All The World’s A Stage

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players …
— Jaques in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII

I have been wrong about almost everything having to do with politics, communal beliefs, and human nature for ten years. I thought at every turn corrective forces, based in values taught in children’s books and elementary school, would mean the demise and disappearance of Donald Trump. I was wrong. Against all my odds he persists, disrupting my status quo, disturbing my sleep, flouting my cherished beliefs. So I went on a search to figure out why.

A lot of my investigations these days happen by Googling specific search words, but in this case I didn’t know what I was looking for, so I began just messing around. “Messing around” is my own personal research method comparable to finding the appropriate place in the stacks and then just grazing nearby, reading book titles, pulling likely books off the shelf, following leads. But it also involves picking up magazines randomly, putting them down, skimming some publication that has arrived in the mail, like the New York Review of Books, or watching what YouTube thinks I might be interested in. In this way I hit on Lee McGowan talking with Heather Cox Richardson.

This podcast, Politics Girl, is not such a stretch for me, but I don’t see it regularly. Finding it was a gift. I’m hanging on by my fingernails here so I’m jumping on anything that seems likely and this more than paid off. Two intelligent women facing the way things are, no outrage, no wishful thinking, no despair, was what I needed. Lee voiced our shared fears and Heather kept it real. Lee said what is coming will be bad but Heather said, maybe it won’t be bad, or at least not all bad. We don’t actually know what is going to happen, not next year, or next week, or next hour. To which I thought, if I am opposed to obeying in advance, I need to stop freaking out in advance.

Heather didn’t sugar-coat it, though. She said, “yes, a lot of people are going to get hurt. That’s the point.” Just having her say it like that helped me to grasp what seems un-grasp-able: our incoming government actively wants policies that will hurt people. Feeling that with dread was waking me up at 4:00 am. Just saying it like that meant that I could observe it, with Zen-like detachment, and then try to figure it out.

Right away, Lee and Heather got into something interesting, the WWE. I don’t pay any attention to the WWE but Heather does because, low culture or not, it’s still culture and it seems to be affecting politics. Professional wrestling, I learn, began with everything scripted but depending on an agreement between wrestlers and fans that it would be accepted as real. The whole thing—characters, storylines, rivalries, alliances, the moves in the ring—were all fictional but everyone suspended disbelief and behaved as though it was real. (Maybe you all knew this. It was new to me, though, and the novelty made me see connections.) This fictional production is called the kayfabe, a term Heather used easily, and why not? Movies, plays, and books all depend on their own form of kayfabe, the suspension of disbelief, which often, in fandom, reaches outside the particular sphere of the story.

So that’s the way it was in the WWF, the World Wrestling Federation, but when that organization evolved to the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) for various reasons, now everyone admitted it was staged. The fans still enjoyed it, but the particular magic wasn’t so potent any more. But THEN a further evolution meant that the two forms merged: some of the spectacle was fictional but some was real and—this is key—no one knew which was which. So the guessing and the wondering and the scrutiny kept people involved, it kept them coming back, mesmerized.

Trump is steeped in this culture. He may be a total loss as a human being but he is skilled at manipulation. He knows that intermittent rewards work. He knows that people will, like B.F. Skinner’s pigeons, peck themselves to death if they are trained to do so. He knows how to keep people on edge wondering if he means what he says. He knows how to get people to play the game that he has designed. He knows that the key to his success is not actual governing, but the kayfabe. Keep the story going. His marks don’t know what is fake and what isn’t and by this time neither does he, but it doesn’t matter because everyone is now trapped.

I, as a charter member of Trump Loathing Party, am at least potentially trapped as well. If I can’t look away from the horrors, I am trapped. If my well-being is tied to the podcasts of other Trump loathers, I am trapped. If I spend my energy loathing him, I am trapped.

So I am teaching myself not to react. Pay attention, see, be informed, but don’t react. Name things as they are, look for ways to make things better, protect those who get hurt as best I can, but don’t react. The game thrives on audience reaction and we are all, even the Trump Loathers, in one way or another, “merely players.”

Like any game, though, the rules can be changed. One cut marionette string at a time.