When Donald Trump was elected President of these beautiful United States, some truly ignorant men decided their chosen silver lining was that art would get “better.” Ignoring for the moment that this makes no sense – has there ever been a period where “art” was bad? All of it? The commentariat cannot look past the end of its nose – it also suggested that the world’s response to living and breathing fascism, with hands around the levers of global hegemony, ought to be to sing it to sleep. That we could inflame people, like me, to some nondescript further response to fascism through the Greatness of Art. But I’m sick of grandness. What in my life feels grand? What, in the lives of the forty million people mired in poverty in my country, could be called grand? We’re poor and grimy. Much of our lives revolves around finding ways to cope with, or contrast ourselves with, the obscene vultures at the helm. It’s an identity that provides some meaning, at the very least, which is hard to come by in life. Why should we not talk about that?
The greatest art we have today is that which reflects how this feels. A story written not by someone sitting outside of this struggle, but describing what actual living is like in this enormous moment of history. Dril and Conner O’Malley are the two artists who have truly captured the unraveling of American society. Like all great artists, they offer us reflections of the world; Dril through the decay of our hypermediated minds, and O’Malley through the visceral flesh-horror of capitalism.
Dril, who absolutely should be given the Nobel prize in literature, is a twitterman, like many of us. His tweets are reminders that there are people with much cooler intrusive thoughts than the rest of us get. Dril is a poet – I won’t accept any less a title for it. The character he plays and the language he uses are immediately familiar with anyone who came up online at the right time. Older relatives fumbling at the keyboard, the obsessed freaks at the fringes of a forum, or the big-talk shitposting weirdos: the kinds of people who make the internet a frustrating place, right up until the rest of us hop online just to talk a little shit just like them. The spheres of social media aren’t really places, they are conversations that never stops.
The greatest aspect of Dril’s character is his ability to seamlessly move between these characters, his lucidity ebbing and flowing, but all clearly derived from the same source. What aspects of myself I see in his character (“i have read 10,000 posts on the matter” is a frightening personal attack) are commingled with aspects of people online that I am sure I would hate. Being part of this flood of content isn’t alienating; it relieves the burden of permanence of and responsibility for my creations. I don’t own any of it, and neither does Dril. Part of the melancholy of the cracks in the anonymity of Dril is losing this wholly fictional identity. Before, he could have been anyone. How would you feel if you sat down with someone at a restaurant and saw them open their phone and post from the Dril account? I’d be a little sad.
At the other end of artistic anonymity is Conner O’Malley. O’Malley is a wonderful comedian with an amazing gravelly voice and his videos have brought me much joy. He has contributed to programs like The Chris Gethard Show, Late Night with Seth Meyers, Detroiters and most recently, the exultantly strange I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson. But his most beautiful creation in this collage were his Vines.
A scene: a man is walking down the street. He sees an expensive car, and a man sitting inside it. He approaches and screams “GOD’S A PIMP, YOU’RE HIS ANGELS, I PRAY THAT I MIGHT DIE FOR YOU!” Cut.
Rather than comment on our fraying mental health, he embodies and intensifies it. He finds these men and for a moment, confronts them with what their lives are – strange little islands in a sea of psychotic and confused desperation. Everyone else is screaming all the time. Why are you eating lobster? Give me five thousand dollars. By the end of the long saga of O’Malley’s Vine character depicted in “The Transformation” supercut, his videos are almost entirely screaming into an almost-swallowed microphone.
O’Malley revealed in a 2016 interview with Paste Magazine his own diagnosis of the era we live in. Trump, and his voters, acting out of self-interest and fear amidst a climate of barely-controlled internal violence. A gun could go off at any moment. Any day, someone is going to be killed in a hugely momentous way, and that will just fold things up. O’Malley uses the phrase “we’re in a very transitional time.” What are we transitioning to? One outcome might be seen in the Howard Schultz Superfan saga of short videos: terrified, broken people, screaming at a camera, begging for recognition from the only people in the world with real power. Then we get tossed in a van, beaten, and told to shut the fuck up and be normal.
Had we been more observant, or our memories more thorough, we would have realized that we were in a nightmare long before the night of the last election. But, that night this truth emerged, and since then, things have been in pretty steep decline for most people. While oligarchs prod each other over their increasingly deranged big picture thinking, most people are staring upward at the mass of wealth and power accumulating overhead, and are slowly being driven out of our minds.
I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I feel stupider than I did two years ago. A large portion of my day is spent reading news that leaves me tired. Another war, another senseless killing, another rich prick getting away with something. Sometimes, these rich pricks fuck up, and say something stupid, and sometimes a microphone or camera documents this, but I know they don’t feel stupid. They make enough money to be basically fine, basically always. Living with daily confirmation that life is made everyday by cruel and selfish incompetents is embarrassing. “One thousand years of blood to keep them rich with money,” truly.
I begin to feel small, under that thunderhead of idiot power swarming somewhere over Washington, DC, and in smaller pockets across the country. Every day ends pretty much the same for me – I go on Twitter and scream at people who inflame a moral outrage, and then nothing happens, and then, I go to sleep. Sometimes I think about the ocean rising up and flooding cities, and sometimes, I think about war and death that I am powerless to stop.
This is the art we need to look at the world around us in a way that does not paralyze us, or chain us to failed expectations of the past. We need to laugh at the people we hate, we need to laugh at our condition, and we need to realize that what will save us is not greatness, or beauty, or grand gestures, but people like us, tired out and with the wheels falling off, screaming at the people who have done us wrong.
Michael Malloy is a student researcher and socialist from the Central Valley of California. His work has been published in @popula and @proteanmag. His other job doesn’t give him enough hours so he has plenty of time to be online.