Photo credit: Ned and Aya Rosen
Say a new guy comes on the scene. He’s outrageous. He’s funny. He violates unspoken norms of decorum and, lo, the world fails to collapse around everyone’s ears. He’s as much a persona as he is a person, and the plans he outlines — wild, absurd, cartoonish — are so implausible that the establishment guys, the ones who have been around long enough to know how things generally go, just laugh.
But this new guy does have a certain measure of clout. To others on his level, he’s little more than a buffoon hamming it up for the camera, but he’s successful and impressive to those looking up from below. He is totally and unabashedly himself, and that kind of authenticity has power. He makes the old norms look a little silly, like a stuffy holdover from a different era...