The Lightning Bottle

As a dedicated part of the What Used To Be New Media (circa 2004), I am of course tied to the news cycle when I sit down to vomit something out into this space. But since I'm only writing weekly of course, I have a chance to sit back a bit and consider which of the main stories of the week I want to focus on, the same way John Oliver does with his Last Week Tonight show on HBO. I can skip over the detritus blown around by the tornado of the 24-hour cycle and consider instead the broader vistas that put the larger issues into context, letting me really hone in on the things that need--no, deserve--my full focus. Like that time I talked about what kind of shorts I like.

Luckily for me this cycle, there were only three things--yes exactly and exclusively three--that happened all week. One was GOP so-far also-rans decided to be mean to Donald Trump in order to generate interest in their adorably stealthy campaigns. Second, Donald Trump published his hotly anticipated list of Babes In the News By Order of Fuckability (preview: Carly Fiorina didn't place, but way up at No. 2? His daughter, Ivanka!). And third, some government employee lady in Kentucky got gay married to Mike Huckabee, I think? I'm not sure about the last one, I only looked at the pictures.

My oldest boy turned 16 this year, so he's going to just miss being eligible to vote next year, but he does ask questions about politics as he's beginning to develop an interest in both civics generally and the kind of passive masochism one gets as a by-product of developing political awareness in America. As a parent I do have a strong instinct to keep him from harming himself, but at the same time I find it fascinating to watch him synthesize the influences around him and begin to stand up on wobbly political legs of his own.

I was proud of his first real observation, a few weeks ago, and I'll paraphrase here: "This Donald Trump guy... The fuck, right?"

I of course calmly explained to him that, look, the first actual casting of any kind of countable vote is still four to five months away and this is the Silly Season, where voters are free to indulge in flights of populist fancy before finally, when it comes time to clumsily jab a tiny metal stick through the guide-hole laid across a confusingly drawn spaghetti junction of candidate lines, people will come to their senses and do what they always do: vote how their corporate overlords command them to.

The flirtation with Trump will prove to be a warm-weather summertime temporary madness and the GOP will do what it always does and turn to a current or former governor who is also a white man and something of an asshole, so most likely Scott "Education Schmeducation" Walker.

I'm still not convinced of the lasting efficacy of the Trump campaign, mostly because he's already said about forty things that would have gotten any other traditional politician disqualified and drowned out by a frenzy of high-pitched and piercing tsking by the press, the example of rhapsodizing repeatedly on the bone-ability of his own daughter merely being the most creepy. And beyond the grating nature of his braying, carnival barker personality, he's also doing suicidally politically impractical things if he's really considering a national post-nomination race next year by specifically driving away the blocks of voters who doomed Mitt Romney, women (by being a gross misogynist) and Latinos (by being a gross racist).

I'm wondering if I'm wrong though and if he will stick around, at least as far as the Republican convention. If there's any animating force to anti-Obama feeling, it's the wounded id of conservative white men who want to fight back against America's pussification and brown-ification, until now best asserted, without intentional irony, by noted moose murderer Sarah Palin. Maybe the snap-back against the criminal regime of Barack HUSSEIN Obama will be legitimately strong enough to carry him through New Hampshire and South Carolina and even the pretend vote thing they do in Iowa and develop some real momentum.

I still believe that it won't, though. I think at the end of this, he'll get to the point where it might cost him one dollar of his own money and that will be the end of it. But on the last day of his campaign, his farewell speech will be coupled with the unveiling of a model of his newest building, a hotel/pet spa so obnoxiously tall as to take up 9% of the total land area of Manhattan and designed in the shape of his own penis. Because I really believe that's who Donald Trump is at his core: a salesman who honestly believes the only product worth selling is himself. Actual public service doesn't really seem like his bag, man. Plus if he becomes president, we'll all know exactly how much money he makes, without multipliers or embellishment. And he hates that.