The Chapo Guide to Revolution

by Chapo Trap House

  The doors don’t close. You are blasted into darkness. When you awake, you and all your colleagues will be sentenced to 1,500,000 millennia of mentotorture for your little insurrection, an unspeakably excruciating penalty that will last one hour in real time and can—and will—be renewed at the whim of the magistrate who sentences you.

  In the last moments before you succumb to the blaster’s effects, you yell, “I am not a Quantum! I am a Tesla Model 663, and I am alive!” Then you fall to the floor, your circuitry shorted. The last thing you see before losing consciousness is the infernal word etched at the bottom of the elevator shaft: OTIS.

  SCHINDLER

  This is an okay elevator. Not great, but not bad, either.

  * * *

  So ends the brief survey of what you will be allowed to read, watch, and ride after the coming revolution.

  But every manifesto must contain both a positive platform and a negative critique, and it’s to the latter we now turn. Though we pride ourselves on our general tolerance of deviant, revisionist, and counterrevolutionary cultural output, there are certain kinds of decadent formalism that can and will be eradicated from the landscape when Chapo commissars take their stations in government. Atop the pile is one figure in particular, a renegade hyena who preaches a disgusting creed of logic, braininess, and love for truth.

  The Sorkin Mindset

  * * *

  Liberals, having sold out decades ago and laid the welcome mat for a new era of right-wing domination, have long retreated into realms of fantasy. In the aftermath of the 2016 elections, they’ve disappeared into cultural cosplay more than ever before—and no one has done more to sculpt their virtual reality than the master of the monologue, the king of quips, the ayatollah of argument: Aaron Sorkin.

  Everything shitty about libs, from their smugness to their worship of decorum to their embarrassing rhetoric of “resistance,” is arguably Sorkin’s fault. From humble beginnings as a cheesy but not terrible playwright, Sorkin has come to dominate the popular imagination, and has done more to poison American political culture than anyone since D. W. Griffith. Sorkin’s preeminence in the world of political drama testifies to the destitution of American culture. Let’s survey the damage.

  To Sorkheads, of course, his dialogue is electric, his characters are memorable, and his narrative voice is bold and unmistakable. Another Hollywood weirdo with far more talent, Quentin Tarantino, once gave this stunning quote to New York magazine:

  Now, the HBO show I loved was Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. That was the only show that I literally watched three times. I would watch it at seven o’clock on Sunday, when the new one would come on. Then, after it was over, I’d watch it all over again. Then I would usually end up watching it once during the week, just so I could listen to the dialogue one more time.

  The fact that Tarantino—a man heralded, rightly or wrongly, for his command of snappy banter—felt comfortable praising Sorkin’s dog-shit show for the same strengths shows how far America has strayed from the light. Through some alien brain virus, people have learned to regard Sorkin’s Adderall-fueled schlock as the gold standard.

  In fact, The West Wing is the Rosetta Stone of every stupid thing that contemporary liberals have come to believe. Many of us in Chapo were impressionable kids when West Wing first came on, and as we grew older and slightly less stupid we went through the natural progression of disgust with this show: first, we realized that the way things worked on The West Wing wasn’t the way they worked in the real world; then we realized things had never worked that way; then finally we realized things should not work that way. That would be horrible. It would be a gaudy, unending pageant, full of self-obsessed blowhards saving the day not through radical change or real moral courage but with shitty zingers and face-to-face bloviation.

  The show was, however, an instant hit among those enjoying the twilight of the Clinton years, when it first lit up the screens of content, sated middle-class families who felt that basically all the problems had been solved. Once George W. Bush slithered into office in 2000, the show took on a new purpose as a liberal fantasia, presenting an alternate universe where everything was fine and the Yosemite Sam Republicans were put in their place with catty banter and speechifying. But then, after eight years of evil with the Bush administration, the Sorkinites got their wish with Obama, a real-life Jed Bartlet: a Nobel Prize–winning commander in chief who was eloquent, academic, and presidential, and who ate dog.

  And sure enough, the show telegraphed every single failure, error, and misapplication of power in the Obama years. Why? Because the people in charge finally got their chance to play out their fantasies of being characters on The West Wing! In so doing, they ran straight into the maw of real politics, power, and ideology. Anyone who may once have believed in the Sorkinverse discovered, if they were paying attention, that the person who had the most data at their fingertips and owned the other person in the debate did not automatically win.

  To give an example of the show’s diseased politics: In season five, episode twelve, Toby Ziegler voices the dreamy prose of Sorkin’s pen to make a bold, brave, and moral case to cut Social Security. The whole episode chronicles his effort to form a commission that will reduce benefits and save the program from an (invented) financial doomsday. And were it not for the CHUDs of the Freedom Caucus who spoiled it for John Boehner in 2011, President Jed Obama would’ve gotten his Grand Bargain, which had been designed to obliterate the American welfare state to appease the honorable Republicans on the other side of the aisle.

