Elon+Trump = BFF's (The Billionaire Boys' Club Faux-Populist Tongue-Bath)
Plus, the Olympics' golden breakdancing moment, and why we fish
Editor’s Note: Have a question about whether Matt wears boxers or briefs? Keep your filthy mind out of Matt’s pants. It’s already crowded enough in there with all the balled-up tube socks. And for the record, as a Man of the Middle, he wears boxer-briefs. (Hope you’re happy, perverts.) Ask less invasive questions at askmattlabash@gmail.com
Dear Matt,
I don’t have enough energy reserves to have endured the Elon Musk/Donald Trump marathon interview on the site formerly known as Twitter, and currently known as Elon’s dumpster fire. Did I miss anything?
Barry T.
I’m trying not to get insulted that you think I had nothing better to do. Because I did. I could’ve gone to the liquor store and bought a sack of Steel Reserve’s, then chugged forties until I made the pain stop. I could’ve put my head in an oven, so that I didn’t have to endure the next two-and-a-half months of similar electioneering spectacles. But no. Instead, I dove on the grenade, so that you, dear reader, wouldn’t have to. It’s not my place to champion my own war heroics. But feel free to do so in the comments section.
Or at least I tried to be a hero. After a forty-minute-or-so technical delay that Elon tried to pass off as a “massive distributed denial of service attack” (or maybe that’s just what happens when you’re such a megalomaniac that you fired half of the engineers who used to make your vanity toy work correctly), while implying someone had pulled the trigger on this “attack” in order to silence Trump (who hasn’t stopped talking about himself since he was old enough to speak), the “interview” began. And after a painstaking, braggadocio-filled recounting of Trump’s AR-ear-piercing last month – Ken Burns told the entire story of our Civil War in less time — my mind started drifting to more compelling things, like a hot game of Tri-Peaks Solitaire I had open in another window.
Listening to these two billionaire buffoons tongue-bathe each other while slopping the disinformation hogs with fake news brought to mind the late, great Cormac McCarthy’s line from his novel, Cities of the Plain: “This place aint the same. It never will be. Maybe we’ve all got a little crazy. I guess if everbody went crazy together nobody would notice, what do you think?”
To answer a rhetorical question from a fictional character with bad spelling skills, I think some of us are still noticing. Or at least those of us who haven’t been turned out by madness in Elon’s MAGAfied Twitterverse.
I don’t wish to belabor a very-belabored interview — if you managed to skip it, I envy you — but here are some random highlights, by which I mean lowlights, gleaned from the 45 pages of single-spaced AI-generated transcript I printed out this morning (so blame Elon, who supports that crap, if AI gets any quotes wrong).
Trump’s first of many lies of the night directed at Elon: “Congratulations, because I see you broke every record in the book with so many millions of people {viewing this interview}, and that’s an honor.” Or not really. I kept checking the present audience count at any given time, and it never surpassed 1.3 million. About what second-place MSNBC does on a regular night. Hear that? It’s the sound of America yawning.
Elon to Trump: “We had a great conversation yesterday…..if we could just record that conversation and post it, it would have been excellent.” Maybe they should have. Because this conversation wasn’t even above average.
Trump to Elon on the illegal immigration chart he was looking at when the shots were fired, that helped him literally dodge a bullet: “I’ll be sleeping with that chart. That chart was very important.” Melania breathes a sigh of relief. She can now go several more years without having to touch him.
Elon baring his foreign policy fangs when Trump claimed he “worked out” our North Korean problem after boasting that “my red button is much bigger” than North Korea’s red button, and by issuing “Rocket Man” tweets and such. Elon: “Those were some epic tweets by the way.” (Here’s North Korea after Trump once again bragged about his special relationship with one of his favorite dictators – he has so many to choose from — at the Republican National convention).
Trump on the enemies within: “We have some really bad people in our government……and I say they’re more dangerous than Russia and China.”
Trump’s very smart critique of Biden’s very stupid mishandling of the Russia/Ukraine war, which has so far gotten next to zero Americans killed who didn’t go there to fight on their own, and which isn’t Trump buddy’s Putin’s fault for invading, but rather, Joe Biden’s: “We had a man that actually made it more prevalent. It was so bad. The words he was using, the stupid threats coming from a stupid face that he was using.”
Trump bringing the hard truth to Elon about his cost-prohibitive electric cars that range from as “low” as $38,990 to as high as $113,630, right in Joe Sixpack’s price range: “Your product is incredible.” (Populism!)
Elon sucking up to Trump for yet another government-funded job: “I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things and just ensures that the taxpayer money….…is spent in a good way. And I’d be happy help out on such a commission.” (As opposed to the “bad” way that doesn’t involve government contracts being showered on Elon’s companies, to the tune of billions of dollars? Or Trump adding twice as much to the national deficit as did stupid-face Biden? )
Trump responding to Elon’s job entreaty with his bare-knuckles pro-labor vetting process: “I’d love it…..Well you, you’re the greatest cutter. I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in and you just say, ‘you want to quit?’ They go on strike. I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s okay. You’re all gone. You’re all gone.’ So every one of you is gone and you are the greatest. You would be very good.” (More populism!)
