Donald Trump and Diet Coke

Consider, for a moment, the following photograph:

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I suppose that you see a glass of soda (pop? coke?), sitting on a wooden pedestal. A background of brick and sunkissed glass in the background, it’s a picture of summer evenings and sweet things quenching your thirst.

I, however, must disagree. Instead we are looking at the truest analogy we have for the Donald Trump candidacy.

Take, for instance:

The Old-Timey Patriotism – The glass itself is an ode to an older time. When war meant killing Nazis and coming home to a dame and a factory job and house from GI Bill. The glass is blazed with Red, White, and Blue, promising to spirit to your lips the best of America. It invokes the days when America was Great. With ticker-tape parades and jingoism. The shape of the glass is even a classic, harking to the good old days of Brokaw’s Greatest Generation. Its silhouette alone is the sum of our nostalgia for grainy John Wayne films and Ballpark Franks. The glass alone seems to be screaming “Let’s Make American Great Again!”

The Homage to a Craft – In America, we used to make things. Like machines. And beer. And diabetes. And here, to appease our yearning for an era of production, is blazed upon that glass’s curves is something we can all agree on: “Take pride in your beer.” And who wouldn’t take pride in their beer? Who wouldn’t like to see America great? It’s a statement so banal that to raise an eyebrow is akin to treason.

And yet, hidden in the glare of the setting sun, is the signature of a registered trademark. Yessirree, this here token of American exceptionalism is the intellectual property of one REDACTED Brewing Company. This simple statement is more than an affirmation of good faith. It’s the cynical commercialization of what we all hold dear – not so different from a TRUMP steak or the $25 Bling H2O available in Trump Hotels.

The Bait and Switch – Of course the glass that proclaims “Take pride in your beer®” holds no beer at all. The glass we see came filled, not with the bounty of fermented grain, but with a mass produced vacuum bag of sugarwater. Cynical branding aside, it’s the bait-and-switch. The glass promises the fruits of America’s heartland and delivers cheaply manufactured fluff. What’s more Trumpian than that?

I’ll tell you what’s more Trumpian. The double bait and switch. That there soda is a Diet. The promise to “Take pride in your beer®” can’t even deliver real corn syrup. How will it build a wall?

The Glass Half Full – And so we’re left looking at a half-full glass of unnaturally colored liquid, and we’re not really sure of what it’s made of. Sounding familiar? Well, you may have noticed that I said half-full. That’s pretty optimistic. Maybe it’s half empty?

Nope.

Take another look at the glass. The geometry of the thing, the bulbous top and narrow bottom mean that it’s not even nearly half full. And when you consider that most of it there is icy cold filler, not much substance, then the glass barely holds anything at all.

The more we look at the photo, the less it looks like a cool drink on a hot summer night. Even the condensation on the glass evokes the campaign team sweating as the new poll results roll in. It seems more like we’re looking at a cynically branded, disingenuous homage to the American Greatness of a time we never knew. It’s a bulbous, diaphoretic, discolored poison trying to emulate a flavor that is, for better or worse, a part of our shared heritage. Its substance is bloated by coldness, so that what seems to be a half-full lesser evil is hardly more than a few drops of sticky moisture.

A few drops of sticky moisture. Please try to remember that phrase when you’re alone in the booth, and think about how uncomfortable it makes you feel.

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Eternities Worse than Hell

devil cat

  • When your fingers are all wrinkly after the shower and they touch each other.
  • The airport.
  • When you’re rushing home because you really need to go to the bathroom and you just barely make it but the door is locked and your keys are stuck on something in your pocket.
  • Anything with Michael Bublé.
  • Nighttime ear mosquitoes.
  • When you’re in a lake and something touches your foot.
  • When someone is telling a story that you told them and they’re doing it wrong.
  • Mealy tomatoes.
  • A Trump administration.
  • A conversation where everyone knows your name and you should probably know theirs but you don’t and you’ve been talking for too long now to ask.
  • Peeling wallpaper. Or scraping stucco. Or sanding anything large. Really the whole Sisyphus thing nailed it.
  • Like if they got rid of avocados. Or limes.
  • Looking over your aunt’s shoulder while she uses Excel.
  • No dogs. Just cats.
  • Everyone on the road is from out of town and looking for a parking spot.
  • A Trump administration.

