White
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* * *
…
Kanye’s behavior would continue to confound some people for months to come. In September, he would appear as a musical guest on Saturday Night Live wearing a Make America Great Again hat—the one Trump made famous during the 2016 election which had taken on, for both the Right and the Left, a kind of talismanic power that was either a symbol of racist-sexist red-state evil or, for believers, a symbol of patriotism and national pride. Wearing the hat had become, for some, an act of defiance—it could be dangerous and you could get into trouble, which is exactly why it became a fetish object Kanye loved, and said, in a meeting with the President at the White House a week later, that wearing the hat made him feel like Superman. He would top the SNL performance off with a free-associative rant where he would praise the President, dis a one-sided liberal media, accuse cast members of trying to bully him into not wearing the MAGA hat and essentially accuse leftists of being the real racists. And at the White House he talked to Trump about, among other things, prison reform, abolishing the 13th Amendment, and even a hydrogen-powered iPlane whose plans he was happy to share with his host, whom he would call the father he never had, and that he loved him very much and then ask if he could hug him. For this, Kanye was lambasted across the media landscape as a “token Negro” and “an attention whore” who should be “hospitalized” and that “what happened” to Kanye was “what happens when a Negro doesn’t read books”—this actually coming from anchors on CNN and MSNBC—and this uneducated Negro bit became a talking point in the mainstream media that was still virulently anti-Trump. This is where the Left had ended up in the fall of 2018—and one darkly thought: Maybe this approach would work for them, or maybe it wouldn’t.
Yet even in advance of these events, when I was driving up to Calabasas for the meeting I’d become apprehensive about, a fact was already crossing my mind, hard and immutable: the manic and rambling Kanye who had been freaking the media out in 2018 was, in fact, no different from the Kanye I’d met in the summer of 2013 in a wing of Cedars-Sinai or by the pool beneath a cabana at Kris Kardashian’s house in Calabasas in 2014; this Kanye was no different from the man I’d hung out with in the Hollywood Hills when he was in the middle of recording The Life of Pablo, or wandered with him through his half-built house at the end of a cul-de-sac on a rainy afternoon before Christmas in 2015, where we’d watched Cremaster 3 and he showed me a space that I thought was a closet but would actually become his wife’s “glam” room. For that matter, this Kanye was no different than the performer I’d first seen at the Staples Center in 2008, when he went on a rant comparing himself to Jesus, John Lennon, Walt Disney, Elvis Presley and Steve Jobs. This ego and narcissism and grandiosity, the sheer insanity of his ambitions, and his dragon energy—it had always been on full display, but was now considered something new and tainted, redefined by the Resistance. Certain factions failed to recognize an artist who spoke in metaphor and poetry, who was often just funny and self-effacing, who you couldn’t take literally—and that Kanye hadn’t changed at all. But the now adamant opposition, both to him and what they believed he represented, certainly had. “You want the world to move forward?” Kanye would ask the SNL audience just a few weeks later. “Try love.”
* * *
…
I arrived at Kanye’s compound in Calabasas and after being ushered in by security, was brought into a room where he was multitasking: assembling the movie team, overseeing his fashion line, rehearsing new material. In the five years I’d casually known him, I’d never seen him so attentive and focused and happy. This was Kanye at his most lucid, and this afternoon confirmed for me that he was, in fact, sane: his own man, no apologies, and not some drugged-out freak gibbering on Twitter. People simply needed to acknowledge—not approve or to embrace—that here was someone who saw the world in his own way, and not according to how other people thought he should see it. What Kanye was championing in his Trump tweets was an idea of peace and unity, imagining a place where different sides could work together despite vicious ideological differences—that’s it. He wasn’t particularly interested in actual politics or literal policy, but it also seemed by the end of the summer of 2018 that no one else was, either. Kanye, like everyone else, on both sides of the divide, now envisioned the world as a theater where a musical was always playing, and hopefully starring someone like themselves voicing their own opinions. But in Kanye’s case with the appropriate amount of narcissistic dragon energy, a power that allowed him, no matter what others thought, to be totally free.
* * *
…
What my friend and I were really discussing that night in Culver City—as disillusioned Gen X’ers who came of age during the one-two punch of the nihilistic ’70s and the rah-rah Reagan ’80s—was freedom. But how could you be free if you were bowing down to the shrieking antics on both sides of a Grand Canyon-size divide that no one was attempting to cross? Since November 2016 my friend and I had both heard that a horrendous economic collapse was about to materialize, the planet was going to melt, countless people would die, the fraught situation in North Korea would send the United States into a nuclear Armageddon, and Trump would be impeached, brought down by a pee tape—leaving no jobs for anybody and Russian tanks in the streets. We also idly noted that the filmmaker David Lynch couldn’t say in an interview that he thought maybe Donald Trump would go down as one of the great presidents in history, not without groupthink forcing him into apologizing for this immediately on Facebook. And where was a resistance that was so attractive and cunning that it managed to sway you, that maybe made you see things in a broader, less blinkered light? But the one we had in 2018 seemed bent on advocating mostly vandalism and violence. Trump’s star on Hollywood Boulevard was destroyed with a pickax, an actor resembling a septuagenarian Lorax said “Fuck Trump” at the Tony Awards, a television hostess called the first daughter “a feckless cunt” on her TV program, another actor suggested the president’s eleven-year-old son should be put in a cage with pedophiles. And all of this from Hollywood: the land of inclusion and diversity. Maybe nobody cared at all about Barron Trump, because this was simply the year of endless low points for a resistance that was spinning epic fails in venting their anger about Trump. Maybe it was just another episode in the reality show that is still unfolding. Or maybe when you’re roiling in childish rage, the first thing you lose is judgment, and then comes common sense. And finally you lose your mind and along with that, your freedom.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bret Easton Ellis is the author of six novels, including Less Than Zero and American Psycho, and a collection of stories. He hosts The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, available on Patreon. He lives in Los Angeles.
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