Elon going into aww-shucks mode: “Well I’d be happy to help out.”
Are you blushing yet? Are you barfing yet? I’m doing both, so I’ll stop. On page 20 of 45. So there’s much, much more if you have the stomach for it. (I don’t.) It’s probably hard to quantify how many untruths were told, but CNN’s Daniel Dale gave it the old college try.
Though even Dale has not yet reported on whether Trump/Musk enjoyed a post-coital cigarette, or who will be wearing whose letterman jacket to the next pep rally.
Dear Matt,
You recently wrote in The Free Press that you had Olympic fever. So now that the games are over, what was your favorite Olympic moment?
Best,
Janet A.
You mean besides Celine Dion’s triumphant comeback in the opening ceremonies, who has been said to have been suffering from Stiff Person Syndrome for years? (Not to be Mr. Whistleblower, but I saw her move a little.)
I’d have to say, for me, my favorite moment came during the Olympics’ newest fake sport of breakdancing. A “sport” I thought I’d left behind in the mid-eighties, when I came out of the cinematic masterpiece, Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo, saying, “Dadgum it, I’ll never be able to dance-battle like Shabba Doo and his dance-combat troupe.” Then, with ambitions dashed, I traded in my parachute pants for the stretch chinos that provide comfort and functionality for us dads-on-the-go.
But no, breaking is back all right. And fully realized in the form of one breaker in particular, a “B-girl” named Raygun, a 36-year-old white cultural studies professor from Australia who stunk it up so badly that she scored zero points from the judges. Yes, she did a move called “the kangaroo.” (In which she literally jumps like a kangaroo, staying on-brand for her homeland.) Yes, she wore green mom sweats while trying to act like a 19-year-old black guy. Yes, she is the subject of nearly universal ridicule. But I admire her confidence. I admire her poise. I admire her unflappability. Note to self: be more like Raygun. She might be defeated, but her heart will go on, just like Celine Dion sang in a song of the same name. A song that Mr. Trump took to using at his campaign events, which Dion’s people have said is not sanctioned, which one could easily see breaking Elon Musk’s heart. Assuming he has one. But I trust those emotionally volatile kids — or their attorneys — will work it out amongst themselves.
Meanwhile, here’s a little Raygun taste if you missed her. (I apologize for not giving you a cleaner copy without commentary — thank the NBC copyright monsters for that.)
Dear Matt,
We get it. You fly fish a lot. And then release all the fish you catch. Why do you engage in this pointless pageant? What do you get out of this? What are we — the nonfisherpersons — supposed to get out of it?
Skeptically,
Roger J.
Rog — if I may — I totally understand why you’d distrust anyone who insists on the necessity of catching fish, only to let them go. It would seem, on its face, a pointless endeavor. An act of futility, at best. An act of sadism (on the fish’s part) at worst. I have written about this at some length, and so refer you to my Substack archive and writings abroad for further explanation. But I’m secure enough in my own thoughts on the subject to dip in to the thoughts of others. Like the great Michigan fisherman/writer Jerry Dennis, whose praises I have sung in these pixels before, and which I will sing again now. Because I think Dennis understands the necessity of fishing as only a fisherman could. And here is what he said, in a delightful essay titled “Why Fish?” in a book called The River Home: An Angler’s Explorations. In that chapter, a woman at a glamorous dinner party asked Dennis why he fished, which he gave her a substandard answer for.
And then he went home, and thought about it for a long time And came up with a much better answer. Which is what writers tend to do: come up with good answers after it’s too late to mean anything. But this was his more considered response, which is a pretty good one:
If I had the wit and the woman had been inclined to listen, I could have told her that fishing makes us alert, pulls us out of our thoughts, and engages us is something bigger than ourselves. It’s a restorative that cleanses us when we’ve become muddied and makes us healthy when we’ve become sickened. It’s a brace against pessimism.
Fishing, I should have explained, teaches us to perform small acts with care. It humbles us. It enriches our friendships. It cultivates reverence for wild things and beautiful places. It reminds us that time needs occasionally to be squandered. It offers relief from overdue bills and endless chores and appalling world events. It makes us participants in nature instead of spectators, a crucial distinction because participants tend to become passionate and protective and spectators tend to become indifferent.
I could have said that looking down into a lake, an ocean, or a river is like looking up into the night sky, that both water and sky are filled with mysteries, and when we stare deeply into them we connect with every man and woman who has ever sensed the tugging vitality of the universe. We become part of a larger community, united by mysteries so vast that they made our differences of opinion and philosophy seem very small.
Anglers are people who want to get beneath the surface of things. I wish I could have made the woman at the dinner understand that the fishing is simply a way to open our hearts to the world.
Yep, Jerry Dennis covers it nicely.
Bonus Film Clip: Here is the aforementioned Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo dance-battle scene. This is not an endorsement. Please remember that dance-violence is never the solution, only another problem: