by Christopher Hall
Comic horror’s fundamental lesson is that the world is not what it looks like. This thought is given particularly sharp expression in John Langan’s The Fisherman:
‘When I look at things – when I look at people – I think, None of it’s real. It’s all just a mask, like those papier-mâché masks we made for one of our school plays when I was a kid…All a mask…and the million-dollar question is, What’s underneath the mask? If I could break through the mask, if I could make a fist and punch a hole in it…what would I find? Just flesh? Or would there be something more…Maybe whoever, or whatever, is running the show isn’t so nice. Maybe he’s evil, or mad, or bored, disinterested. Maybe we’ve got everything completely wrong, everything, and if we could look through the mask, what we’d see would destroy us.
The speaker here is in grief after his entire family was killed in a traffic accident, and there is a sense that only such large dislocations can jar us out of a sense of the reality of the world around us. There is another sense, however, in which this dislocation is a fundamental condition of modernity. A person in the Middle Ages could stand on a still, firm platform and watch the universe revolve around her. It was obvious the platform was solid and still – she wasn’t moving, was she? – and from that fact many other conclusions could proceed. (This is, of course, a vast over-simplification of the medieval worldview, which, for one thing, very much did believe in non-terrestrial realities. But it remains the case that for a large part of human history the route from perception to conclusion was reasonably short.) Now, not only must we accept that we are, in fact, travelling at tremendous speeds in various directions relative to other objects, but we also do so through space that is curved, though time that slows down the faster we go, and, thanks to quantum mechanics, upon a platform where “solidity” does not mean what we expect. The winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2022 won “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.” The actual meaning of this is beyond most people – it certainly is beyond me – but the net result is that now one may approach the oracle Google, ask whether the universe is “locally real,” and receive the answer, “No.”
When Kamala Harris, in August of 2024, began calling Trump and his base “weird,” it resonated first and foremost through the intricate codes of behaviour MAGA has indulged itself in. “Let’s go Brandon,” wearing diapers and massive ear-bandages, and the bizarre religious fetishism for a man who is in no way Christ-like, all contributed to the idea that Trump’s supporters had become, as was and is commonly said, “disconnected from reality.” Much of this may, in fact, be derived from the online world where a good deal of Trump’s support originates; to be strange is the simplest method by which to weed out the normies. This sort of political coherence is hard to come by; even so, Trump’s response was, as is common with him, reflective in the sense that he merely threw the insult back: “They’re the weird ones. Nobody’s ever called me weird. I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not.” “I think we’re the opposite of weird, they’re weird.” And, an increasingly long time ago, at the moment of the Sixties counterculture that gave rise to the modern Democratic party, they were weird.
So MAGA is weird, and their cultural and political opponents are weird. Are they weird in the same way? Read more »