Heroism as a Global Phenomenon in Contemporary Culture by Barbara Korte Simon Wendt Nicole Falkenhayner

Author:Barbara Korte, Simon Wendt, Nicole Falkenhayner [Barbara Korte, Simon Wendt, Nicole Falkenhayner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, World History
ISBN: 9780429557842
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2019-03-27T04:00:00+00:00

Conclusion: Yet Another Alliance

In The Other Alliance, his study of the transnational entanglement of student protests in the United States and Germany, Martin Klimke argues that the movements on both sides of the Atlantic formed an alliance structurally similar to the one of their governments. He demonstrates that they shared ‘an international language of dissent,’ but also that German and European students did not simply copy everything from their American counterparts but ‘selectively adopted, modified, and used American counter-cultural imports, thereby turning them into their own.’35 The transnational heroization of Donald Trump investigated here could be labelled yet another transatlantic alliance. As this chapter has shown, Trump’s American and European admirers agree in many respects but nevertheless see slightly different things in Trump. Most importantly, however, they share an international language of heroism, and their heroizations of Trump depend on and are enabled by a globally circulating popular culture that provides both the narratives and tropes for it.

What is more, in the age of convergence culture where production and consumption increasingly fall together, popular culture provides templates onto which political figures can be grafted not only ideologically but also, quite literally, materially. One can easily cast Donald Trump as Jon Snow because there are countless images of Jon Snow available online that Trump supporters can work with. Amazingly, to turn Trump into Jon Snow one does not even need Jon Snow, as becomes apparent when one looks closely at the image of Trump guarding the wall in Thorstein Memeson’s video. Clearly, the image is supposed to align Trump and Snow, and it succeeds because of the parallels I have outlined earlier. However, the body onto which Trump’s face is imposed here is not that of Jon Snow but that of his alleged father, and, as it later emerges, his uncle, Ned Stark. I was unable to verify if Memeson worked with a meme that had already turned Snow into Stark, thereby suggesting that he was the legitimate heir as which he has by now emerged in Game of Thrones, or if Memeson simply took an image of Ned Stark, inserted it into a picture of the wall, and then replaced Stark’s head with Trump’s. At the end of the day, it does not matter. What matters is that Memeson could easily align Trump with Jon Snow and thereby participate in the forty-fifth president’s transnational heroization—a heroization that almost entirely depends on a globally available popular culture.

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