Pleasure Boating

 The Pleasure Principle

Taking an idea from Zizek about 'pleasure' and its role in politics. I came across a YouTube video of boaters on Lake Havasu in Arizona on Memorial Day, 2022.  I noticed some pro-Trump flags on the boats and something clicked.

Lake Havasu is downstream from the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams and lakes Mead and Powell in Arizona and Nevada.  The whole Colorado water system is being depleted, to the point where water and energy might stop flowing from Hoover Dam... and stop going into Lake Havasu too.  All this because of a global warming and climate-change-induced long drought.  The State of Arizona created Lake Havasu for just this purpose – a playground for ‘pleasure’ boating – damming it with the Parker Dam.  This keeps less and less water from getting to Mexico.  Parker will one day run dry too.  But the Party went on, seemingly oblivious.

Boat Party

Giant cigarette boats, luxury cruisers with 4 massive outboards, speed-boats, pontoons, topless nudity, partying, drinking, dancing, bikinis and skin, ass wiggling  – sort of a French Quarter Mardi Gras, but on water with fancy toys and occasional American and Trump flags. No costumes, no neighborhood, no history, no pedestrians, no jazz as in a real Mardi Gras.  The main ingredients here are upscale, massive and expensive boats running expensive gas. Many are parked along the Bridgewater Channel, beached on sand in rows. The rest parade down the channel like expensive show ponies. Clearly in this scene the middle and upper middle class rule, the businessmen cash in.  Look at them preen!  Vvrooom.

Lake Havasu was near 100F degrees that day.  Mohave County had a 'red flag' warning out for heat and fire.  For the last week it has been over 100F every day in Lake Havasu and Phoenix.  The ‘lake’ is surrounded by expensive vacation homes for the monied of Phoenix, California or retirees. House prices right now go from $260K to nearly $2.8M, but most are in the $300K-$600K range, even for ugly, barren ramblers.  Remember, this is Arizona, a somewhat cheap southwestern state. 

If you look at 'pleasure' as a simple political ingredient – something Trump caters to – and remember the boat parades for Trump on Lake of the Ozarks, Lake Lanier in Georgia, Lake Marion in South Carolina, along the Miami intercoastal waterways and probably on Havasu itself – it starts to make sense.  The upscale right-wing doesn't like masks because it interferes with their pleasure.  They don't want to be poked with a needle. They don't like thinking about racism or capitalism or sexism because it interferes with lazy forms of prior indoctrination. They hate people who point out that the food they are eating is toxic or unhealthy. Trolling with bullshit is their form of comedy.  They want their toys, including boats, as money is pleasure.  The men hate not being able to lust after women at all times; nor the women being told that perhaps a 'sugar daddy' is not quite the catch.  No one tells these types that massive gas-guzzling boats might be problematic. As the film “Vice” showed us, both Dick Cheney and George Bush were drunkards as young men.  And yes, its a mighty 'white' crowd.  In a way, they are still children, but even children are not this sad and obtuse.  Science is abstract, but pleasure is immediate.

So the Party goes on. Burning gas is a right, along with giant boat engines, which tells you something about their attitude to global warming.  Bigger boats, cars, SUVs, pick-ups, toys.  Real men don't think, they act!  Physicality is the only form enjoyment.  They do not want to break with the conservative nonsense that comforts them because that means pain.  Women mean babies or sex to Trumper men – and to some of the women.  That is traditional and easy.  Will they be able to confront the challenges of pandemics, climate change, recession and depression, fascism?  No.  It's not fun.  And if you challenge their pleasures?  Time to shoot to kill.  Violence can also be pleasurable.  Liberty!

So is 'pleasure' limited to the Right?  No.  Upscale liberals bask in their own monied existences.  They partake in a more sophisticated 'party' – comfortably pleasant, without ostentatious displays, but still there, hidden away.  They take part in their own forms of lazy thinking.  After all, pleasure is a human thing.  The working class has its pleasures too and I'm sure some were in the audience at Havasu cooling off in the boat water.  However, some pleasures can become universal pains, especially in the long run. “Freedom” becomes its opposite.  Liberty becomes illiberal.  That is dialectics. The long-term view, the arduous view, is what 'Trumpism' inveighs against, hiding the pain from its supporters, encouraging a glittery hedonic debauche.  This wealth is a form of pleasure. After all, Trump is a fake billionaire and that is what billionaires do – shit in golden toilets.  It is one of the psychological roots of his appeal.  So Trumpists fiddle while 'Rome' burns.  To 'party on' like a Titanic on the high seas.   Never mind the ugly and too few life boats.

Not sure where this commentary came from, but let me know if I've blown a gasket.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: "Caligula on the Potomac," "Impeachapalooza," "Bits and Pieces," "The Only Political Question that Matters?" "The Coming Storm," "What Can You Say About Bill Maher?" "Multi-Millionaire Comedians Who Love the System" or the word "Trump."  

The Cultural Marxist

June 18, 2022