Purple Magazine
— F/W 2016 issue 26

today

by BOB NICKAS

All things being equal… Isn’t that phrase a little hard to swallow? In a time of enormous inequity — social, political, racial, economic — how can a serious thought begin this way? What would follow? Almost anything. All things being equal, we are just as anti- Trump as we are anti-airboards. In parallel, we identify one to be as pathetic and ridiculous as the other, the self-balancing novelty, the imbalanced clown, although airboards are relatively harmless. Those who ride them, a look-at-me breed to be sure, don’t begin to compare with the attention whore for whom social media might have been invented. He and the riders of airboards glide by as if having to walk as mere mortals were beneath them. Neither have their feet on the ground. They are symptoms of a contagious disease. The hot air that belches from the thin lips of this thin-skinned cartoon running for president — telling it like it is! — represents a toxic cloud that may asphyxiate us all, and oh how the winds have shifted. Political upheaval once arose on the left. Now it barrels in from a center de-centered, a middle that collapsed, a right that revels in being wrong, high on rebellion. Fed up with so-called political correctness, Americans are now free to hate whoever and whatever threatens their pursuit of happiness, and in no particular order: women, government, Muslims, Mexicans, investigative journalism, the judicial system, sexual difference, gun control, and environmental protection. (Though isn’t gun control an environmental protection? And why do you need a birth certificate to gain entry to a public restroom when you’re offered an assault weapon with almost no questions asked?) In his pursuit of the White House, Trump will say anything he thinks will help get him elected. In this, he is just like any other self-serving politician.

The anti-spirit in America used to be in the service of social progress. Now that it serves social regress, the time has come to be anti-anti. And so we are: anti antiabortion / anti-antibacterial / anti-antiblack /anti-anticity / anti-anticlimactic / anti-antifederalist / anti-antifeminist / anti-antigay / anti-antigravity / anti-antimatter / anti-antiscience / anti-antilabor (by the way, it has nothing to do with childbirth.)

In an increasingly fucked-up world, you may have no choice except to be anti-everything. Yet to complain about something small seems ridiculous; to try and deal with the bigger issues, too huge. Art is supposedly long, while life is short. Ai Weiwei poses face down on a Greek beach to mimic the photo of a drowned three-year-old Syrian refugee, an image that has already reverberated around the globe, and then he shows his picture at an art fair? Ai looks more like an opportunistic beached whale. Art, rendered reprehensible, makes us anti-art. As for human rights, they wouldn’t be necessary if there were no humans. But people are needed to produce and consume, to fight and die, to reproduce, to keep the machine turning, and if you eliminate the human element, you no longer have the essential element of people being expendable. Far easier to dispense with their rights. This is a new trend in democracy, of which some heads of state are well aware. If Rump was to become president — and let’s get rid of the T, the man is an ass, the shit that comes out of his mouth — his new best friends will likely turn out to be Putin and Erdogan, autocrats who routinely have their critics silenced, arrested, and jailed. None of these men float like a butterfly. They only know how to sting like a bee. And why exactly was Erdogan going to speak at Muhammad Ali’s funeral?

If there’s any hope for a revolution in America, maybe it lies in someone as divisive, dictatorial, and dangerous as Rump becoming president, a little Hitler, a narcissist, petty, and vindictive. After all, revolutions aren’t what they used to be. Witness the populist revolt that has given birth to a figure of fun, and not for the first time. Even if Americans don’t like politicians — being ruled by parents — they do want to be entertained. In this respect, they are not dissimilar to children. The actor/politician is the perfect construction. We’ve seen it from Ronald Reagan to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governator, to Rump, the reality TV star: a candidate for the highest office in the land with almost no coherent grasp on reality. Does he think he can stroll into the chambers of Supreme Court Justices, point his crooked finger, and proclaim, “You’re fired!” And for all his winning, what a loser. Having hidden behind bankruptcy protection on numerous occasions, his own personal gain resulting in others’ financial ruin, just wait and see how his business expertise screws the US and global economies. Will he fulfill dreams that only bankruptcy can buy? There is also the matter of his lack of taste, in no way insignificant. Have you ever seen pictures of his gaudily tricked-out apartment? Who was his decorator — Saddam Hussein? Maybe some good will come of this nightmare in all its vivid mediocrity. The rise of this morally bankrupt blowhard might usher in an anticelebrity, antiselfie (antiselfish), antiplastic era of reason… but don’t hold your breath. And in the meantime, all things being equal… fuck this, fuck that.

END

[Table of contents]

F/W 2016 issue 26

Table of contents

purple NEWS

purple BEST of the SEASON

purple INTERVIEW

purple FASHION WOMEN

purple FASHION MEN

purple DOCUMENT

purple BEAUTY

purple ARCHITECTURE

purple TRAVEL

purple PHILO

purple SEX

purple NIGHT

purple STORY

purple VISUAL ESSAY

© Purple Institute

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