Dateline: Austin, Texas – IT’S NOT TOO GREAT an exaggeration to say I was nearly trampled to death. My near-tramplers were the hordes desperate to see the newishly-elected US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (below right), making one of her appearances here at this year’s South By South West (SXSW) conference and festivals.
Also here from the leftish portion of the political spectrum has been a sizable clutch of other prominent Democrats. I’ve counted an extraordinary total of NINE aspirant presidential candidates, including frontline Senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar – as well as Georgia’s Stacy Abrams who so nearly made it to Governor, but is – so far – not aiming at the Presidency.
A little forlornly from the GOP side, my ex-neighbor and Massachusetts’ ex-Governor William Weld, plus Trump’s most serious Republican opponent in 2016, John Kasich of Ohio – who are both said to be mulling a 2020 primary run against the President – showed up and spoke to much smaller audiences. A respectful crowd also showed up for Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who demonstrated her confidence in the Boeing Company (and its in her, I suspect) by going home to DC aboard one of its questionable 737 MAX airliners. Flying in the face, you might say, of just about every other airline regulator in the known world. Until, that is, she got over-ruled by her erratic boss.
Politics have certainly been to the fore, and it’s striking how unwontedly earnest ‘South By’ appears, this time around. It’s predominantly a leftward-tending earnestness, unsurprisingly – and it’s evident from the get-go. The canvas bags that get issued to the almost 80,000 attendees immediately they’ve registered, are imprinted this year with the American Civil Liberties Union‘s logo, in honor of the ACLU’s 100th anniversary. They also create an off-the-shoulder crowd-sourcing tribute to the Union’s assertive presence here in 2019. There’s an interactive walk-through ‘ACLU Centennial’ exhibit, and on Saturday they mounted a headliner conference session where Executive Director Anthony Romero was joined by activists with the right kind of pop-culture credentials for SXSW – comedian Ike Barinholz, actress Amber Heard, and model and cookbook-author Padma Lakshmi.
It’s still ‘South By’, though, and the earnestness is leavened by hefty doses of humor everywhere. Much of that humor is of a pretty gross-out kind – some of it in films (I’m thinking of the Seth Rogen vehicle Long Shot, supposedly a RomCom also starring Charlize Theron, but with just a tad too much bodily fluid flying around) and some in live events spread across the city. It’s all just part of the sophomoronic quality that’s an inescapable, and never-to-be-discouraged, part of SXSW.
BUT HUMOR OF A DIFFERENT, and exceptional kind – biting, intelligent, highly-informed and just plain hilarious – is also here, emanating from the ‘legacy’ realm of broadcasting. But it’s a totally multimedia event, concentrating on something that’s become a touchstone of our digital landscape (ever since, aptly, it was first launched right here at SXSW 13 years ago). I refer of course to the micro-messaging phenomenon of The Tweet.
In a headily inspired fashion, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show has created The Donald J Trump Presidential Twitter Library. First an ironically hefty book, now a magnificent pastiche of great solemnity, it is installed as an exhibition in the august surroundings of a fine, historical and marbled venue – Austin’s grand old Driskill Hotel. The place certainly has enough columns and vaulted staircases to mimic (for our current purposes) interiors of the monumental buildings in our nation’s capital.
The wit and wisdom of our 45th President of these United States, as formulated in the genre of tweet, are presented with a stunning attention to their thematic coherence – and to the background details of their context, established with thoroughgoing diligence by researchers which would be worthy of any of our great museums. One carefully-sourced section, for instance, memorializes “The Special Relationship”. Nothing to do with the US and the UK, of course – the term here refers to the mind-meld (if that’s not too cerebral a term for it) between Donald J Trump and the TV show “Fox and Friends.”
One conjoined example out of many is this pair of utterances (above), 14 minutes apart early one January morning two years ago, attacking secrets whistle-blower Chelsea Manning: one from Fox News, and one from the Twitter feed of our highly ‘originalist’ Commander-in-Tweet. Just to be clear … the TV headline came first.
There is a notable non-verbal item on exhibit as well (right) – an unspoken reference to the vigorous debate (maintained mostly by the Chief Executive himself) about the President’s manual dimensions, which began way back in the 1980s when editor Graydon Carter called Donald J Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian” in New York’s admirable but now long-lost “Spy” magazine.
Amid all this high-mindedness in the “Library”, however, there is a reminder that we are in SXSW after all, and some grossness must creep in. There is an ‘immersive’ exhibit (as required in any modern-minded museum) – visitors can sit themselves in the very seat of the President as he composes. It is a golden (of course golden) Oval Office toilet – the very fountainhead, so to speak, of the presidential twitter-stream.
You can be photographed, even wearing an orangey-blond wig if you want, plus a MAGA cap and a Terry toweling bathrobe, as you sit on the throne and write your own message to the nation and the world. Be warned: the bar is high. Can you match the man who considers himself “the world’s greatest writer of 140 character sentences“?
