image is a screen-print from the Andy Warhol collection entitled, "Ads" 1985