Surrealism will make America great again

I was intrigued and then dismayed and then intrigued again after I read this week that 'surreal' had been named Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year. It's a word associated with the early 20th century intellectual movement that gave artistic expression to Freud's theory of the unconscious.

It turned out that the popularity was more about finding a word - any word - to describe the astonishing nature of Donald Trump's election win in November. 'Surreal', it seems, has been hijacked as a stronger alternative to words such as 'bizarre' or 'oddball' that were considered inadequate to describe the unprecedented nature of the Trump victory.

Salvador Dali The Melting Watch 1954

It's true that it has tended to be used in a grasping or dismissive manner that diminishes the precision of the original meaning. That was the source of my dismay. Also it is obviously a publicity stunt by the American dictionary company, based on nothing more than statistics of the volume of word lookups on its website.

But I was curious to explore further and went to The Conversation, where I found an excellent explainer article. It was from February and predated the spikes in lookups for 'surreal' on the dictionary website.

The article depicts surrealism as a 'revolution of the mind' that freed the mind from rational and utilitarian values and constraints, in favour of the 'transformative possibilities of the imagination'. It has surrealism 'reconciling the contradictory states of dream and reality into a more potent form of reality'.

This does ring true for me, and indeed it is very exciting. It could be used to introduce compassion into Australia's asylum seeker policy. But I am more disturbed that it is being exploited to affirm the Trump victory as a good thing.

According to the new logic, America and the world are freed from the odious system that Clinton represented and have entered an imaginative transformation that will reconcile the dream of 'making America great again' with the fearful reality of a civilisation that lost the War Against Terror instigated by Trumps opponents. That is surreal.

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Thank you. I offer this follow-up comment on a connected expression 'alternative reality', which has expanded far beyond the old Goebbels meaning of propaganda - 'tell the lie often enough and it will be believed'. At least Goebbels knew lies were lies. Cheney or Rumsfeld's famous anonymous quote re 2nd Iraq War - while your media guys report one reality, we are creating a new one, and that is how we make history while you look on and try to catch up with us - was the first precise political enunciation of the notion of alternative (false) reality. I put 'false' in brackets because Cheney and Rumsfeld, whoever it was who said this, 'genuinely' thought they were actually creating new realities as they went along. The creation of alternative (false) realities is now well advanced in international relations. The view of the world from Moscow is an entirely different beast to the view of the world from Washington, London and Brussels. I cannot remember a time of such sharp divergence about basic facts on specific cases like Aleppo. I have friends who are convinced Aleppo ranks with Guernica as a huge atrocity by an outlaw government ; others regard it as a necessary taking back by a sovereign government of national territory from well-resourced fundamentalist terrorists who like cutting off people's heads and razing classical monuments and selling women and teenage girl captives into sex slavery. It all depends on which reality you have come to believe In. Similarly, the recent murder of Russian Ambassador in Turkey Karlov - under one reality, this was a brutal terrorist murder of a man who was serving his country honourably and bravely, in seeking to rebuild better Russian -Turkish relations - two near neighbours that need to get on better, in the interests of world peace. Under an alternative reality this was not necessarily an act of terrorism because it was connected with what the Russian state military machine has been doing to kill or injure civilians in Aleppo. So we are not going to pass any judgement at this time on the legitimacy of what this murdered ambassador was doing in Turkey, or who or what cause he was serving, and who or what cause was serving the man who shot him in the back. And we won't grace Mr Karlov with the dignity of acknowledging that he was loyally serving his government and died in the line of duty to his government. In the alternative reality, that is unimportant.

— Tony Kevin