Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review<\/p>\n
In movies, novels, music, and art, progressives murder their enemies, including presidents, in myriad ways.<\/span><\/p>\n W<\/span>e live in a society in which gratuitous violence is the trademark of video games, movies, and popular music. Kill this, shoot that in repugnant detail becomes a race to the visual and spoken bottom.<\/p>\n We have gone from Sam Peckinpah\u2019s realistic portrayal of violent death to a gory ritual of metal ripping flesh, as if it is some sort of macabre ballet. Rap music has institutionalized violence against women and the police \u2014 to the tune of billions in profits, largely as a way for suburban kids to find vicarious street authenticity. And this idea of metaphorically cutting, bleeding, or shooting those whom you don\u2019t like without real consequences has seeped into the national political dialogue.<\/p>\n For example, why does popular culture wink and nod at the widespread metaphorical killing of Republican presidents? Liberals used to believe that words mattered and images had consequences; the casual glorification of carnage trivialized violence and only made it more acceptable \u2014 and likely.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In 2017, the obsessive hatred of Trump led, for instance, to many obscenities: Madonna told us she dreamed of blowing up the White House, comedian Kathy Griffin posed with a bloody facsimile of Trump\u2019s head, Snoop Dog shot a Trump likeliness in a video, a Shakespearean company ritually stabbed Trump-Caesar every night on stage, Johnny Depp joked, \u201cWhen was the last time an actor assassinated a president? \u2026 It has been a while, and maybe it is time.\u201d<\/p>\n But such kill chic is hardly new \u2014 and hardly a result of Trump\u2019s sometimes reckless tweets or undisciplined outbursts.<\/p>\n In 2012, a model of the head of former president George W. Bush turned up on a pike in HBO\u2019s\u00a0Game of Thrones<\/em>, \u201cby accident\u201d of course. But by then kill-Bush chic was already a tired genre. In the heat of the 2004 election, Alfred A. Knopf had published Nicholson Baker\u2019s novel\u00a0Checkpoint<\/em>. It was little more than a boring dialogue of characters dreaming about how to assassinate President Bush. (It\u2019s now \u201cupdated\u201d by\u00a0To Kill the President<\/em>, by British writer Jonathan Freedland (aka Sam Bourne), a thriller about assassinating a Trump-like president.) In October 2004, long before Johnny Depp\u2019s John Wilkes Booth rant,\u00a0Guardian<\/em>\u00a0guest columnist Charles Brooker lamented that there would be no presidential assassin to kill Bush: \u201cJohn Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. \u2014 where are you now that we need you?\u201d<\/p>\n The list of \u201cassassinate Bush\u201d public expressions could be expanded \u2014 they appeared in a variety of genres, such as Gabriel Range 2006 \u201cdocudrama,\u201d\u00a0Death of a President<\/em>, which portrayed the successful killing in 2007 of George W. Bush (replete with a president funeral scene).<\/p>\n Between the kill-Bush and kill-Trump chic was the welcomed, calmer hiatus of the eight-year tenure of Barack Obama. True, his critics were often crude, questioning his birth certificate and dredging up stories of his supposedly dissolute youth. But there was, thank God, never an assassination chic among celebrities and in the popular culture associated with Obama, despite the strong passions he often incited. Had there been anything between 2009 and 2017 like\u00a0Checkpoint<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0Death of a President<\/em>, the edgy artist in question would have been ruined if not brought into court and jailed in the manner of the scapegoated Benghazi video-maker Nakoula Basseley Nakoula or perhaps at least surveilled like the journalists Sharyl Attkisson and James Rosen.<\/p>\n More often, Nobel laureate Obama earned hagiography, as journalists hyperbolically compared him to a God or enthused that he was capable of making one\u2019s leg tingle. That piety was often encouraged by Obama himself, who had announced his intention to cool the planet and lower the seas (given recent frigid winters in the American heartland and the near-dry canals of Venice, he may have partially succeeded).<\/p>\n In fact, there\u00a0was<\/em>\u00a0a sort of kill chic that occasionally surrounded Obama \u2014 but of a completely different sort.<\/p>\n In January 2016, Obama hosted rapper Kendrick Lamar at the White House. (Lamar\u2019s hit \u201cHow Much a Dollar Cost\u201d was said to be Obama\u2019s favorite song of 2015). Another Lamar song \u201cBLOOD\u201d (with the lyrics \u201cand we hate the popo\u201d) took on the police at a time when police shootings were in the news. The cover of Lamar\u2019s just-released album at that time, \u201cTo Pimp a Butterfly,\u201d depicted a dozen or so African-American young men on the lawn in the front of the White House, celebrating with champagne bottles and hundred-dollar bills over the corpse of a white judge at their feet, who sort of resembled Ronald Reagan, with his eyes x-ed out.