ABSTRACT
Power is on ostentatious display, in instances of the brazenly crude or kitsch bad taste of “dictator chic,” a phenomenon that emerged as recently as the twentieth century, and that persists. More recently, of course, in the United States, people see the shiny brazen display of golden adornments everywhere in Trump Tower, a vaunting of the self-as-brand that is tied intimately to political power, with personal wealth as the correlative of the Office of the President that such brashness threatens to tarnish. Such displays of raw power, with their undercurrents of barely suppressed violence against human citizens, is not particular only to dictatorships: it is apparent even in instances of ostensibly democratic regimes and may even be an indication – as with the United States – of how precarious democracy is in such nations. The citizen’s concern about deception, however, was not focused on the cover-up of the facts of the Vietnam War.
