A still from Donald Trump’s appearance in a Playboy video

Shortly before the World Trade Center fell, it was photographed alongside another bleak New York City edifice. In 2000, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee accepted a cameo role in a Playboy video.

Just going to give you that again, “In 2000, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee accepted a cameo role in a Playboy video.”

I am aware that Donald Trump is a ham-scented horror whose homunculus hands usher in an age of raging bigotry, and we should all be very, very frightened, etc. But didn’t you think: this is the best and rarest kind of unintentional camp I am yet in my life to devour? If you can’t savour news of this garish man spraying a bottle of non-vintage semen* on a limousine in the prelude to a film that, reportedly, features lady playmates tenderly bathing one another following the mutual application of honey, then you’re dead inside and can claim no right to watch another episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race ever again.

I’d honestly thought the height of low culture had been attained in this season of the popular reality show So You Think You Can Dance on Muslim Graves? with Clinton’s white pantsuit, or possibly her ardent defence of screwing Libya. Either way, those with a taste for the tasteless have enjoyed a feast.

But we shouldn’t laugh, I guess. Especially not in public. It’s irresponsible to draw wide attention to the (hilarious) vulgarity of the GOP candidate when, as Clinton has claimed, what we need to be attentive to is his policy.

I have read and have been told and will be told again shortly that Clinton is, unlike her opponent, all about the policy. While it is true that her expensive think tank has crammed a big website with policies, it is not really true that she talks about them much. Or, more pointedly, makes any genuine effort at expressing them in a coherent form for the people. The impression she hopes to gain by cramming a website no one has the time to read, perhaps, is that she’s a meticulous, honest, even oversharing politician who is hittin’ the books while Trump the simple-minded “hater” is busy with his playmates.

What Hillary actually does in public, despite Michelle Obama’s famous claim that in campaigning “when they go low, we go high”, is largely aim as low as Trump does. In last week’s debate, for example, Clinton introduced the story of former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, who claimed that Trump, the former owner of the event, derided her so brutally for weight gain her bulimia nervosa worsened.

Before you get offended on behalf of Machado, let me be clear as a new convex lens about two of my assumptions: (1) Donald Trump will bring little to office but the scent of ham and loathing; (2) attempts to control the bodies of others by verbal abuse or other means are only acceptable when they come from one’s personal trainer and/or personal dom(me).

It is awful what he said about Machado, and what he has said about other beauty contestants. I mean, what is this? A beauty contest? Well, OK, it is, but that’s hardly my point. My point is that women who enter contests in which they are judged for their beauty alone can reasonably expect to be assessed only for their opinions on foreign policy … no, that wasn’t my point either. I don’t have a point, as I adore beauty contests, especially when participants get to answer a question about foreign policy. If you want a critic of beauty contests, look to Clinton, who pointed out, during the presidential debate, that they are just the sort of thing Trump likes, ergo bad. Which is not only a strange way to talk only about policy, but a strange way to go about defending Machado, a former pageant contestant. “Your career path has been a dirty sham. Now cover yourself up and perform as a campaigner in the key former pageant contestant demographic, which, our pollsters tell us, is currently hoping for RuPaul to stand.”

This spat went on for days, which I am certain wasn’t good for Machado, who I ardently hope is being paid well by Clinton for her trouble. I won’t bore you with the entire story, so allow the newspaper of boring record do it for you. Or the other one. Let’s fast forward to Friday 3.20 am US EDT, when Trump used Twitter to accuse Machado of having a “sex tape”, which turned out not to be a sex tape as we commonly understand the category, but night footage of her engaged in sex on a reality TV show.  Many news sites have reported this as not as bad as a sex tape. I won’t even get into the sexism-tinged class snobbery that bothers to declare the difference between consensually having sex in front of a TV camera and consensually having sex in front of a phone camera. But I will say, ladies, that if you do or if you do not wish to have consensual sex in front of any kind of camera, or enter a beauty pageant, you can expect nothing but approval from me.