<\/p>\n Reverse the roles and imagine an invitation to the White House for a country-western singer \u00a0who had produced such a racialized cover, and one could expect another impeachment resolution. I suppose the Kendrick cover art was meant to imply that the revolution had succeeded \u2014 the old white guard was not just gone but, happily, dead, and the time was upon us to bring on the cash and drinks to celebrate the new guard in the White House.<\/p>\n Ignoring Lamar\u2019s racist art and anti-police lyrics is like having your picture taken in 2005 with Louis Farrakhan (\u201cThe Jews talk about \u2018never again.\u2019\u2026 You cannot say \u2018never again\u2019 to God because when he puts you in the oven, you\u2019re in one indeed!\u2026\u2018Never again\u2019 don\u2019t mean a damn thing when God get ready for you!\u201d). Embracing Lamar gave Obama street cred, but with plausible deniability: After all, a public figure cannot be responsible for all the cry of-the-heart expressions of an artist or social activist.<\/p>\n More recently, Obama unveiled his official presidential portrait by the hip artistic sensation Kehinde Wiley. Wiley is an identity-politics conceptual artist who emphasizes his own black and gay identity as essential to his work. He previously had courted controversy on two occasions for recalibrating well-known paintings from the past \u2014 reworking the scenes of violence in interracial fashion. In these two paintings, a black woman, sword in one hand, is holding up the severed head of a white women she has just decapitated. Or as Kehinda Wiley once described his black-on-white severances to\u00a0New York<\/em>\u00a0magazine, \u201cIt\u2019s sort of a play on the \u2018kill whitey\u2019 thing.\u201d<\/p>\n What explains the rules of a rather disgusting genre of assassination, decapitation, or kill chic? Most obviously, presidential conservatives are targeted, while Obama flirts with those who artistically indulge in fantasy interracial killings. And the rules over the last two decades seem pretty clear:<\/p>\n 1) By their supposedly immoral natures, conservatives have deserved such obscene fantasy invective (Trump with fatal bloody knife wounds and Bush\u2019s head on a pike are almost natural).<\/p>\n In contrast, liberal leaders are moral people. Even to fantasize that their leaders might suffer the same fate is repugnant. The means are different because the ends are, too: equality and social justice versus white privilege and exploitation. Simply put: To achieve progressive agendas, one can explore all the violent avenues of the imagination.<\/p>\n 2) Given the long history of racial oppression in the United States, there can be no resort to \u201cwhat if the roles were reversed?\u201d contextualization (e.g. a talentless pop artist as Trump\u2019s official painter, with a past of substituting blacks for white victims in famous paintings of decapitation, explaining that the reversals were a sort of play on the \u201ckill blacks thing\u201d). Imagining or depicting white decapitation or the murder of a GOP president is an anguished, warranted cry of the oppressed, whereas reversing the racial roles would be proof that racism endures. The art world by nature poses as antithetical to the powers that be; to imagine that it would turn on the establishment forces of social justice is not just unrealistic but absurd.<\/p>\n 3) Metaphorically assassinating a Bush or Trump has no real-life ramifications. Lowering the bar of what is culturally acceptable has nothing to do with violence such as a Bernie Sanders supporter shooting Representative Steven Scalise and fellow Republican congressmen. But in the case of progressive targets, lowering the bar just might have real consequences, given the Right\u2019s innate propensity for hate and violence.<\/p>\n Translated, that means that the sober and mellifluous Obama can engage his culturally explorative side \u2014 and in his usual judicious tones \u2014 while not being especially bothered by the killing chic of Kendrick Lamar or Kehinde Wiley whom he patronizes. All that is a welcomed edgy expression of authenticity and presidential versatility.<\/p>\n And perhaps in the same warped manner, so is the art of ritually killing Bush or Trump in film, art, and literature, through knife, bullet, and bomb: artistically pushing the envelope \u2014 and all for a noble cause.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review In movies, novels, music, and art, progressives murder their enemies, including presidents, in myriad ways. We live in a society in which gratuitous violence is the trademark of video games, movies, and popular music. Kill this, shoot that in repugnant detail becomes a race to the visual and spoken […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1161,1124,1098,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2Rv","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5191,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/art-needs-moral-vision\/","url_meta":{"origin":11005,"position":0},"title":"Art Needs Moral Vision","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 27, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Spielberg's\u00a0Munich\u00a0offers only moral evasion by Bruce S. 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