Chris Bray on the echoes of Soviet-era mandatory celebrations expected of US elected politicians during a speech by Comrade Stalin to the Politburo state visit by the President of Ukraine:
I hesitate to say any of this, because it’s December 22 and none of us should be thinking about the grotesqueries of the political and media classes, but it’s been a busy week for them. I started writing here a little more than a year ago, and have argued since the beginning that our notional leadership classes have developed a set of ritual behaviors that are entirely severed from any form of reality you’ll ever see in your own daily life. (Dana Loesch: “You can’t run a country you’ve never been to.”)
And so here’s one of the least subtle court eunuchs with a message about ritual obedience:
I wish I could replicate the awkward burst of nervous laughter that came out of me at the moment that I saw this message. The policing of performative applause in a formal political setting is so obviously a theme of totalitarian societies that … well, that Chief Eunuch Michael Beschloss can be counted on to not notice what he’s just done. I didn’t get a harumph outta that guy, he said, from deep inside a cloud of obtuse self-regard.
“They insist on inflicting on us such bloated theater & they seem not to know how false it all appears.” The Ukrainian president made it all the way to the Capitol in his combat fatigues, doncha know, and was greeted with a rapturous standing ovation by members of Congress, seen here in this actual footage:
Are there any normal human beings who don’t taste bile when they see this performance? And, Thomas Massie and Rand Paul aside, are there any normal human beings left inside the Beltway?
“Squee! Squee! Squee!” they explained, shaking their pom poms in a dignified ritual of state.
