Originally a comment by Artymorty on Troops with assault rifles.

As David Frum said, this is a dress rehearsal — and by that he means it’s a dress rehearsal for a military coup. And as California Governor Gavin Newsom warned, the federal government is looking for a spectacle — and by that he means Trump and his minions are seeking a spark to blame the upcoming Reichstag fire on.

This is how it happens, folks. Sinclair Lewis was right: it can happen here. History is repeating, as it does, no matter how much we’re forewarned.

The problem with history books is that they always look at it from hindsight. Historians have tragically failed at conveying to the public what it looks like — what it feels like — when history happens in real-time. Momentousness only exists in the rearview mirror. They mostly just feel like ordinary moments when you’re inside them. You have to imagine their momentousness, by projecting yourself into the future, looking back. That’s a lot of work, and it’s a lot of abstract thinking. Most people can’t do that.

Well, here we are. It feels not quite real, but instead muted and muffled, and not exciting enough to quicken the pulse, to make people take action. It doesn’t have the slick editing of a John Wick action movie. The lack of cinematic gloss has somehow made us unable to react appropriately to the emergency. We expect to be prompted by Hans Zimmer’s booming music cues and J.J. Abrams’s glossy lens flares. Fascism is supposed to have the vibe of a big-budget, red-band movie trailer. But it doesn’t.

For me, the moment brings to mind Don DeLillo. White Noise. I was annoyed to hell by that damned book when I read it (in the early 2000s, decades after it came out). But I think back now, and I have to concede: he nailed it. A family of neurotic, intellectual academics unable to process a real world disaster, because they’re so knotted up inside their own minds. He wrote it in the pre-Internet era, when that kind of brain-pickling was mostly limited to elite university campuses. But in the social media age, we’re all prisoners of idea-world.

When our brains are saturated by abstract ideas, we don’t know how to react when a Big Thing happens in the actual real world. We struggle to process what is real. We’re numb to it all.

Simulacra and simulation. Spectacle and hyperreality. Oh, dear god, the postmodernists actually had a fucking point, didn’t they. Maybe in this terrible universe, Foucault gets the last laugh after all.

Fuck!