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D.B. Cooper and Forrest Fenn, American Heroes

“He was the single most hopeful man I ever met, and I’m ever likely to meet again.” – Nick Carroway, The Great Gatsby

On the eve of Thanksgiving in 1971 a man bought a ticket aboard a Boeing 727-100 for a quick flight from Portland to Seattle. Once the flight was underway, and from a seat near the middle of the plane, he handed a flight attendant a note describing a bomb in his carry-on. He showed her a tangle of wires to demonstrate the seriousness of his claim. If he did not receive a ransom of two hundred thousand dollars and a selection of parachutes, he would detonate his bag in mid-flight.

Hero status.

We’ll never know if the man who went by Dan Cooper really had a bomb. Hours after the hijacking began he was bound for Mexico with a bag filled with cash and a parachute. Somewhere over Oregon he opened the Boeing’s rear hatch to jump into the freezing November rain and illuminate the imagination of generations. He was never seen or heard from again.

A few weeks ago the FBI officially closed the case: unsolved. At some point they had to get tired of fielding deathbed confessionals from people who claimed to be D.B. Cooper or the Lindbergh Baby but can’t be sure which one. But there’s still something captivating about our nation’s only unsolved airplane hijacking. There’s an infectious kind of hopefulness in carrying off a plan like that.

I can hear your incredulity now. A hijacking, you say, is the most violent throe of desperation. But hope and desperation are on equal footing in the foundation of the American Dream. We are a nation built by refugees who fled untold horrors for a crack at a new life. In fact it’s only a deeply rooted tradition of hope that can explain the rise of D.B. Cooper as a legend. Who can really believe that an untrained man could jump alone above a rugged wilderness and into a freezing storm at hundreds of miles an hour in the middle of the night wearing only a polyester suit and survive?

It’s this hope that drew settlers to a New World, then to the farthest flung corners of it in search of gold. Hope has a way of gnawing at us, and like gold itself it’s as much a gift as a curse. It allows us to believe that the future will be different from the present, not through a commitment to self-improvement, but through the work of chance. And even to this day nothing captivates us like the prospect of hidden gold.

Buried treasure is the stuff of high adventure. Of the movies and books that guided our understanding of what it means to go on an expedition. From the mutiny on the Hispaniola to the riches of the Sierra Madre to a ramshackle group of kids on the Oregon Coast, a search for hidden treasure has provided a simple and tangible objective to catalyze adventure.

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A picture of hope.

But in our Brave New World the hope of improbable prosperity has been watered down to gas station keno machines and scratch-off lotto tickets. There is no buried treasure. Or is there?

Forrest Fenn’s goal was to leave a legacy behind. The millionaire art collector was battling cancer and planned to die alone in the woods, leaving a bronze chest of gold clutched in the hands of a skeleton for a future adventurer to find. Well, he beat the cancer but still thought the treasure chest was a neat idea, so he hid one somewhere in the Rocky Mountain west. No X marks the spot, but a poem gives the clues.

Forrest Fenn treasure map

Forrest Fenn’s claim to have hidden a great wealth of treasure somewhere in the mountain west is outlandish. It’s improbable. The cynic in me calls it a ploy to sell copies of his book. But then there’s the hope. Not so much the hope that I find the hidden gold, but the hope that someone of means so believed in hope itself that he really did hide a collection of gems and doubloons.

Because the gold isn’t really the treasure. It’s the idea that the gold might be out there, sitting in a hole or a hollow tree, just waiting to capture the imagination of a new generation of adventurers.

And if we never find it? Well, as long as we look, that might even be the point.

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Donald Trump is Actually Just a Dumb Henry VIII

In an election year, things can start to feel pretty familiar. We all know the drill. Non-political TV commercials will be come a thing of the past. The phone rings off the hook at dinner time. You assume a persistent state of anxiety.

This year promises to be more of the same. Really, this year promises to be much more of the same as the campaigning inevitably turns more and more negative. “But wait!” you say. “This election in unprecedented! We’ve never seen anyone the likes of Donald Trump before!”

And that’s just not true. See, because Donald Trump is really just a dumber, modern version of Henry VIII (King of England 1509-1547).

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Photo Source

Donald Trump is just Henry VIII with Twitter (update: Henry VIII is on Twitter), kind of like how Avatar was really just Ferngully in 3D. And full disclosure: some of this stuff seems kind of petty. The thing is, petty personal stuff is fair game because of comparison #1.

