When the cash-grab come-ons started isn’t definite. Maybe it was when Barry Goldwater’s noteless running mate William Miller jokingly used his non-notoriety to press Americans into indulging their credit addiction. Or perhaps it was Harry Truman surrendering to fatherly instinct to not just drop a blisteringly hot take on a critic of his songstress daughter’s performance, but threatening to break his nose, black his eyes, and bludgeon his groin. Or possibly poor Mary Todd Lincoln leaving an unappreciative note on the cast of “Our American Cousin” when it was in rep at Ford’s Theater.
(The last one is apocryphal, though a purported historian at an unnamed university with the Reddit username r/shovethisupurwokehole confirmed it actually happened. Hey, better believing that than the Project 1619 illiterates.)
Nancy Pelosi’s luckily lucrative stock picks aren’t history’s first indication that politics is a paying profession for pelf pickers. Frankly, if we took civics education seriously as a country, any voter caught unawares that pols routinely slick their wallet wet with wads of payola would be stripped of their franchise. Paint me as Plato for thinking a body politic should scrupulously excise naive, too-well-meaning clods from the registrar rolls.
Your average public servant slaving for a supplementary salary from beholden industrial interest is a seamy tale as old as Roman aqueduct subventions. As Nietzsche wrote, “power stands on crooked legs.” But customary skimming off the top of bloated stopgap bills is accepted by most voters, like when the McDonald’s accountants budget for a degree of employee theft. The fisk, we fatally acknowledge, always has some extra fingers digging through it.
Graft will always be with us, but now it’s blousing out beyond the borders of the tax-dollar pie, as our elected Little Jack Horners shoot out their grubby paws for more quid. The prime example is, per the political clock, an old one. Donald Trump long made a fortune licensing his name out to various unaffiliated endeavors, including but not limited to, steak, schooling, spirits, and slots. During his third (serious) presidential run, he’s been offering all allotropes of kitsch: coins, NFTs, Good Books, Air Trumps, and the iconic MAGA hat, which now comes in a splendid palette of color choices, including slate gray and hunter’s orange. And lest we forget about his most sedulous side hustle: keeping clear of the clink.
Trump isn’t Trump if he’s not touting trinkets. But his political peers, fed up with such dusty notions of honor and propriety, want in on the lucrative racket, where they can lend their surname to drop-shipped plasticine gewgaws and factory-churned ingestants.
Michelle Obama, who, when she became First Lady and was faced with all of America’s replete problems and struggles, saw a country of well-fed children and thought, “By Jove, these plump little munchkins are eating too many Fruit Loops!” Then, while raising the issue of endemic bullying in schools, proceeded to shame portly youngsters for not putting down the Game Boy and stepping outside, screeching “Let’s Move” to the little moo-ers before abrogating the French fries in their school lunch, replacing them with moldy carrot sticks.
Mrs. Obama hasn’t forgotten about chubby children out of the White House. Now she’s peddling directly to America’s offspring, without the public expenditures, all with private capital. She was just spotted in Costco—the patriotic megashopper’s Mecca—flogging a line of carbonated drinks from Plezi Nutrition, a low-sugar brand she co-founded. The tag snugs nicely with suburban good taste: toss out the Pepsi and prove you aren’t racist by forcing your kids to gulp Michelle’s effervescent strawberry lemonade!
Sorry, libertarians. The Swamp Uniparty doesn’t just agree on adventurist foreign policy. Our two parties may war with each other for the cameras, but they agree on one important endeavor: fleecing voters with knock-off dreck. The offerings are diverse, from specie to canned beverages to dumpsters full of remaindered memoirs, the political class eagerly sniffs out gimmicks to palm off on unsuspecting fans. Tucker Carlson is pushing nicotine pouches, Governor Kristi Noem boosting Texas dentistry, Hillary Clinton hawking headwear—it’s Christmas every day for the political aficionado eager to consume more than just ironic Twitter quips.
The Founders’ vision of America as a commercial republic didn’t just come into fruition—the buy-sell predilection has gone from positive benefit to normative, engulfing our entire enterprising spirit. We’re so materially satisfied that we vote for greater values, but we still spend accordingly on those same politicians we task with bettering society.
The Tao Te Ching famously stipulated that you only have a good governor when citizens have to ask, “Do we have a governor?” Now we not only know our governor, and congressman, and senator, and president, but we, as theologian Russell Moore said of his fellow evangelical Christians, “impute to them almost superheroic status.”
And what does America do best with its venerated heroes? Produce endless mounds of polyethylene pap etched with their names that will eventually pollute a landfill the size of Montana. And some sad day my kids will toss out my unopened Trump Hotel bottle of water.
Add comment