ECLIPSE OF THE SUN

1.

TWENTY YEARS AGO, physicists discovered that the expansion of the cosmos is speeding up. Instead of losing momentum as they fly farther apart, the particles dispersed by the Big Bang scatter faster and faster. In other words, entropy accelerates.

Once, this fact seemed counterintuitive, but in 2018 it was a palpable reality. As the universe hastens toward its demise, it seems fitting to begin this reflection by observing a different anniversary: the centenary of Dada Death. Toward the end of World War I, George Grosz promenaded through Berlin dressed as a grim reaper appropriate to the zeitgeist. In the photograph that preserves the costume for posterity, the artist stands facing the camera with a rattan cane tucked under one arm, his long overcoat surmounted by a macrocephalic death’s-head with shrunken eyes, four nasal apertures, and ridiculously oversize dentition. Like the novelty known as “windup teeth,” which is essentially a death’s-head minus the rest of the head (and a masterpiece of modernism in its own right), Grosz’s brilliantly fashioned mask exaggerates the inappropriate affect of skulls to remind you that behind every human face lurks a grinning, nihilistic idiot.

Flash forward to the disaster that is 2018. The year started off with something called a super blue blood moon and transpired under the sign of another skull, the Death Comet. This celestial body’s morphology justifies its name, but, scary as it was, there was also something ludicrous about the way the Death Comet cruised across the firmament in November. It just kind of did a fly-by, like the regional manager of a chain of hell-planets—Hi guys, don’t mind me! Wow, you’re really being self-motivated with the carnage and misery. Just, uh, keep up the good work I guess! OK see ya!

It’s exhausting, our unending confrontation with the antic, leering, slapstick facets of horror. For me, the mascot of 2018 ghastliness was Tiny, the guy in the PINOCHET DID NOTHING WRONG! T-shirt who danced to the “Cha Cha Slide” with some Proud Boys in August at a demonstration in Portland, Oregon. Tiny, whose nickname is ironic, and who was wearing some kind of facial protection gear, is a surprisingly good dancer. The back of his shirt read MAKE COMMUNISTS AFRAID OF ROTARY AIRCRAFT AGAIN, in reference to the Chilean dictator’s habit of killing leftists by throwing them out of helicopters. One is loath to admit it when people like Tiny succeed in making themselves terrifying despite the eye-rolling obviousness of their tactics. Huge fascist in Bane mask sassily swiveling his hips: Yep, I’m freaked out. As for the fascist-in-chief, he really won’t give it a rest, will he? Clomping up the Air Force One loading stairs with toilet paper stuck to his shoe . . . It was like, Come on! We get it! You’re an evil clown!

But Trump has, of course, attracted a lot of terrifying and ridiculous subordinate freaks who orbit him like moonlets, and we are only just beginning to develop a taxonomy for their varied types of monstrousness (which is this crew’s only form of diversity). Let’s survey a few recent classificatory breakthroughs.

Senior adviser Stephen Miller is a Crawler, one of those moist and pallid humanoids of the type featured in the 2005 movie The Descent. He has escaped from his cave and learned to talk normally, as opposed to using echolocation like a bat, in the manner of his people. But every time a child is irrevocably traumatized while being ripped from its parents by border guards, Miller’s West Wing neighbors hear a rapid, excited clicking noise—the Crawler’s celebratory ululation. Sometimes his neighbors also hear rapid, excited breathing, which has no Crawler-specific meaning and simply indicates that Miller is masturbating to ICE’s newest list of detainee-restraint devices. To cope with more and more roundups of schoolchildren sans papiers and fugitive abuelas, the agency has asked vendors including American Lock, Ripp, and Safariland—I repeat, the name of the company is Safariland—to provide lots of “oversize leg irons,” “TranZport Hoods,” and, pant pant, something called “the Wrap.” Question: Why do you need TranZport hoods to take detainees to nonsecret prisons? Answer: You don’t!

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a smoky-eyed demon who speaks in riddles, like the one that says, “My name is Legion,” in the Bible. While I understand that it is grossly sexist (not to mention very uncivil) to make a joke that acknowledges the existence of a woman’s eyeliner, my own allusion to smoky eyes is not sexist, because I’m referring to the fact that Sanders’s eyes actually smoke whenever she concentrates on evil.

And then we have Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin and his lovely wife, Louise Linton. They belong to a race of space vampires who have walked among us for millennia. These aliens never quite figured out how to make their faces look human, which is why they wore all that powder in the eighteenth century. But they’re not self-conscious anymore. With the invention of Botox and injectable fillers, humans started paying good money to look like what all the space vampires had been trying so hard not to look like: space vampires. Now the real space vampires blend right in. Everyone just assumes Mnuchin looks the way he does because his nasolabial folds are so full of Juvéderm that if one more cc were stuck in, his head would explode. Not so. That is his real face. And while you might think that his visage is frozen into a single expression, such that he has no choice but to constantly smile with the contentment of a possessed ventriloquist’s dummy whose murder spree is going well, in fact he’s smiling because he’s happy. The lies he’s been selling about the GOP’s methodical efforts to redistribute all American wealth to the wealthy are working. Plus, the New York Times recently published conclusive evidence that Trump is guilty of massively felonious tax fraud, and nobody cared, because we were all so distracted by fascism.

Linton’s tirade and photo op occurred in 2017, but don’t you feel that all of Trump time is sort of running together? Has it ever not been Trump time? It’s like the final shot of The Shining, where Stanley Kubrick strongly suggests that Jack really has been in the Overlook Hotel “for ever and ever and ever,” just like the ghost twins say. Trump time is like Overlook time, wound up on itself, old murders tearing holes between decades, the gore of the past spilling into the present.

2.

First there were the paintings—maladroit, ingenuous, cute. Actually, they were terrifying. They showed a simple world, one in which the statement “I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully” made perfect sense as political oratory, a peaceable kingdom where everybody got along, human and fish, dog and cat, Tony Blair and bathroom fixture. The stiffness was not the kind of rigidity that suggests a white-knuckled effort to keep something at bay—it was just clumsiness. For the painter, apparently, nothing was lurking beyond the frame: no monsters, no ghosts. That’s what was terrifying.

While these paintings were being made, there were (and still are) people in a detention camp in Guantánamo Bay waiting to be tried for whatever crimes they are suspected of having committed in the early 2000s. There were (and still are) Americans in Afghanistan prosecuting a war that will end when we win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people or when tectonic subduction flattens the Swat Valley, whichever comes first. And this is just one of the countless fronts in the ongoing, hydra-headed conflict formerly known as the War on Terror.

Whatever you call it now, it’s one big murky battlespace, to use the military lingo, full of special operators running around doing . . . things, various things. The operators have been operating so busily that the Department of Defense is creating newfangled nostrums to keep the kids going. In the informative essay “Beyond Human: Rise of the Supersoldiers,” published in Small Wars Journal this past August, Nilanthan Niruthan said that the Pentagon—while continuing its efforts to perfect the TALOS exoskeleton, arguably the military’s creepiest boondoggle ever—is exploring the “potential for using drugs to create supersoldiers” who can do things “humans are not biologically adapted to, such as breathing in high altitude and even underwater.”

While all of this has been happening, George W. Bush has been placidly painting away. The canvases earned a lot of awwws a few years back, and then, this past September, there was the candy—or cough-drop—moment: entertaining, bipartisan, also cute, also sort of terrifying. His demeanor was wry as he slid the lozenge to Michelle Obama, seated next to him at John McCain’s funeral. He was aware of the comical nature of the moment, a president acting as if he were still a kid passing notes in chapel.

Did the handover of the cough drop prove the resilience of our democracy? Or was that interpretation just another step toward the unseemly rehabilitation of the man who has, incredibly, turned out to be the second-worst American president of all time? You’d think the answer would be self-evident, but it was vigorously contested. The debate was a weird little echo of the larger controversy in which it was embedded, the fight over how McCain should be remembered—as the Maverick, or just a Republican whose at least superficially self-aware sense of humor made him appear to be less of a tool than the average Republican?

Hot, and getting hotter. It was another year of infernos, some as far north as the Arctic Circle. California burned. Movie stars fled Malibu—a J. G. Ballard novel come to life. It wasn’t climate per se but government neglect that fanned the flames consuming Rio de Janeiro’s Museu Nacional, immolating countless irreplaceable treasures, including the only documentation of some indigenous languages that are no longer spoken. Reports describe them as “recordings,” and I assume they were analogue recordings, or they would have been backed up.

I can’t stop thinking about those old, brittle strips of tape just . . . melting, the voices imprinted on them melting, too. Every language represents a specific path through time, one that commenced when all the world’s languages began evolving from the first language; every language is a repository of unique knowledge developed by an unbroken chain of speakers stretching back tens of thousands of years. The thought of these chains being truncated so unceremoniously, and of the experiences and knowledge of millennia being cast into oblivion, is sickening. Safeguarding those fragile traces of cultures decimated by colonialism was nonnegotiable, something that had to be done. But it wasn’t done. Climate-change denial—Trump shrugged off the hair-raising United Nations report on impending doom like it was a joke—and the austerity that starved the museum of resources are two aspects of the same barbaric nihilism.

