Like It Friggin' Is

I haven’t seen The Social Network, but my guess is that it suggests that being really bright has a lot to do with becoming fantastically rich. In many cases, that’s obviously true. Someone comes up with a brilliant invention or innovation that the world really needs, and gets rich off the royalties or licensing fees. (Not that there aren’t countless cases of someone coming up with a brilliant invention, and dying a syphilis-ravaged hobo; it’s my understanding that Philo T. Farnsworth, who pretty much invented television, barely had a pot to pee in when he kicked the bucket, ho ho.)

I suspect, though, that great success in business is every bit as much a function of blind luck as pop stardom is. Some schmo stumbles along at exactly the right second, guesses right about a couple of things, gets rich, and spends the rest of his life being buttered up by persons who can’t take a chance on his or wealth being the result of his or her being wonderfully prescient or shrewd.

All of which is to say, a little floridly, that I refuse to believe that Donald fucking Trump is bright, however many gleaming towers in Manhattan might bear his name, however many stretches of freeway in the tri-state area may be maintained because of his generous donations. I have never known the guy — and I’ve been seeing him on TV and reading about him since the late ‘80s — to be anything other than boorish, vulgar, self-inflated, and just generally sickening. I hate his hair. I hate his pout. I hate his ex-wives, and his present one, just for having married him. I hate that when we went last year to Atlantic City, where he owns a casino (or casinos), his photograph was on the label adorning plastic water bottles dispensed for $5 each at his overpriced seaside nitespot.

And now, apparently, I’m going to have an opportunity to not vote for him for President! “Somebody has to do something,” he has declared, “because we are losing this country." As we apparently weren’t during the glorious Bush/Cheney years, during which something approaching $1 trillion was spent on ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein so that GWB could finally feel more manly than his dad about something. And now we've got Maureen Tucker, formerly of the Velvet Underground, telling interviewers at Tea Party rallies that she, like so many very stupid Americans, is sick and tired of Obama's wastefulness!

Do we dare look forward to debates pitting The Donald against that waste of protoplasm Mitt Romney and the exquisitely preposterous Palin? Can’t you just imagine? Responding to a question to which she doesn't know the answer (and doesn't want to know the answer, because that sort of knowledge is the province of the sort of elitists who are ruinin' this great nation of ours), Palin will chirp something about how, for anyone who’s given birth to and raised five kids, being president will seem like a day at the beach, and her fellow mama grizzlies in the audience will whoop and applaud, causing The Donald to do what he’s always done when he feels outflanked — launch an ugly ad hominem attack. “How can anybody take anything you say seriously,” he’ll wonder, pouting adorably at the audience, “when you don’t even got big tits?” And in bars from one Portland to the other, men in greasy baseball caps will high-five each other and snort, “Tell it like it friggin’ is!”

I can see America's future, my friends, and it don't got a lot of pretty.