Dan Olson’s recent video on a silly meme that DHS posted and is being picked up by right wing crazies all over the world surfaced something that’s been absolutely floating on the top of my mind ever since I saw it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7WqVx9x89s

They show a clip from Werner Herzog’s 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World (full film), where a little penguin starts inexplicably running away from the herd that’s heading to the sea, and running towards some distant mountains instead.

The penguin isn’t just like wandering off to see some sick mountains because it’s never going to get there. There’s no food. There’s no shelter. There’s no security.

The penguin is going to die.

Immediately before the clip in the full documentary, Herzog asks a penguin expert if penguins can go insane.

So, another thing that’s implicit underneath this is the recognition that Trump and his cronies are on a suicide mission. They do not believe in the future. They cannot conceptualize the world surviving the present. And so, theirs is an embrace of pure id, pillaging what future does exist to live out a revenge fantasy for no other reason than because they can. Their only policy is chaos and hatred because, where they’re going, they don’t need policies. The actual mountains, America the Great and its promised flourishing, don’t matter. It can remain a hazy shape on the horizon because no one headed there will live to see it. Their only goal is to take everything else with them on the way out into the ice to die.

Now, maybe that’s just cope on my part. I too am human and need to rationalize the world as it exists [to] grapple with the future, but it would go a long way to explaining why modern right-wing propaganda is so grim and nihilistic, reticent to depict any coherent ideal, even an unrealistic, unobtainable one.

Herzog intended for The Penguin to reflect on humanity. Encounters at the End of the World is an unabashedly anthropomorphic film about the stories that people read into nature in order to say something about ourselves.

And, to that end, the United States Department of Homeland Security has looked at this penguin and said, “Yep, that’s us. We’re doing this for no reason. We have no hope of success. There is no meaning to this. You don’t need to ask us why because you’ve always known why.”