Ubu Why: A Heuristic
Poland exists. It seems Ubu had to too.
1
For Trump the gut, and his is substantial, if largely adipose baggage, knows, or thinks it knows, all. He goes far beyond Reagan’s “facts are stupid things“ (which Reagan quickly corrected). For him, lies are smart things. He lives by them.1
This is a guy with a lifetime habit of reflexive, outrageous lying. Most won’t call him on it; the few who dare he can bully and insult into withdrawal or groveling submission. With that baseline it’s hard to differentiate his SOP from cognitive decline or, to borrow a phrase from a longtime Trump watcher, the insanity of a shithouse rat. Ladies and gentlemen (if that’s not too reductive), place your bets.
Some people, especially the once Trump-positive or Trump-curious, see the absurd and unrelenting lying, inanity, and invective as signs of white-matter disease or fabulation. Others lament “If only the tsar knew!” as if wicked gatekeepers have rendered the young and innocent Trump a passive conduit for whoppers. Or he’s a super-duper executor of never abandoned deep-state hegemonic designs and totally in the know, cleverly keeping adversaries off-balance with obnoxious idiocy that conceals intricate, carefully thought out long-term plans. (This group should get together with the fabulation theorists.) Fine. He’s demented. He’s crazy. He’s a chump. He’s a mastermind. Rank likelihood to taste. He’s also exactly who he’s always been, folks, only more so (paging Lord Acton). Many just haven’t wanted to see it.
2
With that assumption in mind, let’s posit a working theory on this president. He does stuff that blows through boundaries (truth, logic, custom, decorum, law, sanity) for what we’ll loosely call reasons (impulse, spite, anger, half-baked schemes, because he can), and when things go fubar, as they frequently do (six bankruptcies), he denies what he did, lies about it, blames someone else, comes up with contradictory excuses and bullshit rationalizations, attacks the messengers, and changes the subject. Then he does it again.
The guy’s a yahoo. He flings feces, then reacts to what ensues (outrage, cheers, retaliation, sucking up, whatever).2 He’s uninformed, except via echo chambers and sycophantic cronies, not just because he’s grandiose but because he sees no need for facts or expertise. He’s a cartoon version of what Rove described to Suskind, with even less grounding in ordinary thought and feeling because he’s a Cluster B who’s two or more standard deviations from the bell curve’s ringer.
The good news is, when things sour he can change course (only to repeat the same shtick later, ad infinitum) by coming up with some nonsense to say this was the plan all along and it was pure genius and a massive success. The bad news is, six bankruptcies, which means he can screw up bigly and has done so often, and the ethical compass of a psychopath. As the title of a book about him cheerfully puts it, everything Trump touches dies.
3
Take the war with Iran as an example. Going by news reports, he thought he’d be in and out in a weekend, ignoring cautionary advice to the contrary, and plotted the sneak attack amid negotiations (again) with his Israeli handlers and administration yes men. Predictably that failed, and the consequences anticipated by the tuned-out naysayers began to bite. As a consequence we see instantiated what’s described above, a chaotic thrashing about, simultaneously boasting of total victory while secretly seeking a ceasefire and begging allies for help when not threatening or insulting them or insisting he doesn’t need them anyway.
Encountering this shambolic display, many try to pick out what Trump is really up to. The apparent answer is that Trump is doing what Trump always does. He did something stupid based on bad assumptions, bad motives, bad reasoning, and bad impulses, and now he’s frantically rummaging around in his worn bag of tricks to extract himself from the mess he’s made, while likewise predictably making matters worse with harebrained Hail Marys like a Secret Squirrel op to snatch Iran’s enriched uranium or a Marine landing on an island or two to pry open the long and elaborately fortified Strait of Hormuz.
It’s altogether plausible, for example, that Israel (coordinated with Trump) attacked the South Pars gas field as DJT’s way of sticking it to allies who Bartleby’d his SOS to open the Strait of Hormuz but need energy from the Gulf more than the U.S. does. A rule of thumb for today may be to come up with the lowest, dumbest, meanest, craziest motive, then ratchet it down a notch or two. That will be the likeliest one.
Unless the U.S. and Israel are looking for an excuse to bring on the Marines or escalate to nuclear (Terrorist fanatics are blowing up energy infrastructure! We have no choice!), escalation like the once again ill-thought-out South Pars raid is akin to going full Tropic Thunder.3 A typewriting monkey seemingly has a better chance of keying King Lear than these characters have of coming up with something other than “Yeah? I double-dare you!”4 Yet that’s what’s needed.
4
Given that, resolution of the Iran crisis, or anyway a timeout, will depend on the bloody-mindedness of all parties. Recent precedent (e.g., Ukraine) isn’t encouraging. Nor is it inconceivable that in desperation over energy costs, financial markets, and restive voters, the vassals will dogpile Iran—if the March 19 statement from the U.K. et al. is an indication of the moral courage and intellectual honesty of the parties in question, it may be likely. Needless to say, it would be timely and wise for those feckless elites to rethink sole reliance on the American “friend” and maintain stubborn non-participation so that all sides can declare victory, however specious, and announce peace negotiations, the more protracted the better, since they allow for a cooling-off period. Otherwise we’re in a Countdown to Looking Glass timeline, which truly is the stupidest of them all. Unfortunately that’s no proof against it.
Worse, some will consider it the smartest. Within MAGA, which boasts a rainbow coalition spanning from the misguided to the batshit, from game theory wonks to profiteers, from fascists of various stripes to rapturists, nukes are not only not out of the question but positively desirable. The civil tumult to inevitably follow will be a handy pretext for a Schmittian state of exception. Voilá, president for life! Like I said, half-baked schemes. It’s unlikely to stick (he says, exercising the frontalis and superior rectus), but what a freaking mess it would cause, and that’s the best case.
