Hearts, Minds, and Huevos
Should the RNC start a MAGA organ selling program? Plus, why meatspace beats screen life, and the beautiful simplicity of Tom Petty
Editor’s Note: Have a question you’re afraid to ask? Join the club. Matt has questions he’s afraid to answer, like “how does he do it?” He doesn’t know. It’s not his job to deconstruct The Magic. Just to perform it. So ask your deepest, darkest questions at askmattlabash@gmail.com.
Dear Matt,
I read that Mr. Putin generously donated the warm heart of a deceased deer to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on a hunting trip. Upon receiving this gift, the prime minister apparently lost his lunch behind a tree. What a sissy.
But Putin is a real man. I really admire his generosity. So inspiring and pure. A man after my own heart. And this brings me to another kind and selfless soul, who is closer to home. Trump…..Here is my idea: Perhaps the RNC could create a new revenue stream selling organs. Or even entire bodies. Maybe it’s not the most innovative idea, after all, human sacrifices have been made for tens of thousands of years. But don’t you think it’s high time to make sacrificing chic again? Surely they could get more than $60 for a heart, which is what they charge for the Lee Greenwood Bible. I mean, people sell their souls at Mar-a- Lago for free every day of the week, don’t they? Ask Lindsey Graham. So why not add a price tag for a body part? This revenue stream could help to pay the legal bills for the most important man who has ever lived and ensure he remains in the White House forever, or at least until he returns for a Second Coming via cryogenics. So what do you think?
Crystal Knowhim in San Francisco
Are you being sarcastic? Because I smell sarcasm, which I don’t have time for. I’m a busy person, as spring slowly eases into summer. I have to paint the deck, weed the mulch beds, and fish the sulphur hatch for brown trout. And of course, after a long winter of sloth/carb-loading, I’m trying to get back into mankini shape for Trump boat-parade season. My status as a sexpot Rumble Influencer depends on it.
But your organ-selling idea is an intriguing one.
The RNC, like Lindsey Graham, has, of course, already sold its soul to MAGA Inc., allowing everyone’s favorite Stepford daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, to become co-chair as it turns itself into a wholly-owned subsidiary of DJT, the latter of whom might be single-handedly underwriting the defense bar with his myriad legal woes. So why not put her in a prominent fundraising position? Somebody has to pay all these lawyers, and Trump himself isn’t in the habit of doing so. Eric’s multi-talented wife, who has worn every hat from playing “special correspondent” on Trump Productions’ online Real News Update (a fake news show), to being a Tom Petty cover singer, is now adding “clairvoyant” to her CV. It seems Lara’s claimed the presidential debates are “rigged” against her father-in-law, months before they’ve even happened, and mere hours after they were announced. She’s been roundly mocked for it online. But like she sings in her/Petty’s song, she won’t back down.
As of earlier this year, the RNC was facing its worst cash crunch in over a decade, one that only promises to grow steeper if Lara starts expensing her Botox and filler treatments. So finding novel ways to raise money — besides spamming senior citizens with scary if-they-can-do-this-to-Trump-they-can-do-this-to-you emails (it’s a pretty safe bet that Grandma didn’t have sex with a porn star, pay her hush money, then lie about it on campaign finance reports) — might be just what the doctor ordered. After all, who wouldn’t pay top dollar for Lil’ Marco Rubio’s spine (assuming he has one), or J.D. Vance’s huevos, which Trump currently keeps in an adorable MAGA coin purse in his back pocket.
It all makes me wonder how much I could get for one spleen, heavily used. Which I’m getting tired of venting in these pages, while writing about one ethically-challenged failure after another. In fairness to the MAGAbots, they’re not good for much, but they are good for making the rest of us feel morally superior. Just look at these guys, showing up to Trump’s corruption trial in their matching pompom-girl outfits. (Mike Johnson, apparently, missed the “hey-wouldn’t-it-be cool-if-we-all-wore-solid-ties-like-Mr.-Trump” memo.)
