I wore a Trump T-shirt and walked around Delhi. This is what I learnt
It’s safe to say that Trump is the most famous person on earth right now. [Photo courtesy:AP/File]
My newest acquisition of importance is a Trump T-shirt. It features the old man in jacket and tie, giving a double thumbs up. Trump wears a baseball cap that bears the legend: ‘Make America great again.’
What I didn’t bargain for was the strong reaction this tee would provoke from strangers. Outside Raasta in Aurobindo market, an NRI New Yorker gave me a lecture on how evil Trump was. To irritate him further I mock-shouted a racist slogan: ‘No Jews, No Blacks’ and dived into my Uber before he could punch me. The Charlotteville violence had just happened and, in a Vice video, we’d heard these slogans for the first time.
Outside 4S in Defence Colony, a lawyer whom I’d never met, delivered another anti-Trump lecture. He was more upset that I was wearing it on the day the BRIC conference got underway in the Chinese port city of Xiamen. I couldn’t see what the connection was.
This happened a third time, with a guy in a Fabindia shirt. Private dinners are not where you expect hostility over a T-shirt, but after the third drink this guy was laying into me thick. I offered to take my T-shirt off if it was bothering him so much.
We live in earnest, literal times. Since irony is dead, humour is a casualty. In August, Eminem performed at the Reading music festival wearing a Trump t- shirt. He was more careful than me. It wasn’t a Trump campaign original but a T-shirt that he’d got printed himself. The T-shirt said: ‘Fack Trump’, making it clear which side he was on.
Trump was embedded in pop culture way before he was elected president. He’s also been called America’s first pop culture president; his presidency is one vast reality show, which comes with a five season guarantee, with a high probability that it will be extended by another five years.
Whether you like pop culture icons or hate them, is your business. These icons drive pop culture; pop culture owns them—and after the tipping point is reached the icons don’t own themselves either.
In August, in Osnabruck in Germany, police seized five thousand carrot-coloured ecstasy tablets in the shape of Donald Trump’s head. One side of the tablet has Donald Trump’s face and what the BBC termed as his ‘exuberant hairstyle’, while the reverse bears his surname.
The father-son duo who was arrested while transporting the pills said they planned to sell the tablets on the Internet under the tagline: ‘Trump Makes Partying Great Again.’Another American president, Richard Nixon, visited China in 1972. The trip altered the course of US-China diplomacy. It also inspired Andy Warhol to start painting after eight years. And what did he paint? Two hundred portraits of Chairman Mao.
Mao brought about drastic changes in farming policy; thirty million people died due to a man-made famine that the Chinese Communist Party still officially attributes to natural causes. At the peak of this, between 1958 and 1962, Mao refused to open granaries stocked to the rafters, accusing peasants of hoarding. The Great Leap Forward had become the Great Leap to Famine.
You can say that Mao was an odd choice for a man more into playing with Campbell’s soup cans and Coke bottles. Critics have said perhaps Warhol was subverting a communist icon into a consumerist one. But critics interpret most things using a vocabulary of twenty words, ‘subvert’ being one of them.
His choice of Mao could have been for simpler reasons. In a memoir Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, Bob Colacello recalls Warhols Swiss dealer suggesting he do a portrait of someone really famous, perhaps Einstein. Warhol said he’d do Mao since he was ‘the most famous person on earth.’
Warhol did not feel the need to say whether he supported Mao’s policies that killed thirty million. He was responding to an image mass produced several times over by the publishing division of the communists.
In the current climate, Warhol would have been under fire. At the very least, he would have to write ‘Fack’ somewhere in the portraits to show his reasonableness.
I think it’s safe to say that Trump is the most famous person on earth right now. If Andy Warhol had been around, he would have done something with his image. His hair, his slogans—this is fertile pop culture territory.
Pop art used to be about messing with the unserious, and in its transformation of the visceral into art it also pulled off some literary insights. Literary insights are by definition ambiguous.
These days, artists take political sides, much like every man on the street.
I also asked my friend who got me the Trump T-shirt to get me a ‘Make America Great Again’ sticker. I’ve stuck that on an old Maxim Mallika Sherawat poster: ‘Maximum Mallika, Minimum Clothes’. Where I stuck I’ll leave to your imagination.
I’ve got this framed and its hanging in my bathroom. Give it forty years. One of Warhol’s Mao paintings sold in Hong Kong earlier this year for twelve million dollars.But hold on, what happened to my Yogi tee?
(Courtesy of Mail Today)