Category Archives: Politics Schmolitics

Füd, Politics Schmolitics

Trump vs. The Fast Food Spokesthings of Yesteryear

There are three things we know for sure about Donald Trump: he watches TV constantly, he loves fast food, and his brain stopped processing new information circa 1989. There may be some other things we could learn about him; it’s impossible to say for sure! Nevertheless, deductive reasoning tells us that someone who’s spent so many hours of his life absorbing cathode radiation while ingesting processed swill, and whose mind has been spinning its wheels in a ditch for 30 years, must have lots of opinions about TV commercials from that era, and the various fast food icons contained therein.

Trump has occasionally shared his thoughts about ad mascots he dislikes, but these are mere tantalizing morsels compared to the buffet of thoughts he must have on the subject. Sure, some people say it’s a disturbing sign of sundowning when we see the president wander off aimlessly at official events or hear him rambling like a senile dolt through an interview. But for all we know this seemingly demented behavior is just his great mind preoccupied with thoughts like, Whatever happened to stuffed crust pizza?, or What in god’s name is Grimace? To present the answers to these burning questions, here is a completely scientific compendium of advertising figures of the Oliver North era, with a definitive determination of Trump’s opinion on each.

Continue reading Trump vs. The Fast Food Spokesthings of Yesteryear →
Politics Schmolitics

Mao Zedonald

These days, there’s no shortage of people casting dire warnings about Donald Trump. Each time the president makes another statement, millions of people point out the eerie similarities between his latest “tactic” and those employed by brutal dictators of old.

The dictator to whom Trump is most often compared is Hitler, an extreme comparison that would be totally unfair if not for the fact  that many of his closest advisers are full-blown white nationalists. At the risk of splitting hairs while the world burns, Trump’s style of governing (such as it is) does not remind me so much of Der Fuhrer, whose horror was at least meticulously planned. His first chaotic days in office remind me more of a completely different despot: Mao Zedong. Specifically, they call to mind Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

I’ve long been fascinated by hermetically-sealed cults of personality, like North Korea, and regimes that attempted to halt history in its tracks, like Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.  But the place and period that fascinates me the most is China under the Cultural Revolution (which ran roughly from 1966 until Mao’s death 10 years later), which combined a cult of personality with an insane push to erase history into one horrifying amalgam.

During the Cultural Revolution, everyone in China—all 1 billion of them—was taught to worship Chairman Mao as if he were a god. Mao had always been officially revered, but this period elevated him to an insane, untouchable level. Mao made sure he remained at this level by fomenting a climate of “permanent revolution” in which any vestige of the past was questioned, then destroyed. The result was a roiling chaos that left everyone too confused, terrified, and exhausted to question anything Mao had done.

Even if you know nothing about Mao or the Cultural Revolution, this has an obvious, superficial resemblance to Trump. His election was an attempt to destroy all political norms that preceded it—both the Clintonite neoliberal consensus and the staid fiscal/intellectual conservative wing of the GOP. In the place of both of these, Trump has created a new political reality that revolves exclusively around his own whims.

But how are the two men specifically similar?  Allow me to demonstrate.

Continue reading Mao Zedonald →

Politics Schmolitics

What’s Cookin

With the sheer amount of insanity that has transpired in the last week or so of the presidential campaigns (never mind the accumulated insanity to this point), you easily could have missed a special sliver of crazy that emerged down the home stretch. It’s difficult for anything or anyone to appear particularly bonkers in an election season that has legitimized the voices of anime-loving Nazis. That feat was managed late last week when the topic of Spirit Cooking lit social media aflame.

The budget version (and fair warning, even this condensed explanation could lower your IQ several points) proceeds thusly: the fire-and-brimstone segment of the electorate pored over the recent Wikileaks emails and found one in which Hillary Clinton operative John Podesta talked about attending a show by performance artist Marina Abramovic called Spirit Cooking. Said show purports to involve various bodily fluids, pig’s blood, self-cutting, etc., in a tortured bohemian tableau familiar to anyone who’s ever been dragged to a freshman art show. Through the fevered interpretation of the Alex Jones crowd, however, Abramovic’s work was not a high-school-goth level metaphor but an act of actual witchcraft.

Continue reading What’s Cookin →