This morning, somewhere between my second cup of coffee and the fourth grim scroll through the news, I found myself pondering a hypothetical: If a space alien—curious, polite, perhaps with a clipboard—landed in my front yard and asked me, a nearly 64-year-old American, “What’s it like living in your country right now?,” I wouldn’t start with the Constitution or the national parks. I’d hand them a copy of James B. Twitchell’s Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America, a book I read back in 1992 when I was thirty and still believed things might get better.
Twitchell’s argument was that television had ushered in a golden age of vulgarity—mainstreaming spectacle, flattening culture, and celebrating the lowest common denominator. What was once fringe now strutted center stage. That was 1992. It feels almost quaint now.
This week, I’ve been soaking in evidence that Twitchell was merely outlining the overture.
This morning, I read Tyler Foggatt’s New Yorker piece, “‘South Park’ Skewers a Satire-Proof President,” which examines how Trey Parker and Matt Stone are still hacking away at American grotesquery with their chainsaw of satire.
After watching Season 27, Episode 1, I found myself genuinely wondering how they haven’t yet been exiled to some kind of digital gulag. The episode’s venom is so precise, so nihilistically cheerful, it left me staring at the screen with a mixture of admiration and dread. How do you parody a culture that’s already parodying itself?
That same night, my wife and I watched Shiny, Happy People: A Teenage Holy War—Season 2, Amazon Prime. Enter Ron Luce, a religious demagogue who recruits teenagers into his personal holy war by dressing them in camo and screaming at them through bullhorns as they crawl through canals full of hissing cockroaches. I turned to my wife and said what I now believe is the most accurate possible take: “Ron Luce is the Vince McMahon of religion.”
Because here’s the thing: Vince McMahon isn’t just a wrestling promoter. He’s the high priest of American kayfabe—the architect of performative outrage, cosplay masculinity, and spectacle-for-spectacle’s-sake. He’s built an empire on screaming, sweating, soap opera buffoonery, and somehow, that aesthetic now defines everything: politics, YouTube, fringe churches, presidential rallies, TikTok evangelists.
McMahon didn’t just influence culture—he became it. If aliens really want a crash course in America, forget Mount Rushmore. Start with Mr. McMahon, the Netflix docuseries. Then draw a direct line to our histrionic politics, our teen-traumatizing spiritual boot camps, our screaming demagogues who mistake performative frenzy for moral clarity.
The real problem with cosplay—whether it’s in the ring, the pulpit, or the Senate—is that eventually, the performers forget they’re performing. They fall into kayfabe coma. They live the lie so long they forget how to take off the mask, and eventually, they become the mask. What starts as theater curdles into delusion.
I used to mock the NPR crowd—those genteel sippers of Bordeaux and tote-bagged reason—but I’ve come around. The quiet, the moderate, the civil? They may be our last tether to sanity. Watching Parker and Stone slap their thighs in manic glee may give us a few much-needed laughs, but it’s not curing anything. It’s not even slowing the spiral. It’s gallows humor on a tilt-a-whirl.
If the aliens ask me what America’s like, I’ll tell them: It’s a deeply unserious country drunk on its own cosplay, where the line between performance and reality has vanished, and where kayfabe is our national religion.
And then I’ll offer them a donut and a copy of Carnival Culture.
Cinemorphosis 
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