I’m laying this on Trump, and far be it from me to deny him agency, but it would be remiss not to give deserved credit to his innumerable enablers, and not just the toadies and zealots that fawn over and surround him. Let’s hear it for the delusional vainglory of Biden and his over-promoted inner circle of lackluster hacks, the party-over-country betrayal and, worse, political mistake of McConnell, the legalistically induced institutional sepsis of the Roberts court, the credulity, selective blindness, and recency bias of now erstwhile Trumpists (NB: this isn’t endorsement of the available alternatives). It’s a long, long list, and now it’s closer to closing time than ever before and the clock is ticking. Take a bow, folks.
A threadbare hope is that Trump, for all his manifest derangement, is not so far gone as to think he can get away with the extravagant madness of nuclear war and martial law, rendering 2020’s squelched post-election autogolpe a tepid warm-up. He is where he is because he has, or had, the capacity to know when to back down, as his TACO acronym attests, and arguably it’s the sanest thing about him.5 Otherwise we’re in Milgram experiment territory, fingers crossed that subordinates like Mike Pence, of all people, and officials few have heard of find the gumption to say a hard no. That is no place any planet should ever want to be.
5
“Fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous, grandiose, dishonest, stupid, jejune, voracious, greedy, cruel, cowardly, and evil.” That is how Wikipedia describes Ubu, anti-heroic invention of enfant terrible, avant la lettre surrealist, and pistol-toting bicycling enthusiast Alfred Jarry. Jarry reimagined the protagonist of Macbeth as a potty id, variously bullying and craven, set loose to wreak havoc upon the world.6 Any likeness to persons living or dead is purely unintentional.7
Conventionally “Ubu” is thought to refer to the name of an unpopular teacher from Jarry’s schooldays. But you can also hear it as où boue, which means “where [there’s] mud, muck, mire.” An Ubu doesn’t drain a swamp so much as swallow it, further distending with boodle his already immense girth. Think of the Ubu/où boue collocation as a euphemistic companion to Bosse-de-Nage, the pataphysician Faustroll’s baboon sidekick, whose name, minus the parodic aristocratic particle, could be basse nage, meaning “base wallower,” or Ubu’s famous expletive, merdre! a made-up word for “shit” with an extra voiced uvular fricative.8 To you civilians, that’s the “r” that to English speakers sounds vaguely like softly hocking a loogie.
Bosse-de-Nage, by the way, is a baboon described as “befouling and ravaging everything indiscriminately.”9 The colors red, white, and blue, normally found on the buttocks of his kind, instead appear on his face. Thought you’d like to know that.
But I digress. My point, such as it is, is that when an absurdist fantasy of unbridled, tyrannical appetite, a satire you’d ordinarily think too puerile to take seriously except as a historical curiosity, begins to look like a sober diagnostic assessment of the senescent toddler with nuclear matches in power today … finish that for me, will ya? I can’t find what to say about something at once so abjectly ridiculous and degraded and a whim away from as real as it gets.
And I might point out that Ubu was all gut too. Instead of a paunch-concealing blazer and a protests-too-much dangling tie he wore a gown like a nightshirt emblazoned with an emblematic spiral, a vortex sucking everything into an insatiable belly. I encourage the White House to lose the flag pins and adopt it instead. All except Hegseth, with his tent show red, white, and blue pocket squares. He’s a natural Bosse-de-Nage.10
That’s all I got for ya today. Say your prayers, sug.
What’s that proverb about swords? And the one about fooling all the people all the time? It must be said, though, that until it doesn't, lying works. Over time it's a catastrophe, but that’s everybody else’s problem. As Keynes said, in the long run we're all dead, and Trump's pushing 80. His time's almost up, and till now he's gotten away with pretty much everything. What do you suppose he'll do with what remains, become a Carmelite?
Trump may be a seated disaster as an executive, but as an insult comic, attention economy carny act, and lawfare-supercharged reneging grifter he’s remarkably effective. Credit where due.
OTOH, if Iran and the aggressors were able to come up with a bit of performance art, such as a Marine “victory,” that would allow both sides to save face, or pretend to, and begin diplomacy, I’m for it.
If anyone can get away with declaring victory and going home, Trump can. He may not know much, but dude’s a master of the attention economy. Like I said, the trickiest bit might be getting Iran to play along.
For an extended take check out Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi: The Most Punk Play of All Time. For those unacquainted, this post’s subtitle refers to Jarry’s stage directions: “Set in Poland, that is to say, Nowhere.” When Jarry wrote Ubu, Poland didn’t exist, having been absorbed into Austria, Prussia, and Russia in the 18th century. It became a state again after WWI.
On the Macbeth angle: You might extrapolate Melania “I really don’t care, do you?” Trump into the role of Lady Macbeth, and that’s an argument to be made, but equally you might see in the president’s psychic world both figures, jointly plotting, inciting, and carrying out. For that matter—this is for you literati—think about Jarry as not only Faustroll (genius of inversion) but also Bosse-de-Nage (mocking of and amused by said genius) and Ubu (the trouble with excess is it’s not enough). Whereas Trump is an Ubu without knowing it and by nature (presumably), Jarry was an Ubu by choice (presumably) via a never-ending life-as-art performance.
But a number of writers have noted certain uncanny similarities between King Ubu and the current U.S. president, among them Charles Simic.
H/t to the co-located Nada Gordon for the word “collocation.”
The quote can be located on this page, which begins with a prescient words that might well apply the Gaza: “We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.”
The only words spoken by Bosse-de-Nage are “Ha ha.” Hegseth’s vocabulary is more extensive, but what he says is if anything more limited.
Entertaining and elucidating, as usual.