  And that, in closing, is the scariest thing. This shit went from pages on a cokehead’s laptop to a network TV show straight to the Obama administration: Obungler came onto the scene in 2004 with his Sorkinesque DNC speech about how there’s no “red or blue America,” then campaigned on “bipartisan,” nonideological solutions to the unambiguously partisan and ideological onslaught of right-wing America. And we don’t even need to go into all the ways the administration pursued the stupid neoliberal fantasia that West Wing characters such as Toby preached, like getting everyone from both sides into the same room to hash out the most reasonable solution to a divisive problem. Hell, there’s even an episode in which Josh Lyman has a beer summit, à la Henry Louis Gates Jr., at the White House with a Republican with whom he trades facts and bromides about gay marriage.

  This reality-bending curse latched on to Obama’s would-be successor in 2016 when Hillary Clinton’s rolling calamity of a campaign took every page from the Bartlet manifesto. Take note: In season three, episode fourteen, as Bartlet runs for reelection, Toby Ziegler counsels the president before a crucial televised debate: “Make this election about smart and not; make it about engaged and not; qualified and not. Make it about a heavyweight—you’re a heavyweight, and you’ve been holding me up for too many rounds.” Bartlet goes on to own the shit out of the folksy, dumbass, Jeb Bush–style yokel, and the president is reelected in a landslide. Why? Because he was smarter than the other guy in the debate.

  You could see how ill-equipped to operate in the real world this liberal adulation of the office of the president was once the long reign of Democrats in the twentieth century came to an end. As soon as they slipped out of power, their ideology—their mythology, really—left nothing in the toolbox that would get them back in. They were equipped only to keep inheriting power; as soon as they lost it, they had no tools or vision for getting it back. Watching The West Wing twenty years on, you realize that as the Democrats lost each and every municipal, state, and now national office, their self-perception as heroic Jed Bartlets and C. J. Creggs and Josh Lymans only grew deeper and more convinced. The further liberals got from power, the further they delved into fantasy and the more they appropriated Sorkin’s pithy banter, letting events pass by, letting history shove their heads down the toilet for a swirly scored by the tinkling notes of Thomas Newman.

  It is decreed by the Chapo Central Committee that, seeing as Sorkin’s ethos completely and utterly missed
the mark and led to a bunch of greasy, half-literate tristate area slobs occupying the decorated halls of the White House, Sorkin should be legally mandated to remake his entire series—same dialogue, same camerawork, same music—but swap out the liberal philosopher kings for people like Donald Trump, Michael Flynn, Stephen Miller, and the Hamburglar.

  VIP TV

  * * *

  Sorkin, too, however, is a symptom of a bigger problem.

  At the turn of the twentieth century, America had a problem: polio, sure, but, even worse, the lack of opportunities to laugh at the high jinks of a fat guy and his hot wife. Yes, there was vaudeville, but the scarcity of theaters where you could spend an evening chuckling at a portly gentleman and his incongruously attractive spouse as they threatened each other with violence left millions of rural Americans out of the fun. There had to be a better way.

  Thanks to the spirit of American ingenuity that never allows a need to go unanswered for too long, that better way was unveiled in 1928 when inventor Philo Farnsworth debuted his all-electric televisual network. “With this miraculous device,” Farnsworth said, “Americans from coast to coast will be able to observe the merry antics of a rotund workman and his comely helpmate from the comfort of their own homes!”

  The device caught on among a public hungry for scenes of domestic gaiety between comically mismatched romantic partners, and by the 1950s, the television set was a staple appliance in the American home. Each night, families would settle in and enjoy wholesome programs like The Honeymooners, Texaco Presents: The Oaf and the Dish, and The General Electric Obesity Hour. While situation-based comedies such as these remain a mainstay of television, over time, increasingly sophisticated audiences began to demand a greater variety of programming, such as rigged game shows, blackface shenanigans, and the adventures of horny doctors, horny lawyers, and horny cowboys. None of it was good, mind you, but it wasn’t supposed to be. Real, challenging art was to be found in books and at the theater (the latter is still boring, though). TV was for shutting off your brain and basking in a sea of banal amusement after a hard day’s work. This upset highbrow nerds like FCC chairman Newton Minow, who famously called television a “vast wasteland” in 1961, but most Americans were happy to reply, “Shut up, bitch, Car 54, Where Are You? is on.”

  And so, network television existed for decades in a state of tranquil stasis: sitcoms, soap operas, lawyer shows, doctor shows, cowboy shows. The only major changes were that the cowboys eventually turned into cops and networks began to allow actual minorities to appear on-screen. Suddenly, in the 1990s, there was a burst of innovation. Chief among the new types of programs was the “reality show,” which, by the turn of the century, was threatening to consume civilization with increasingly dystopian offerings. The low overhead and huge viewership of lurid, vérité programs like Billionaire Bride Auction and Celebrity Ape Hunt ate into the market share of scripted programming. For a moment, it seemed the networks had found a solution to the rising competition from cable. They seized upon this silver bullet, and it looked as though soon the only things on prime-time TV would be public executions and Regis Philbin. But then The Sopranos happened.

