GLORIA, or 1/6 and the absurd

The January morning was cold. President Trump, soon-to-be-former President Trump huddled with his family in a tent in front of a row of monitors, watching the crowd. His crowd. They’d come when he called and they would soon lay siege to the capitol when he asked. They hadn’t been numerous enough to propel him to a second term, but the crowd was big enough to soothe his ailing ego.

Behind the President: his children awash in a mix of nerves, disappointment, and anticipation. After putting on his biggest-boy voice and monologuing to the ‘gram about the bravery of patriots, Don Jr. called on his wife to dance to Laura Brannigan’s 1982 hit “Gloria.”

Gloria, you’re always on the run now…

Running after somebody, you gotta get him somehow

I think you’ve got to slow down before you start to blow it

I think you’re headed for a breakdown, so be careful not to show it

Everything about this scene was a little too dissonant, too un-self-aware, too on-the-nose. Tense anticipation hangs over the video, the gravitas of the moment before the big moment. It almost could have come out of the pre-climax of any generic authoritarian dystopia, but the movie would have been accompanied by restless strings or low horns, something to fit the mood better than cloud-huge dance synths.

But under those synths, the lyrics of “Gloria” are strangely apt, telling a story of delusions of admiration, of grandeur — and a hero seemingly blind to the coming disaster.

Are the voices in your head calling, Gloria?

Gloria, don’t you think you’re falling?

If everybody wants you, why isn’t anybody calling?

You don’t have to answer —

Leave them hanging on the line.

I’m not even sure it’s the weirdest image from January 6th, 2021 — I mean it would have to beat a shirtless “Q shaman” presiding from the podium of the Speaker of the House over his would-be barbarian legislature. Or even just the casually-waving lectern-stealing guy. This has to be the weirdest, most quintessentially american attempted-coup of all time.

Of course the critical lack of self-awareness is a defining, perhaps even required, feature of these fascist movements. How else can they convince previously-normal members of society to do things that are plainly wrong?

Since at least the time of Plato, one of our most persuasive answers to the question of why people do good has been “to avoid being caught doing bad.” Whether for moral, social, or selfish reasons (like staying out of jail), most people try to do good and most try to do good as society sees it. To participate in a movement of hate requires destroying the existing societal-image and self-image and replacing them with new, false images that serve the narrative.

The perversion of morality is definitely the more harmful consequence, but this process also results in the loss of the ability for “self-cringe” (to borrow a term from Contrapoints). The same process that gives you khaki-and-tiki-torch marches chanting Nazi slogans also gives you Don Jr.s’ Insurrectionist ’80s Dance Night.

Truthfully, I have been reluctant to write this or laugh too hard at these absurdities. I’ve always believed that laughter can heal, that the right joke can deny, if only for a moment, the power our troubles hold over for us. But the wrong joke can undermine the threats we face (and as a recovering late-’00s edgelord, I know a lot about the wrong jokes). This dichotomy is central to the “Schrodinger’s Douchebag” edgelordic irony that has come to definite contemporary (online) fascist recruitment tactics, so if we laugh we must laugh carefully.

But it takes so much energy to hold at bay the obvious humor in these moments of horror. Again, “shirtless Q shaman in fur presiding over the house”! There are only so many times I can explain how a seemingly-innocuous meme actually is a fascist recruiting tool — even when I know it is — before I start to question my own sanity.

Feel your innocence slipping away, don’t believe it’s comin’ back soon

But hey, at least it wasn’t Born in the USA again.