A photo of a defiant American president getting on a plane yesterday after annoying the hell out of the rest of the Group of 7 industrial countries' leaders made me stop and think. What Trump often employs - at least when he's not doing that goofy thumbs-up thing - is basically what we usually think of as the Black Power salute, which achieved peak attention and notoriety at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. This is not the involuntary fist-pump exhibited by many an athlete in the heat of the moment of victory. It is a distinct and deliberate salute involving a raised arm and clenched fist, and it has a long and varied history, long before Donald Trump picked it up.
It was perhaps first used in a deliberate and systematic way by the radical US trade union movement in the early 20th Century, and then by the leftist Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War. Since then, it has been adopted by many different protest groups from radical feminists to the Black Panther movement to white nationalists to Black Lives Matter, as well as by various individuals, from fascists like Benito Mussolini to killers like Lee Harvey Oswald, Carlos the Jackal and Anders Behring Breivik. Trump himself first used it at his inauguration ceremony, much to the consternation of some commentators, and he even used it on his official Christmas card, which is just plain bizarre
So, what is Trump's purpose in adopting the salute? Some have analyzed it as "anchoring", a gesture used at a moment of high emotional arousal, and then repeated later to recreate that emotional response, in a kind of Pavlovian conditioning. To me, that seems to be giving it more credibility and rationality than it perhaps deserves, although I can maybe imagine Steve Bannon coming up with such an idea back in the Bannon days.
No, I don't think Trump is either disciplined enough or intelligent enough to use it in such a slick, Machiavellian manner. Neither does it seem likely that he is deliberately using it as a general symbol of rebelliousness or challenge to the status quo. I really think it is a more or less spontaneous action on his part, probably with some vague subconscious intention of demontrating a general image of strength, power and triumph.
Except ... it has to be said that his hand does seem very small when he is doing it, which rather detracts from the effect.
No comments:
Post a Comment