#thecartertrilogy

Introduction: Let's make love in the summertime, and breathe in each other's arms

There's an interesting cultural and historical framing device us Americans have been using in order to make sense of, and to comb out the nappy-headed developments of the past couple of years.  In our interactions with each other, we've resorted to reducing our shared events, and this ol’ President, and this ol’ year in particular, to a television show.   The U.S. President assassinated a top Iranian General at the beginning of the year, and the news was communicated in countless late night jokes and online memes as the raucous events of the season premiere of 'America - The Series.' 

In conversations throughout the year we would reduce the countless and needless complexities of this year into bite-sized episodes, and the countless and needless complexities of the Presidency into a mean ol’ villain or defiant hero in that show.  We do this so we could for a moment, warren order from the disorder of a pandemic, and we do it in order to masticate Trump, in an attempt to find something of cultural value in the marrow there. 

Set against the backdrop of the fall of the American Empire, Presidential Press Secretaries are referred to as mid-season replacements, scandals like Russiagate get packaged by cable news hosts as a storyline culminating in the ratings bonanza Mueller report episode, murder hornets appear as a J.J. Abrams-esque black box mystery, and over video chat we joke to our friends that the interview the President gave on the virus was ‘brought to you by Regeneron’. We do it so we can turn ol’ Trump up when you and the missus need a laugh, or so we can box it all in, get the highlights, and turn it all off sometimes.

Even now, as the results of this Presidential election conclude, we refer to it as the ‘Season Finale’ (a multi-day, multi-episode story arch, if you will).  We pontificate on the next move the President might take with the same confident hand-waving we gave to theories about Rachel and Ross, or about who shot that mean ol’ oil man J R Ewing. Except of course, these are real people up on our television screen that we treat as characters, passing, or not passing real laws, no matter how brazen and cartoonish their villainy might seem.

They are public servants, selected to be dutiful arbiters of democracy.  They are unpackaged and unscripted members of society, in stark contrast to the other faces you would see on television and billboards, those manipulated faces and lives, augmented and born from tinseltown, giant recording companies and whatever technological medium of the day.  Those other faces on television were the “illusion" Howard Beale talked about in the 1976 film Network, a traveling troupe of jugglers, fire-eaters, movie stars, athletes, singers and rappers, all completely separate from reality, striking a pose with a song to sing as soon as you press a button on a remote. Nowadays though, everyone you see is a little of column A, and a little out of column B.

For a solid century, generations of celebrities were fully in column A.  Notoriously private, insular, and sexually closeted, they would spend their days galavanting across the estates of their private Xanadus, appearing every once in a while to grace us with their presence, and fill our hearts with the gospel of America, all glowing and bright up there on that movie or television screen, or curled over the glossed-over pages of magazines, then glowing again illuminated on the flat-screens of our lives. Every now and then a scandal might hit the supermarket rags, or a scathing memoir would be published, but for the most part, celebrities came to us in ordered, scheduled appearances, their actual lives, marriages and drug habits compartmentalized away from that glowing screen I told you about.

Lately though, they're everywhere, with quotes under their faces dispensing grandfatherly advice on our school-mates Facebook page, or appearing on our media scroll without makeup to give cooking advice, or getting into days-long Twitter clashes with some unemployed rando. Every one of them leveraging some personal story, reported first in the news in order to tie in to the release date of their next project.  Rap star Cardi B herself has described her upcoming album as having “my ‘Lemonade’ moments, my personal relationship moments,” a set that wishes to delve into the inner workings of her own troubled marriage to Atlanta, GA rapper Offset.  

And through this monumental change, where actors in crisis, rappers expanding their brand, desperate online characters and season finale plot-lines get mixed up with our actual families, loved ones and our country, we the people have been there, fully comfortable with this conflation, in fact welcoming this with open arms.  So when did we become so comfortable mixing our mediums of entertainment with our frameworks of reality?