Kathy Griffin With Trump's Severed Head Sets Off US Denial Storm

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

02 June 17

Hysteria from Donald Trump to Mitt Romney to Chelsea Clinton is Sad!

he image (above) appeared May 30, Memorial Day, and promptly set the tut-tutters’ tongues a-wagging, especially with thoughtless tweets of condemnation. Condemnation is not a rational argument. Condemnation is not a cogent response. Condemnation is an emotional blurt on the path to censorship.

The saddest thing about Kathy Griffin holding Trump’s bloody head aloft like some classical regicide is that she soon fled the scene with a groveling apology (abandoning Tyler Shields, her photographer, in the process). This episode speaks volumes about the tortured pathology of American culture in its present mindless form: freedom of thought, freedom of speech are allowed, but only if you exercise them within the walls of your invisible mental freedom prison. Otherwise you risk being an outcast. For Kathy Griffin, that risk is substantial, and it’s all too human of her to abase herself to save her career (if she can). The real sickness lies in the cultural demand for that abasement, which serves as a self-righteous cover for a deeply cowardly refusal to consider what the image means in a country where the majority of people want this presidency decapitated and are told they cannot talk about it except in officially approved and restricted ways. The official culture tries to prohibit depicting the living monster as defeated and slain.

We need to talk about that societal unwillingness to talk about that.

The cruel, hideous ruler has long been a universal stereotype and reality

At this point it’s hard to know how much planning went into showing Kathy Griffin like a Shakespearean avenger holding up the tyrant’s severed head (echoing the end of Macbeth), but in a short video of the shoot, she says: “Tyler and I are not afraid to do images that make noise. Also he often lights me to the point where I look about fifteen. But first I’m an artist. But really it’s good lighting.” Her tone is typical Kathy Griffin jokiness, even when she talks about having to leave the country, going to Mexico, “we’re not surviving this.” Even then, prescient as it is, she’s joking.

The image first appeared on TMZ around 11 a.m. Tuesday. Unreasoned judgment followed promptly without analysis: “sick,” “sick and offensive,” “gone too far,” “supports ISIS,” and the like. There was also pushback showing various right-wing images of lynching Obama. In early afternoon, Kathy Griffin responded with two tweets. The first said: “I caption this: there was blood coming out of his eyes, blood coming out of his … wherever,” a direct reference to Trump’s verbal assault on Megan Kelly for asking him about his misogyny. Kathy Griffin’s second tweet at 1:42 p.m. was more direct: “OBVIOUSLY, I do not condone ANY violence by my fans or others to anyone, ever! I’m merely mocking the Mocker in Chief.”

At 4:19 p.m., Donald Trump Jr. wrote in full denial: “Disgusting but not surprising. This is the left today. They consider this acceptable. Imagine a conservative did this to Obama as POTUS?” This is either ignorant or deceitful, as violent images against Obama have proliferated from the right for years.

At 5:01 p.m., Chelsea Clinton joined the rabble with a possible point: “This is vile and wrong. It is never funny to joke about killing a president.” She assumes, without supporting evidence, that the image was intended to be funny and/or was literally about killing a president. She apparently would rather not think about it.

At 6:14, Mitt Romney, who snottily and falsely once characterized 47% of Americans shiftless good-for-nothings, chimed in with this cheap shot tweet: “Our politics have become too base, too low, & too vulgar, but Kathy Griffin's post descends into an even more repugnant & vile territory.” (The immediate twitter response from Elliott Lusztig is stinging and powerful, concluding: “you have now turned into an abject coward.”)

Under withering attack, Kathy Griffin apologizes for exercising her rights

By 8 p.m., Kathy Griffin was tweeting “I am sorry. I went too far. I was wrong.” In a video posted at the same time she retracts everything she can:

Hey, everybody, it’s me, Kathy Griffin. I sincerely apologize. I’m just now seeing the reaction of these images. I’m a comic, I crossed the line, I moved the line and then I crossed it. I went way too far. The image is too disturbing, I understand how it offends people, it wasn’t funny, I get it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career, I will continue. I ask your forgiveness. Taking down the image, gonna ask the photographer to take down the image, and I beg for your forgiveness. I went too far, I made a mistake, and I was wrong.

