As I write this column, three days before the presidential election in the United States, there is global anxiety. And also the suspense, the morbid curiosity of the billions of spectators that we are, fascinated by the rise of this new-look fascism that artificial intelligence has made irresistible.
As you read this column, the results having undoubtedly been in, what was unfolding on the news screens has descended into life, submerging everything. Here we are in the water of this bath of which we are nothing more than disposable babies. Powerless as we were to prevent anything.
I know that you just have to imagine something for it to never happen. On this precept I based my writing: avoid at all costs, as long as it is still possible, to imagine things. Master of error and falsity, the imagination constantly betrays us, flatters our vanity, it is only the stopgap, the crutch, the misery cover for our botched investigations, our superficial analyses, it serves as a false alibi for our cowardice in the face of reality. The most despicable thing about imagination is that everyone has the same one; you only need a little to believe yourself to be the creator of something new, when you have only regurgitated the most ordinary fantasies, the most common delusions. The pride felt in the works of our imagination is that of the sheep rejoining its bleating flock.
She can help us
However, in desperate cases, imagination can come to our aid. By producing hypotheses, theories, prognoses, it allows us to temporarily stifle the anxiety that grips us. And currently, three days before the American vote, excited by the coming drama that is coming, as a plea so that all this does not happen, I imagine, yes, I imagine, that my precept on the imagination works, and it will be enough for me to imagine that Donald Trump will win for that not to happen. It’s editorial superstition, intellectual fetishism, call it what you want, I couldn’t find anything cleverer to get over my nerves.
But what’s worse? The victory of Donald Trump which, alone, will be able to calm the Trumpists, remove the desire to physically attack their enemies (us, the Democrats), or his defeat which triggers the general uprising, with, under the accusation fallacious electoral fraud, the surge of violence. Should you put the monster to sleep by stroking it in the direction of the hair or take out your knife and defend yourself? But how can we prevent, in one way or another, this man’s hidden desire from being fulfilled: to change the course of History? Overthrow democracy, hang it by its feet.
I find myself thinking that it would perhaps have been better if he had been re-elected four years ago: Covid, Ukraine, Gaza and everything in between were his. He would be ineligible today, unless he elected his daughter-in-law Lara, in a Putinesque version of nepotism…
Our imagination is weak, always lagging behind. To understand how fascism works, if the word still has a meaning, you have to go to the cinema and see The Apprenticethe film by Ali Abbasi, and in the same day, watch on France 2 The Tiethe documentary by Mathias Théry and Etienne Chaillou who, respectively, take fascism from above and from below. Everything differentiates these two films and that’s what makes them essential to each other.
In The Apprenticethe resistible rise of Trump is chronological, simple and Hollywood, we follow it, hypnotized. In The Tie, it is more regional, complex, very original, the fall of the young RN activist is an epic which reveals the secret wounds of the poor boy: he is a fan of Marine, she changed his life, he wants to get closer to her, serve her, touch her. “I’m a real asshole,” he concludes at the end of this cinematic psychoanalysis. Well yes. But admitting bullshit doesn’t take anything away from the bullshit.
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