3.

That was my attempt to survey some of the ways that the REDRUM of the Bush years seeped into 2018. I realize there were some digressions along the way. I also realize that excuses are lame and self-reflexivity usually is, too, but I must ask my reader to sympathize with the predicament of a writer attempting to compose an essay on the horrors of 2018 while 2018 is still unfolding. One of the awful things about any truly awful event is how it performs a sudden, stomach-sinking gestalt shift on the past, which must now be reconceptualized as having all led up to this. Awful events in 2018 were constant, but at a certain point we experienced a qualitative leap, or rather qualitative plunge. And this made my efforts look all wrong—the recent past I’d attempted to represent was the pre-gestalt-shift past. What you are reading is essentially the catastrophic aftermath of a topical essay that got wrecked by an onslaught of topicality—fragments feverishly jerry-rigged together. I shall now focus on the crux of the nightmare, which has to do with leakages from an earlier era of REDRUM.

In March, the collective response to Austin bomber Mark Anthony Conditt was: “This homeschooled evangelical white guy, who’s on record as anti–gay marriage and anti-choice, started sending bombs to people of color in the most liberal city in Texas. But there’s no evidence he was radicalized.” But by October there really was no need to pretend that Cesar Sayoc Jr., who mailed pipe bombs to Democratic figureheads, and Robert Bowers, who slaughtered eleven congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue, were not “radicalized,” because by then the “radicalization” of the whole GOP had become an implicitly acknowledged fait accompli.

The jaw-dropping October 8 Wall Street Journal editorial in support of Jair Bolsonaro (then a candidate, now Brazil’s president-elect) was a major bellwether in this regard. The bastion of respectable conservatism distorted Bolsonaro’s character and positions so preposterously that it could not have been accidental, describing him as someone lefties don’t like because he’s “politically incorrect,” not even acknowledging the devil’s-advocate argument that there might be legitimate reasons to fear and loathe a politician who makes no secret of loving Pinochet as much as Tiny does and who has been frank about wanting to implement a policy of summary liquidation of undesirables. No doubt it was true the editorial board wanted to signal approval of Bolsonaro’s economic predilections (deregulation, privatization, blah blah), but the paper was also signaling a willingness to provide cover for atrocity, at home or abroad.

It was also in this window that I became conscious of the fact that anti-Semitism is just, like, a totally mainstream Republican thing now. It used to be fringier, didn’t it? Now, as long as you say “Soros” or “globalist” you can Jew-bait to your heart’s content, and not a single other Republican—not even that famous man of principle, Arizona senator Jeff Flake—will call you out on it. This embrace of anti-Semitism is seemingly in conflict with the party’s support for the Israeli government irrespective of any atrocities that government or its supporters might inflict on Palestinians, but Republicans don’t have issues with cognitive dissonance. On October 22, at a rally for Lyin’, Self-Abasin’ Ted Cruz, Trump finally announced he was a white nationalist, although he left out the word white. “I’m a nationalist” was definitely the most newsworthy sound bite of the evening, but right before that, he went full Elders of Zion: “Radical Democrats want to turn back the clock. Restore the rule of corrupt, power-hungry globalists.” The day after the Pittsburgh shootings, on Meet the Press, National Republican Congressional Committee head Steve Stivers stoutly defended an attack ad in which a Democratic House candidate was said to be in league with “left-wing mobs paid to riot in the street [cue image of Kaepernick kneeling]. . . . Billionaire George Soros bankrolls the resistance.” Then Mother Jones’s Ari Berman clarified that the ad was paid for by a branch of the NRCC. That’s right. The Republican Party, as a whole, is funding ads about Jews bankrolling violent leftist mobs.

4.

In the summer of 1941, the Nazis began planning the final solution to the Jewish problem. At the Wannsee Conference the following January, the implementation of the solution was announced to the Reich’s top officials. To most people, the Nazis’ shift from a policy of deportation to one of extermination would seem to be a giant ethical leap, but for the Nazis it was a logistical one. There had been no ethical leap. Instead there had been a series of incremental steps, one of the biggest of which was the 1935 passage of the Nuremberg Laws. In addition to declaring sex between Jews and gentiles illegal, thereby testing public tolerance for the obscene incursions into bodily existence and intimate life that any ethno-nationalist regime must ultimately undertake, the laws revoked the citizenship of all German Jews. In effect, the Nazis declared that there was no such thing as a German Jew. And because their word was law, saying it made it so. Poof. There were still Jews in Germany, but there were no longer any German Jews. With this ontological magic trick, the Nazis crossed a significant threshold. If you could suddenly make all German Jews cease to exist, then why couldn’t you make Jews cease to exist altogether?

