Dadaism, or just "Dada" was an early 20th Century artistic movement that was intended as a protest against the strict social conventions and militaristic nationalism that permeated late Colonial era Europe and eventually led to World Wars I and II. Dada was characterized by irrationality and silliness, as a counter-point to the behavior of many public officials and celebrities. Gavin Newsom's recent political trolling may be considered a modern iteration of the Dada movement, one that highlights the laziness of our clickbait media, Legacy media's seemingly endless tolerance for Trump's irate and inane behavior, and the expectations of honesty, decorum and professionalism that are applied without spare to every Democratic politician, but which are no longer applied, in any way shape or form to Republicans.
The most famous example of Dadaism was Marcel Duchamp's ready-made sculpture "Fountain". Duchamp's "ready-made" sculptures consisted of common items that he found or purchased, modified slightly, and submitted to art shows. The Fountain sculpture was a urinal signed with the name "R. Mutt" that was submitted for an art exhibition in New York. The item was not selected, and Duchamp threatened to resign from the board for that exhibition. Once it was discovered that Duchamp was the artist, the urinal was included in the exhibit. In today's terms we just call this "trolling", but Duchamp's gesture highlighted the idea that a work of art could be more than just an object, it could also consist of the actions of the artist, and the social dialogue surrounding that object.
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| Fountain by Marcel Duchamp |
Newsom's political trolling is similar in that much of the dialogue coming from conservative media outlets insisting that Newsom is trying to "be like Trump", or that Newsom needs to "be more serious" are laughably stupid and completely miss the point of his actions. The more conservatives complain about Newsom's trolling, the more they highlight just how much they've separated themselves from reality regarding Trump's behavior, and how hypocritical they are when they allow Trump to spew endless incoherent tantrums, while expecting Democrats to abide by the same behavioral norms that prevailed before the first Watergate scandal.
Trump's early morning "truth tantrums" are the political equivalent of an ape in the zoo flinging handfulls of his own shit at the spectators behind the glass. Nonetheless, these sundowning episodes are taken as serious policy statements by media outlets. When Trump threatened to hobble economic development all along the East Coast by blocking funding for completion of the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore, national media outlets not only failed to point out that such a block would violate the Impoundment Control Act and cause long term economic harm to millions of Americans, they referred to Trump's threats as a "plan", thereby treating sleep-deprived bullshit as if it's the equivalent of carefully considered policy decisions.
Democrats are partly to blame for those false expectations as a result of their own lack of aggression. In the current age, giving long-winded speeches about the "norms and traditions of the Senate" or boasting about a "strongly worded letter" written to a sociopathic ape with a rapidly progressing case of Alzheimer's does little to inspire confidence. Right now disapproval of the Democratic Party is largely rooted in the party's own lack of aggression. If more Democrats would just stop sitting on their hands, and begin aggressively calling Trump out for his nonsense, then the Democratic Party would rapidly find themselves becoming much more popular.
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| Cut with a Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany by Hannah Hoch |
Newsom's trolling comes at a time when not a single media outlet has bothered to assign teams of reporters to compile all of the information released from various sources on Jeffery Epstein into a coherent narrative. That failure to curate publicly available information is leaving millions of dollars of ad revenue on the table. This is equivalent to if during Watergate, instead of having reporters competing to compile every new piece of information into a new blockbuster story, reporters like Woodward and Bernstein had simply written snippets announcing when some documents were released, with no other commentary. That kind of willful negligence has many Americans growing increasingly skeptical of outlets that are owned by billionaires who benefit most from the tax breaks in the recent Trump budget bill, and who are quite likely to have met Jeffery Epstein at a party back in the 90s.
In this environment where Trump is out of control, Democrats are mostly sitting around like a bunch of wimps and legacy media have apparently decided they don't want to do their job anymore, Newsom's trolling comes across to many as the only honest political expression available to the typical American. I'm very hopeful that they will finish the Golden Gavin statue in time for the Newsom Golden Gate Boat Parade.
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