So Trump embarked on his tirade, which Clinton answered, also on Twitter, with her claim that 3.20 am US EDT is a fine time to talk about policy. She was “going high” with a link to a piece on Medium that encourages Americans to perform unpaid or low-paid socially necessary labour. Surely it is not so much policy to tell citizens “work for nothing” as it is propaganda. Then she issued a statement saying that she could not believe that he was talking about Miss Universe while she was busy with policy, such as guaranteeing work for no wages, even though she was the one who brought Miss Universe up. In a policy debate.

Next, the Trump Playboy video appeared, and a jillion news sites celebrated his indignity, thereby reaffirming that (a) all entertainment featuring women in any state of undress is bad, with the curious exception of reality TV; and (2) no one had any intention of talking about policy. Why bother, when we can just talk about Bunga Bunga Trump?

We can say for all we are worth that it is Trump who has diminished the debate down to the level of a Miss Universe Q&A. Or we can admit that an overwhelming cultural obsession with individual qualities in leaders, whether we perceive them as good or bad, is a foolish one that has become much greater over time. This is identity politics on the global stage: he seems like a real guy, she seems like a stuck-up bitch; he is a crass chap who never tips his doorman, she is wholesome and I hear she once went to Oprah’s house.

I’m not claiming that personal stories of politicians have at any time been overlooked in the history of liberal democracy. But jeez, we’ve never been so keen on them as we are today. It is not that character is unimportant, but it has lately become the only effing thing we think of as important. To the point that “work free of charge for America!” now stands to be applauded as sensible policy, and not a blast of ideology.

Good luck to anyone voting in this election or any other; you can’t expect blame-stream media to hand you decision making tools other than “he seems racy! I don’t like that!” or “she knits booties for minority babies! How dreadful!”.

The world is gone to heck and for this, you can largely blame us blamers. A media industry fixated with pointing the finger at bad people can no longer even point out bad policy decisions to itself. When we’re not blaming the bad character of individual politicians, we’re blaming groups of people for all that is wrong in the world. White men. Muslims. Boomers. Transpeople. All these identity categories are blamed at various times by various shades of media for the shit the people find themselves in, and, of course, none of these identity categories — now seen almost as indistinct from individuals a la “Speaking as a woman” — is in reality responsible. What was that another Clinton once dared to say? It’s the (management of the) economy, stupid.

This does my head in. I think to myself journalists must know — somewhere deep down, please — that bad policy has much greater instrumental powerful than bad character.  And then I realise that they don’t care about the future of the world as much as they do about search engine optimisation. And then I cry, and I am forced to watch that Playboy video to cheer myself up.

Trump or Clinton? I don’t care and leave me alone to my camp softcore because either way, the streets of Tripoli, Aleppo and other places I can neither spell nor locate on a map will still run red with blood. The people of the US will still not have their basic wage tied to inflation. The stores in which they work will continue to sell cheap goods those workers can afford, goods made by other workers in other countries held by need in slavery conditions. The militarised US police will visit more terror upon citizens, who arm themselves in turn. Every time there is a mass shooting, people will say, “How could this possibly happen?!” ignoring the ruddy great fact of an ex-Afghanistan carrier in news pictures. Profitable prisons will fill, as ours are, with the brown, the poor, the female, the mentally ill. There will be more blood on more streets I cannot name and when Julian Assange tries to show us a picture of these places, he will again be called a rapist and a terrorist. And another building like the World Trade Center will fall, as rich folk like Trump and Clinton stand tall.

And we in media will continue to tell you, “bad people did this” and we will never, ever try to describe to you how years of bad policy did this, because we are just too damn busy with our Playboy and our belief that the most that you deserve are tales about individuals and a sweaty handful of clickable search terms.

It’s 2016. Party on.

 

*Not actual semen, but champagne. Trump’s role, as made plain in most reports, is confined to fully clothed introduction. However, all sane persons would agree that the symbolic function of this exploding drink within an erotic film could only be as threshold signifier. Which is a posh way of saying willy. Please do not address Trump-related complaints to the proprietor of this web service, but instead to Sigmund Freud.

*This article was originally published at Daily Review