This year, the Trump administration began a push to “denaturalize” millions of Americans. In June, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services announced the creation of a task force to investigate naturalized citizens for various infractions, the first such initiative since the McCarthy era. Everyone understood that this meant the government was now going to look in earnest for any reason at all to deport brown or black people. The program is not merely callous; it’s aggressively sadistic, and part of the reason it exists is to advertise the administration’s aggressive sadism. It’s a terror program.

Trump’s proposed nullification, in October, of birthright citizenship (jus soli, citizenship derived from being born on the nation’s soil) would mean that all American citizenship would be based either on naturalization or on the principle of jus sanguinis—that is, on inherited citizenship. Your parents are citizens, so here’s your birth certificate: It’s an unobjectionable way of perpetuating a polity. As a bureaucratic concept, jus sanguinis implies an ancestry that fades into a foggy past; you needn’t ask the question of how the first ancestor in this citizenship lineage acquired their citizenship. The danger lies in the possibility of asking, and then demanding an answer.

In other words, the danger lies in the possibility of treating the concept of jus sanguinis not as a useful abstraction but as a sort of imprimatur, or ratification, of a supposedly literal phenomenon: membership in a nation, in Trump’s sense of the word nation. Jus sanguinis, as the term suggests, is citizenship ultimately backstopped by blood. The inheritance is not based on the fact that your forebears had passports—it’s based on the fact that they were American and, via the conduit of biology, they’ve passed their nationality to you. “How do we know your parents were really citizens? What if they were illegals? What about their parents?” Germans under the Nazis had to document generations of non-Jewish ancestors to get their “Aryan certificates.” SS officers had to go back to 1750. The DNA technology that Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren so foolishly used to show she has “Native American ancestry” could easily be used for an ancestry inquisition.

The administration has not yet passed laws decreeing that, say, there’s no such thing as a Salvadoran American. It’s starting that experiment with a different group of vulnerable people: transgender Americans. The Department of Health and Human Services recently proposed a legal definition of sex as purely binary, immutable, and determined by one’s anatomy at birth—that is, by one’s congenital genitals, to use a phrase that in our totalitarian future will no doubt crop up on a kids’ show, like a latter-day “Conjunction Junction,” but to teach cis orthodoxy and hatred of difference. No word on what to do if the newborn’s chromosomes and/or anatomy are not so easily categorized. The existence of intersex people is not something the HHS appears to have wrapped its mind around. But it knows transgender people exist and it would prefer them to stop doing that.

5.

“George Grosz’s cartoons seemed to us not satires but realistic reportage. We knew those types; they were all around us.” This is Hannah Arendt circa 1968, talking to historian Peter Gay about Weimar Berlin. When she says “those types,” she’s referring to the inhabitants of Grosz’s interwar Bizarro World: narcotized flappers, gouty Prussian warlords, Slendermen in wingtips. Grosz also depicted empty suits, ghosts in the haberdashery of a lapsed belle epoque. That they were already dead was just as well. Soon enough, Karl Diebitsch was to design a very striking SS uniform, all black, with the famous death’s-head front and center on the hat. In a modernity patrolled by such apparitions, anyone in a cravat was begging to be garroted. Diebitsch was both morally and sartorially prescient. He sensed that the force of rücksichtsloser Härte (ruthless toughness, a core Nazi value) would easily overcome the starch of bourgeois respectability.

“My honor is loyalty.” It doesn’t even make sense. It doesn’t have to. In Porto Alegre, Brazil, during the country’s presidential campaign, three men attacked a woman wearing a sticker with an LGBT symbol on it and a T-shirt reading ELE NÃO (Not him), an anti-Bolsonaro slogan that highlights his misogyny. They carved a swastika on her stomach. A police officer investigating the case told the press that he thought the attackers had been the victims of a rush to judgment. “I looked at the drawing . . . on her belly. This is a Buddhist symbol of harmony, love, peace, and brotherhood.” At least he got the brotherhood part right.

Grosz’s work, like that of fellow Neue Sachlichkeit artists Max Beckmann and Otto Dix, was not universally esteemed in its own time. His great allegory of postimperial delusion, Sonnenfinsternis (Eclipse of the Sun), 1926, spent years rolled up in somebody’s garage. Over the decades, the clarity and diagnostic penetration of Neue Sachlichkeit vision has grown ever more hauntingly apparent. Early on, these artists grasped that there is no such thing as objectivity, only a variety of methods for decoding and transliterating the signals emitted by empirical reality. The relevant distinction was not between objectivity and subjectivity, but between good-faith and bad-faith attempts to extract signals from the noise. The new objectivity was subjectivity. Had they attempted to neutrally mirror the world around them, the artists would have been guilty of the same mindless complicity as Grosz’s empty suits. In an era marked by hyperbolic grotesquerie, naturalism is normalization. That’s what Arendt was getting at. She was speaking literally. Grosz’s cartoons were realistic reportage.

