Here’s a thought I tweeted: “Kind of final phase of machismo here. Those fucking arms planted on cartoon ducks!” I was responding to Trump’s posting of an AI fantasy clip. A squadron of geese (not ducks) advances; they’re all on foot, they have Trump’s hair, they carry and fire assault rifles, and they do so with human arms that are jacked as shit. But the geese are still geese and they walk like geese. Maybe faster, but geese: there’s a ground-swallowing waddle that moves them forward, and a miniaturized shift from side to side. All the geese advance together, all of them tip from side to side together. Then some of them fire guns, because they’re here to fuck us up. But the shooting becomes fireworks, the way a commotion in a dream will convert into some other commotion in the dream.
The setting I take to be sort of Detroit, I guess, but in places rather like Manhattan. I have to admit I don’t know the arc you see in the background, or the circular domed building that comes after the arc. But the geese are headed for Canada. They’ve got to defend Lake America and they’ll come right up to the border and fire across, at which point everything switches to a red-white-and-blue fireworks show taking place over (I think) Detroit.
Plus, there are the arms, the bulging manly arms emerging from winged creatures who waddle forward and tip from side to side. I argue that the clip represents aggressive maleness now descended into a form that’s fatally decayed. It’s not just that the maleness is cartoonlike, it’s that the chief concern here is to explore cartoon possibilities. The big arms’ mysterious appearance on geese makes the arms hang and wag like toy appendages. Meanwhile, the theme to Hawaii Five-0’s playing. The music gives everything a kick—Hawaii Five-0’s got a very up kind of theme—and kicks are what this show’s all about. No martial music, no music that causes you to march forward, just music that indicates there’s something dashing and high-spirited going on. Such as this splendid goof of the rows and files of blonde Trump heads tilting together with waddling geese underneath them. And then the guns go off because Canada, and nothing has to make much sense.
The boss of the executive branch finds that this clip speaks to him, or at least Natalie calculated that he would. It’s up there for Canada’s government to see, and those folks will make of it what they can. For my part I say Trump and MAGA feel everything is a show and a consumer experience, and that with them nothing they claim to care about really stands on its own and remains a value that can’t be shifted. Strength and maleness and military might (and patriotism) can be played with and moved about, with the aim being thrill and spectacle. Military attack turns into a city fireworks display, reason being that these things look alike when they’re on a screen and nobody’s paying much attention.
Viewed large, MAGA scrambles up our Middle East policy for the sake of footage showing Iran getting hit. Viewed medium, trade policy with Canada is scrambled to give talking heads a reason to scream about a new threat. Viewed small there’s the clip of the geese, in which everything’s scrambled. The geese with the assault rifles and their wagging arms—we just saw inside MAGA’s head and who knows what to do.