Performance Art
Trump, the metaphorical, and the mundane.
I had a friend once, who wrote a play, in which—well, in which someone wrote a play. And in the second play there was a guy who performed, not a play, a performance piece, in which he pulled out a gun and shot directly at the audience.
The special effects were fun. One character had this little bladder of red liquid under one armpit, and he had to hold his arm out until the moment of being shot and then pull his arm in to squeeze the liquid out. Very dramatic. We had to reduce the amount of liquid, actually, because the first time we practiced it the spurt of liquid was a bit much. I distinctly remember one of my castmates saying “Whoa, that’s arterial blood, that’s not what we want.” This character was supposed to get injured, not die!
My character, in the play within the play, liked it. The performance art piece, I mean. She went straight to the romantic, enthused by the sight of something dramatic, something dangerous. She’d already spent every preceding scene in an odd state of metaphor, and people getting shot, well, that was good metaphor. Art should strike people like that, she said. Who cares if it’s real or not?
My boyfriend, in the play within the play, did not like it. The performance artist had shot his cellphone, and he kept repeating, stunned: “He shot my phone.” He was fixated on it. “Do you know what that phone cost me?” he asked. Then: “Do you think he really shot those people? He shot my phone.”
We broke up, of course, epically, every night. We got the best laughs of the whole show, after the tension of the preceding events. It might be the best scene I’ve ever had the privilege of acting. We were both the straight man to each other, and both the clown. One of us, focused hilariously on the mundane. One of us, so enraptured by the artistic meaning that the plain facts were nothing at all.
I seem to remember that there was a character who could thread the needle, seeing the art and the tragedy and the facts. It was a long time ago. The memory is faint.
Right now, the Trump administration is (a) attempting to revoke legal immigration status from non-citizens for political speech, while indiscriminately deporting otherwise-innocent people with even minor immigration irregularities to a horrifying prison in El Salvador from which they say they cannot retrieve anyone, and, (b) instituting tariffs that could crush the US economy and that have stock markets plunging. Both have received pushback from unexpected places, and I should commend Joe Rogan for speaking out against the former. Yet it’s the latter that has drawn restraining votes from a few Republican Senators, and it’s the latter that people seem to think might sink him.
He shot my retirement savings. It’s not a small thing, to be fair, and yet it seems so terribly mundane, under the circumstances. Trump is a performance artist. Maybe the mundane is the best way to fight him. Still, I could wish it seemed more possible to usefully see the people in the line of fire.