Comparison #1 – Donald Trump and Henry VIII were both extremely petty. Historians generally use words like “reactionary,” “harsh,” and “insecure” to describe the later years of Henry’s reign. Does any of that sound familiar? The monarch was more or less continually at war with France, pretty much entirely as a result of personal beefs with Francis I. Also with Scotland. And Rome. And Spain.

Comparison #2 – Both guys got in a huge fight with the Pope (over some childish bullshit). Donald Trump managed to spat with basically the best Pope we’ve ever had because the guy described un-Christian foreign policy suggestions as un-Christian. Henry took it one step further. He decided he didn’t really want his wife anymore, and since divorce was pretty taboo in 1527 he decided to just quit Catholicism, which pretty much meant that everyone else had to quit Catholicism too.

Comparison #3 – So speaking of divorce, both guys got married. Like, a lot. Of course at press time Mr. Trump has been married three times. Henry managed to rack up six wives in his 55 year life, which is pretty impressive for a time when divorce was a no-no. How’d he do it, you ask? Two annulments, two natural deaths, and two executions. I wonder what The Donald would do without a good divorce attorney and gobs of money?

Comparison #4 – And it’s those gobs of money that bring us to comparison #4. Both guys were born loaded and then spent their adult lives blowing it on an indulgent lifestyle. Both men were born into a picture of privilege, and both men turned out to be pretty lousy businessmen. In Henry’s case this led to the ruination of a personal fortune and healthy English economy. Trump hasn’t been given the keys to the economy yet, but his record shows that he’s really an average businessman at best, and I suspect that he’s actually broke. In both cases a huge inheritance eventually fell victim to extravagance and lots and lots of gold (because gold is classy).

Comparison #5 – Both guys expressed interest in spending an insane amount of money defending the southern border (and Henry actually did it). In fairness, in Henry’s case it kind of made sense because he made a career of pissing off all of Continental Europe.

The comparisons keep going. Both men had a penchant for gambling. Both men advocated strongly for a paranoid insulation of the border. Both men were obsessed with shiny stuff.

But there’s one really striking difference: Henry VIII was pretty damn smart.

Henry was a renaissance man. He was an accomplished musician, a talented composer, and a poet. He was an avid reader and an author. He revolutionized military theory. He cherished knowledge and took pride in being a thinker. On the other hand, we’ve got this guy:

And that’s really the most compelling difference. The personality profiles are essentially identical. They’re both megalomaniacal sociopaths born into wealth and who take power for granted. They’re womanizing narcissists who’ve made their own petty disagreements matters of national security. They’re both men who were attractive and charming in their young lives, and who’s unrelenting vanity plummeted them into paranoid insecurity in their later years.

Of course another (important) difference is that Donald Trump isn’t actually in charge of anything yet. (Celebrity Apprentice doesn’t count). Henry VIII reigned for nearly four decades. A quick look at his record sheds a bit of light on what four years of Trump might look like.

  • Henry made dramatic changes to the English Constitution, primarily to greatly expand executive power. I recommend getting out today to exercise some of those constitutional rights while you’ve still got ’em. Hell, maybe four years of Trump turns into four decades.
  • Henry preferred a military-forward approach to diplomacy. For instance, to encourage James I of Scotland to marry his infant daughter to Henry’s son Edward, the English monarch went to a decade long war with Scotland; a truce sealed by matrimony was the only path to peace. I sure hope President Trump doesn’t decide he wants a new Canadian wife!
  • Henry quashed dissent with more executions than any other English Monarch. Trump has already exhibited a distaste for being questioned by blacklisting an unprecedented number of news agencies from his campaign events.
  • He ran the economy into the ground. Henry VIII inherited, in addition to a large personal fortune, a thriving English economy. It only took a few years of an extravagant lifestyle, hasty military conflicts, and the construction of elaborate royal palaces to burn through cash reserves and tank the economy. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar. Don’t worry though, Henry did manage to pay for it all (through loans from Parliament and the seizure of church property).

And so all this talk about the Trump candidacy being unprecedented isn’t quite right. We’ve seen this guy before, albeit as a disgraced 16th century monarch who’s fallen on the wrong side of history. I wonder what Henry would have done with a nuke?

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Dirtbag Economics

With 98 days to go until the election [President, United States], it’s going to become very difficult to think or hear about much else over the next three months. We’ll be reminded continually that our lives are terrible (in case you forgot), that a man in a turban is definitely going to murder you some time in the next 36 hours, and that the only possible way to improve the economy looks a lot like the beginning of Ferngully.