We are in dire need of more realistic reportage. The way Danny in The Shining appears in certain shots where he just stands there frozen with his mouth agape as if horror is a paralytic venom—this is the feeling that has stolen through my veins as I have witnessed the mainstream media’s abject failures in the face of the unfolding nightmare. Both-sides-ism, the whole “Nazis-like-pancakes-too” genre, the atrocious New York Times profile of McInnes . . .''

6.

Clowns are figures of fun, depending on your idea of fun. They were invented to make people laugh. They both exceed and fall short of the human the way that laughter and terror exceed and fall short of words. I assume that’s why they segue so easily from being figures of fun to figures of terror.

Gritty is definitely a fitting mascot for the year, a realistic representation. My first glimpse of Gritty—adjacent to a caption explaining that this creature had just been unveiled as a National Hockey League team’s actual mascot—made me laugh for such a long time that, judging from my fellow subway passengers’ expressions, I think it qualified as hysterics. But Gritty elicits the full gamut of emotions. The image of Gritty beating the shit out of Pepe the Frog was almost as cathartic as the Samuel L. Jackson/Kavanaugh mash-up. Then there’s the photo of Gritty embracing the Phillie Phanatic, with the words MALE INTIMACY AND COMMUNICATION IS A LETHAL WEAPON IN THE FIGHT AGAINST PATRIARCHY scrawled across it. Gritty looks shocked to be getting a hug—shocked and, again, just so happy. When I saw this image, I teared up. I cried over a picture of the Flyers mascot hugging the Phillies mascot. For just a moment, but still. I haven’t always been unhinged, but in recent months, fear and rage have melted all my hardware. Gritty feels commensurate with the timbre of my state.

7.

Mob violence might mean pogroms or lynchings undertaken by regular citizens, but it is the jackbooted thugs who are at the bleeding edge of Republican politics. My feeling during Trump’s campaign was that his movement could not properly be called fascist unless or until we started to see phalanxes of Trumpshirts cresting the horizon, because I think it’s absurd to call any movement fascist if it’s not explicitly militaristic, and because if you don’t have fascist spectacle then you don’t have fascism, though you may have something just as bad. The Trumpshirts, I thought, were a necessary component of the requisite militarized pageantry.

In retrospect, I realize I was stupidly neglecting to adjust for the fact that we’re living in the twenty-first century and the first fascists were not. Militarism means something different in an era of unconventional and hybrid warfare prosecuted largely by corporate mercenaries, most of whom used to be special operators, like the American assassins that, according to a report a few months back in Buzzfeed, were hired by the UAE to kill people in Yemen on behalf of the coalition. And in the age of the gig economy, of course the Republican party’s paramilitary wing will be a motley assortment of freelancers—a word originally used to describe medieval mercenaries—and its spectacles will be only partly IRL and will be choreographed very differently from Leni Riefenstahl’s.

8.

We shall fight on till our final breath,
For we are the regiment of death. . . .
Yes, the Hussars have long eyelashes,
But we enjoy heroic clashes. . . .
Victories are won by those with flair,
So into battle if you dare.

The speaker is the Death’s Head Hussar, a character in The Last Days of Mankind, Karl Kraus’s 1918 magnum opus of repulsion, a bizarre and brilliant satirical treatment of World War I. Kraus abominates not only the conflict, but also the media’s collusion with imperial propaganda, lambasting an era that “has no flesh, only blood, no blood, only printer’s ink.” The Death’s Head Hussar is Kraus’s name for German crown prince Wilhelm, who led a regiment of the famously dandified cavaliers. The mixture of Thanatos, narcissism, and puerile glorification of combat in his speech seems very contemporary to me.

Kraus’s final poem, “Man frage nicht” (Do Not Ask), written the year of the Reichstag fire, begins:

Don’t ask why all this time I never spoke,
Wordless am I,
and won’t say why. 
And silence reigns because the bedrock broke.

We’re living in the era of evil clowns and ludicrous monsters because they’re what crawl out of the cracks when the bedrock breaks.

Elizabeth Schambelan is deputy editor of Artforum. Her essay on Brett Kavanaugh and the history of sexual violence will appear in the Winter 2019 issue of n+1.