The animal with a good conscience.–

The vulgar element
in everything that gives pleasure…
does not escape me,
but it does not offend me anymore…

How come?
Is it because there is no sense of shame
and everything vulgar appears as poised
and self-assured as anything noble, lovely, and passionate
in the same sort of music or novel?

The animal has as much right
as any human being; let it run about freely.
And you, my dear fellow man,
are also still an animal in spite of everything!
That seems to me to be the moral of this story…

Bad taste has its rights
no less than good taste, and even a prior right
if it corresponds to a great need, provides certain satisfaction
and, as it were, a universal language, an absolutely intelligible mask and gesture.

What is and remains popular is the mask.

–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 2, Section 77 by Friedrich Nietzsche

A friend suggested that former President Donald Trump is the current poster-child for the vulgar.  Indeed, Trump who is running once again for the seat behind the desk in the Oval Office takes pride in his vulgarity.  Vulgarity is a mask.  So is “taste” for that matter.  What is behind the mask?  What succession of selves is concealed by the mask?

Bad taste has its rights, a dictum that comes to mind whenever I think of Las Vegas, or of pornography, or of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, or of Draftkings Sportsbook, etc…  You know, — the rags-to-riches shortcut, the ghost haunting the capitalist idealization of the risk taker who strikes-it-rich with the IPO of that idea no one else yet has thought of…

What is and remains popular is the mask.