And it’s all true. Especially about the economy. Just look at Texas, that shining example of how government regulation just stands in the way of unfettered economic prosperity for all [natural born, white] Americans. I’m sorry I didn’t hear you, what’s that about the oil market? Oh, shit. I meant Utah. Let’s look at Utah. It’s a shining example of . . .

There’s going to be a lot of back and forth, in this next quarter year, about the economy and how best to fix it. Many of you probably feel strongly about that conversation which is interesting because many of you probably don’t really understand it. I sure as hell don’t. And so I’m not going to spend these thousand words on getting into treasonous ideas like suggesting that sustainable energy production can avoid the boom/bust cycle that ravages rural America, or that the War on Drugs hasn’t actually failed at all because it was never about drugs in the first place, or that neo-conservative foreign policy over the last several decades can go a long way to explaining the whole “ISIS” thing, or that the strongest proxy for economic growth is investment in education and not lax regulations at all, or that (and stay with me here) one popular candidate didn’t know that Russia invaded Ukraine like a year and a half ago (and, like, let that last one sink in for a minute).

Instead I’d like to spend a few minutes discussing a different set of economic principles that are a bit more tangible for folks who’s biggest uncertainty in life is whether to go fishing or mountain biking this weekend.

Tenets of a Dirtbag Economy

On Beer – Beer is the common currency of a dirtbag economy. A six pack is legal tender for early rides to the airport, borrowing a trad rack, or putting a huge core shot in your roommate’s brand new DPS Wailers. But remember that not all beer is created equal.

There are two suitable avenues for beer-as-remuneration. You may purchase semi-ironic macro produced swill (Pabst, Hamm’s, Schlitz), or you may support a local brewery. Here in Montana, it would be considered bad form to show up with a case of Sierra Nevada or New Belgium. Those guys make fine beer, sure, but keep it local, yokel.

The Growler Problem: A growler is the worst way to transport beer (except for maybe in your cupped hands). A growler goes flat in like 4 hours and is a half inch too tall for every refrigerator shelf. On the bright side, a growler encourages revelry on delivery and so it’s a great way to drink a portion of the gift.

Depreciable Assets – Skiing powder is about the best thing a human being can do. Now, I’ve never skydived from space, or received total consciousness or anything, but I’ve seen some shit and skiing pow is at the top of the list. And it’s well documented that you cannot ski powder without this year’s skis, so you’re going to need to unload those sticks from last season.

Of course everyone trying to sell their skis every year creates a market surplus, which combined with the fact that no one wants your clapped out shit, leads to 80% or more depreciation of skis in the first year. You thought motorhomes lose their value fast? Try selling a pair of Soul 7s with last year’s topsheet art.

A similar phenomenon exists with mountain bikes, stand up paddleboards, and devil sticks, but nothing depreciates like skis. Of course everything depreciates, so we can’t that bent out of shape if the curve is a bit steeper for the best toys.

The Toyota Paradox – Everything depreciates except, by definition, investments. And to hell with gold and Apple stock, I’ve never seen a better investment than an old Toyota. I have a friend who bought a Toyota Tacoma, drove the shit out of it for four years, and then sold it for a profit. That’s a true story. No blogger creative license necessary. And that wasn’t even a classic. 

You know that the pre-’86s had a solid front axle, right? That’s so sick for four wheeling and for looking rad in the Whole Foods parking lot. The 22re engine is well documented to run for infinity miles. All you have to do is change the oil and I heard you don’t even have to do that. Seriously. Look it up. It’s on Expedition Portal’s Instagram.

yota
116k miles (or 216k? 316k?), only kind of rusty. 90th percentile of quality, I swear. $5k. Won’t last long. Solid front axle perfect for picking up chicks at the farmer’s market.

As a dirtbag economics certified financial adviser I recommend that you cash in your 401k immediately and go buy this truck (this deal won’t last long).

This extends to pre-1992 Volkswagen vans, bonus points for a Westy. If you have a Syncro just retire now.

The Nalgene Proletariat – You have never purchased a Nalgene bottle. You are incredulous, but it’s true. It’s just not how dirtbag economics work. You can’t, like, own, a Nalgene bottle, man. What you really purchased was a share in a global Nalgene bottle co-op. They come, they go, we don’t get all teary eyed about it. It’s beautiful.

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