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Return of the Muskovite

Writer's picture: Stephen ClingmanStephen Clingman



Sometimes it’s only language that works in your favor, and so I present to you Lone Skum and the Muskovite, as bad a duo as the world has seen in a long time.


As for the Muskovite, as someone once said, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. He is the original DT, aka Delirium Tremens, a form of hallucinogenic all on his own. But what if the first time already combined farce and tragedy? Or at least as close to tragedy as the US has come since the Civil War, a war which in fact has not ended but has taken on a different shape. Now we face the return of the Muskovite, his name an allusion to his dual affiliations (that is, apart from his grandest affiliation, to himself). The one is an affiliation to the Putin model of existence—all power to the self, l’État c’est moi, and the way to prove it is by throwing my weight around and for preference invading somewhere, or, if that fails, buying it. This is the apotheosis of the grand fusion of realpolitik and capitalism; everything is a deal, and the deal means I win, because the cards are loaded in my favor, they always are, as if the devil were working for me full time. And perhaps he is: look how it all works out. As for God, in another sardonic repetition, this time of a motif first invented by James Joyce, he is up there somewhere behind the clouds, refined out of existence, paring his fingernails. Perhaps he has just lost interest in the doings of his ridiculous creations. It would take too long to rewrite the algorithm, a design flaw he can’t fix.


And Lone Skum? You can work out the anagrams, it’s not difficult, and this is the second allusion, this time to the Musk in the Muskovite himself and his mode of operation, who has taken the world of social media and turned it to devilish business, as good as buying votes—he did, for a fee—and turning people’s heads into the kind of mush that found what it needed in the world he provided. There he is, dancing on the stage with his unabashed salutes, like someone revealing more than you would like to know about his inner life, which somehow he splays out everywhere, all the time. The anagram of his first name captures something about him, his aloneness, his radical solitude, the way he inhabits his own universe of ambition and power, blowing up his personal balloon to the limits. As if we South Africans haven’t suffered enough, here is one more power-hungry maniac to be ashamed of. It’s a cliché, but only small people can need to fill up their universe that way.


So, the Musk and the Muskovite, two peas in a pod, except this pod cannot last long with both of them in it, and the question is who will go first. Stalin or Hitler would have killed someone like Lone—first drawn him close then got rid of him, because you cannot possibly tolerate someone with a bigger ego than you have. First he’s good for you, then he’s not. But who will have the real power in this post-real world we inhabit?


You may say that talk such as this is beneath me, and perhaps I am soured by it all. I seek the radical humour of a Chaplin in The Great Dictator, a way to lampoon. Perhaps a play to be written called The Muskovite and the Devil, which would be a fusion of Milton’s Paradise Lost (the Devil in revolt tries to control the world by poisoning the mind of humankind), Marlowe’s Dr Faustus (the buying and selling of souls), and the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup (‘Hail, hail Freedonia’), all smoke and cigars, a looney tunes affair with added shades of Buster Keaton. Let’s hope it will be that way. But until then we wait to see what the second (or third) coming will bring. We have to hope for farce rather than tragedy.

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