File this under “When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Exhaustive List-Oriented Monographs On The Nature of Human Ugliness.” Given the relentless shit-storm of ugliness that’s become emblematic of these times, I thought it might be fun to do a bit of a thought experiment here and take just one single horrendous, obscene or grotesque thing Donald Trump has said or done and explore it a bit - really try to mine it for all it’s worth. I call this game “Spelunking in the Ugliness.” In honor of Father’s Day I thought I’d use this classic gem from Howard Stern’s radio show where Trump describes voyeurism as one of the perks of owning a beauty pageant.
“Well, I'll tell you the funniest is that I’ll go backstage before a show, and everyone's getting dressed and ready and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere. And I'm allowed to go in because I'm the owner of the pageant and therefore I'm inspecting it. You know, I'm inspecting, I want to make sure that everything is good.
You know, the dresses. ‘Is everyone okay?’ You know, they're standing there with no clothes. ‘Is everybody okay?’ And you see these incredible looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that.”
Now the fun begins! How many separate and distinct sorts of ugliness can we find in just this one statement? Put on your spelunking helmets and gas masks kids, we’re about to go down.
We’ll start with the basic ugliness of the concept and pedophiliac sentiment behind it, and of course the ugliness that it actually happened. There’s the ugliness of the man and his character, the ugliness of his voice, it’s smutty little tone and the ugly little way he describes it. There’s the ugliness of the fact he thinks it’s a story worth telling, and that he feels it’s something to brag about, both the story and its teller become exponentially uglier still. Of course there’s the ugly image we get in our minds of this pasty faced, flabby old pervert lurking around rooms full of young girls - his ugly, beady little eyes furtively leering at their bodies and whatever ugly little fantasies it inspires in him.
I’m not a big fan of beauty pageants myself, but you still gotta figure for these young girls this is a really big deal, most likely one of the most exciting times of their lives, so there’s the ugliness of having Pervy McSweats-a-lot walking in and ruining what should’ve been a culminating moment of their childhood. Multiply that by the ugliness of however many lifetimes of innocent memories he ruined. And add to it the ugliness that he’ll never understand or care about any of that.
I’m sure that by listening to the audio we can find all sorts of other ugly little nuances, inflections and subtexts, but since I’m sure we’re all getting a bit queasy by now, we should probably move on to some of the larger, uglier issues this raises while we can still bear it and try to learn whatever ugly lessons there are to be learned.
There’s the ugly fact that the man who said these words is now President of the United States and that most of people who voted for him did so knowing he’d said them. And you can slather on to that a big fat ugly layer of hypocrisy knowing any of them would’ve damned a Democrat for a fraction of the offense. There’s the knowledge that this whole ugly situation came about from thirty years of letting ugly people spew ugly shit about us on the radio and Fox, and the ugly fact that by ignoring it and doing almost nothing to defend ourselves we may be past the point of no-return. There’s the ugly realization we need to face that whatever it is we are doing sure as hell ain’t working. And finally and probably the ugliest thing of all is that the country and its constitution and the values it stood for - all that stuff we’re letting slip away with scarcely a fucking whimper - was once, according to my father, so very, very beautiful.
Bearing in mind that that’s just one of thousands of ugly little things we’ve been subjected to and that each might on their own expose whole new spectrums of ugliness... but we can leave that to future sociologists and mathematicians for now.
Here’s some pretty pictures from my trip across country to make up for all that I just put you through, and a bit of sad news that the trip killed my transmission and radiator. I know many of you think I’m some kind of super-patriot, but I’m not. Making and posting signs for one’s country is really very easy. Sinking $2,800 into a 1999 Honda Odyssey for your country, on the other hand, is kind of hard, so feel free to help out if you can.