There's an article in today's New York Times on the newest internet sensation, a young man named Jake Paul whose major talent seems to be a mastery of the outlandish, the inappropriate, the dangerous, and the absurd. Think of the old TV show Jackass, taken to new extremes. He finally explains to me our president.
Jake lives in a modern white house in LA that he's spray painted, and he films himself daily doing things like throwing furniture into his empty pool and setting it on fire. The pool has more recently has been filled with water, and now reportedly features a big screen TV at the bottom, face down. Jake has over 10 million You Tube followers and other insane numbers on social media more generally. He's a self made celebrity master of exaggeration, hype, and craziness as a performance art. He surrounds himself with followers and like minded bros who egg him on and applaud his worst/best intuitions and silliest tricks.
He has had a much-viewed fake wedding video with a model. He seems to exult in self indulgently "fake news" about who he is and what he's doing. He creates controversies almost daily. At his instigation, the true and the false elide into nonstop entertainment of an profoundly puerile sort. His followers are totally hooked. There's a certain sense of humor that finds anything hilarious that controverts the norm and either perplexes or outrages quintessentially mature people. And Jake's apparently a genius at it.
It occurred to me, reading of his immense popularity and growing juggernaut "empire" of clothing and other things, that we're now even more than ever before in an Age of the Outrageous, where large segments of the population seem to crave the bizarre and over-the-top more than ever, and seek out the exaggerated extreme that's so stupid, it's hilarious, to at least their own sensibilities. Everything is hyped as fantastic, fabulous, the biggest ever, the worst ever, the best ever, the scariest of all time, the never before seen in all of human history, and so on, and on.
This explains to me as much as anything the president we have now in that other white house, and why we have him. His dysfunction is a daily delight to the clamor for crazy that has descended over the culture. We now live on the border of Hypelandia and Absurdistan, two states that have finally and fully merged. And Trump truly is the king of it all.
It's a strange and existentially fascinating development for the new century.