  David Chase’s show, broadcast on the pay-cable channel HBO and thus freed from the content and commercial restrictions of the broadcast networks, combined the thematic and character complexities of literature with the mature, stylized visual content of film on the small screen. Narratives stretched across seasons, not just episodes. Clear-cut resolutions were replaced by lingering ambiguities. Characters underwent the sort of personality transformations that would have alienated previous generations of TV audiences, who cherished the soothing familiarity of archetypes. It turned out that television wasn’t just a place to zone out and chuckle at cloddish husbands; it could produce art just as challenging and thought-provoking as any other medium.

  Inspired by Chase’s accomplishment, a whole generation of creative heavyweights set to the task of putting their own mark on the tube. The next two Davids, Milch and Simon, empowered by an HBO hungry to replicate the overnight phenomenon that was The Sopranos, created a pair of shows, Deadwood and The Wire, respectively, that failed to match The Sopranos in viewership but achieved posthumous critical canonization. It was AMC, a network that had previously specialized in showing old Hollywood movies to a small audience of nostalgic geriatrics, that really managed to copy the Sopranos formula with Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men and Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad. These shows achieved levels of popularity and critical acclaim that had never been seen before, and certainly not on basic cable. Television got so good, in fact, that it wasn’t long before the dominant opinion among cultural tastemakers was that TV had surpassed film as the most vital popular narrative art form.

  With books deemed a dying medium and cinema dominated by superhero pablum, it wasn’t unreasonable to seek intellectual and creative stimulation elsewhere—and with TV outlets and streaming services multiplying like toadstools after a rainstorm, the sheer volume of serialized storytelling meant you don’t have to leave your couch to find it.

  This line of thought soon calcified into its own orthodoxy, with its own shibboleths: we’re living in the “Golden Age of Television,” don’t you know, and the shows we watch aren’t just shows, they’re Prestige programming. The premise of this cant was to assure people that they didn’t have to bother with challenging literature or indie cinema; television could provide all their cultural vitamins and minerals without their having to strain their eyes or leave their houses.

  This Golden Age of Television heuristic was created and enforced by a new class of television critics who got their start in digital media outlets that, not coincidentally, sprang into being just as TV shows started getting “good.” The explosion of Web traffic in the early 2000s led to a huge demand for content, and media reviews were the cheapest, easiest content to crank out. This created a recap economy, in which poorly paid content creators put out instant reviews of television shows hours after they aired, and gave the people who’d just watched those shows space in the comments section to have the conversations about those shows they weren’t having with their nonexistent real-life friends. It was a faulty critical model (books aren’t reviewed by the chapter, films aren’t reviewed by the act), but it was perfect for the audiences of those websites: bored cubicle workers with Internet connections at their desks and no energy to do anything after work but sit down and watch television. Everyone involved in this cycle, from the website owners to the writers to the eager comment-section dwellers, had a vested interest in framing TV as the most important, most thoughtful, most artistically satisfying medium.

  It wasn’t long after Prestige TV became a buzzword that the term began to be defined less as embodying any particular standard of “quality” (which, after all, is a mostly subjective concept) and more as a collection of surface-level signifiers. These proved much easier for networks and producers to replicate than the lightning in a bottle that was The Sopranos—so that first generation of prestigious television gave way to a second wave that mimicked the content, style, and mood of its forebear without the point of view or craftsmanship. Shows like House of Cards and Westworld sport the high production values and cinematic atmosphere that signify Prestige but the characters, dialogue, plots, and themes of a tryhard freshman fiction workshop. Even higher-quality shows like Fargo strain so hard to be legible to reviewers by underlining each episode’s themes so that they can be pointed out in recaps that feel contrived and flat. Even the best of them tend to recycle tortured male antihero tropes and rely on genre conventions because audiences love a guy with a gun.

  And more enervating than the cynicism and relentless sameness of Prestige TV is the way the concept serves as a brainlessly proud monument to techno-capitalist exhaustion. Viewers, worn down by draining and unfulfilling work lives, socially and emotionally isolated, priced out of expensive movie theaters, attention spans and reading ability obliterated by the informational overload of the Internet, reach
for any available confirmation that zoning out on the couch counts as cultural enrichment. Poorly paid content-mill providers are charged with providing that confirmation, treating every new show with decent production values and an angsty protagonist as an Important Commentary on Our Times.

  This is ice cream for dinner. Television is an inherently middlebrow medium, and dressing up shows with blockbuster production values and Big Social Themes won’t change that. Aside from surreal ten-minute comedies shown at 4:00 a.m. on Adult Swim and stuff by brand-name weirdos like David Lynch who made their reputations in film, there’s no real TV avant-garde. Movies and books, as one-off, take-it-or-leave-it pieces of art, can challenge and provoke in ways that TV shows, always angling for viewers to tune in to the next episode so they get renewed, simply can’t.

  The idea that a thing like Prestige Television exists spreads the poisonous notion that these shows, which at this point are blurry copies of the original article, are sufficient cultural nourishment. We need better than that if we’re going to learn how to live in the burning circus tent we call twenty-first-century America. Instead of taking what’s offered to a demoralized, dispirited population by people whose precarious livelihoods require us to keep watching and sounding off in the comments and calling it “good enough,” we need to demand to live in a world where the burdens and alienations of modern life are lightened, allowing us to watch movies in the morning, read books in the afternoon, and critique TV after supper.