Forgiveness for Kathy Griffin is not happening yet. Squatty Potty fired her as product spokesperson. Fox News reports that the Secret Service may be checking this out as a death threat. CNN fired her as New Year’s Eve co-host (and at 10:26 p.m., New Year’s co-host Anderson Cooper piled on with a smarmy tweet: “For the record, I am appalled by the photo shoot Kathy Griffin took part in. It is clearly disgusting and completely inappropriate.”

Almost 12 hours after Kathy Griffin’s abject apology, at 7:14 a.m. May 31, Trump weighed in on twitter: “Kathy Griffin should be ashamed of herself. My children, especially my 11 year old son, Barron, are having a hard time with this. Sick!” This tweet is surrounded by other presidential tweets about Trump’s Russia carelessness, health carelessness, and climate carelessness, with no indication his children have any problem with any of that. And the tweet comes from a man who has more reason to be ashamed of himself than most mortals.

Perhaps the ugly feeding frenzy surrounding Kathy Griffin will not destroy her completely, which may be the best she can hope for at this point. It would be a pleasant surprise to hear Anderson Cooper or anyone else say that this unjust victimization for an act of freedom in a supposedly free country is “disgusting and completely inappropriate.” Waiting for that could take awhile, mainly because it’s true. And it’s difficult. And it requires facing some brutally awful truths about a country that too often prefers to demonize the truthteller.

A mature culture might attempt to understand majority feeling

So here’s a list of eight ways of thinking about Kathy Griffin’s severed head image that don’t begin with mindless rejection. No doubt there are more.

(A) This is a classical reference to Medusa, an epic monster with snakes for hair. She was so horrible, merely looking at her would turn you to stone. When Perseus beheaded her, he became a hero. In the present version, Trump is the monster and Kathy Griffin the would-be hero. Trump IS a monster, with a host of monster-enablers. But Kathy Griffin has been turned to stone, it seems.

(B) The head is not a part Trump makes much use of, so losing it does him little harm.

(C) If this is really Trump’s head, why does it have what appears to be Kathy Griffin’s hair? Is she trying to get into his head? Is this as far as anyone can go to get into his head?

(D) If the image is true, why not have the courage of your convictions? If it’s not true, why create it? Let’s assume it’s a valid, potent image. Then what do we make of the majoritarian, craven, cultural bullying that would rather destroy an uppity woman than search its own soul? Or even wonder if it still has a soul?

(E) Clearly the severed head of Donald Trump is an exercise in freedom of speech. So why does anyone think it should not be allowed? That’s the opposite of freedom. That’s a police state mentality.

(F) This is not an actual assassination. It’s not an actual attempted assassination. It’s not even a call for assassination of or even violence against Trump. It’s a far cry from all those right-wing memes lynching Obama. This is an example of artistic license. That’s another trait of free societies. Police states hate artistic license, even when it’s literally licensed.

(G) The image is a metaphor. It raises the question: would the United States be better off without this particular head of state? Clearly that’s a debatable question. Clearly a majority of Americans think the answer is yes. No wonder the authorities and their media gatekeepers would rather condemn the idea than talk about it. Of course any discussion quickly arrives at the likelihood that a decapitated Trump gives us a President Pence. Would that be better?

(H) Ask yourself this, if you can: “How is this photo worse than what the Trumpini are doing to _____________ [fill in the blank].” How is Kathy Griffin holding a fake head with fake blood in a photo studio worse than Trump’s vicious literal or figurative decapitation of healthcare or Medicare or immigration justice or climate justice or criminal justice or racial justice or pick your own real horror that destroys innocent real people’s lives in ways Kathy Griffin’s photo never could? How are the feelings of Trump’s family more deserving of compassion than the innocent civilians he dismembers by proxy in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and God only knows where else?

So what should be a higher priority: Expressing distaste for a crude image from powerless artists? Or confronting a powerful, apparently soulless president whose human compassion is so limited he could put the planet at risk?

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William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.