Their fealty is almost touching. However much you humiliate yourself in your daily life – maybe you fire off squeakers in church, or butter your own corn to Gayle King’s Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover, or insist that it’s actually preferable to have a “doodle” breed to a real dog “because they’re hypoallergenic” – you will never beclown yourself as hard as these stooges regularly do. They’ve already given their hearts, brains, and dignity away for free. Why not throw in a few vital organs and make some real money for the cause?
Hi Matt,
For my birthday, my beloved treated me to a close-up magic show in a small venue. For Christmas, she took me to the Big Apple Circus. Call me a geek, but I love, love, love such shows that renew for me a sense of child-like wonder. But I wonder. When we brought our great niece and nephew (6 and 4) to the circus, they were excited by the energy of a real-life crowd, loud noises, flashing lights. But the acts left them yawning. At their tender ages, they've already been exposed to so much sophisticated, whiz-bang CGI, animation, and YouTube stunts that I fear they're irretrievably jaded. Can nothing IRL seem wonderful to them anymore? Is it possible for a human to lose the sense of joy and awe from a gorgeous sunset, a redwood cathedral, a silent mountain top? Is it a matter of stepping up the intensity a la virtual reality? Where does that end? Are there broader, deeper implications?
Yours in astonishment and delight,
Tino K.
I usually use setups such as yours to do my neo-Luddite routine, and to tool on younger generations, generally holding that it’s important to keep the kids in their place so that they don’t get any big ideas about rotating us out before it becomes absolutely inevitable. But I’m going to make a prediction in the case of your niece and nephew — I think odds are that they’ll probably be all right.
Yes, they are bombarded by more technological marvels and distractions than any of us ever experienced at that age. But the pleasures those yield are vicarious ones. Vicarious pleasures tend to be preferable to none at all. But when push comes to shove, it’s better to live in real life than on your screen(s), which they will figure out in time. Or to bring things back to adult world: would you rather prepare and eat bistecca alla Fiorentina, with all the sensory goodness that entails, or watch Stanley Tucci do it on Searching for Italy? (Even though I was a fan of the show.) Would you rather make love to a real live person, or watch two strangers rutting it up on Pornhub? (A rhetorical question, you don’t have to answer that.)
Or take one of my meatspace pastimes: fly fishing. I like reading about fishing and watching fishing videos well enough. But I’d much rather have my own adventures, even if that “adventure” is nothing more than running out to a local pond to catch bluegill. Because a feisty little bluegill on the end of my line is of more immediate interest to me than some YouTube showoff in Isla Mujeres with an Atlantic sailfish on the end of his.
Why, just this past week, I had to sneak away from all the noise — the noise didn’t miss me, or even notice I was gone — to do what I always do this time of year: chase brown trout around one of my favorite rivers, the Gunpowder. Though sulfur mayflies come thick off the water right about now, looking like yellow-orange visions of gossamer with wings, the fish in this pressured tailwater have advanced degrees in fly evasion, often being able to decipher between real bugs and artificials the way the tech-savvy among us can spot an AI-generated image a mile away.
Consequently, I’m often happy to catch two or three fish. But on this perfect spring afternoon, ten were generous enough to come to hand, before I turned them loose. Never an easy thing for me. Not because I want to eat the fish, but because I can’t stop looking at these swimming artworks — tawny masterpieces, haloed and speckled in blacks, and browns, and reds. Perhaps they’re not quite as brilliantly colored as brook trout, but they tend not to be as promiscuous, either, which makes every one you catch mean even more.
Right in the middle of Salmo trutta communion, I heard a hard rustling in the brush, expecting perhaps a black bear (some of the river’s newer inhabitants) to break through. But instead, something looking like my polar-bear dog, Solomon, made a cameo. It was a Maremma Sheepdog on the loose – Maremmas being the Italian cousins of Solomon’s people (the Great Pyrenees).
Nella was the dog’s name, I learned straightaway. Not from any formal introduction — the dog didn’t speak (which is maybe why I so enjoy the company of dogs) — but I could hear her owner, in a pleasing Swiss-Italian accent, calling after her. But not before she jumped in the hole and dog-paddled around, putting fish down for the next half hour. Ordinarily, this would’ve pissed me off. But I don’t see Maremmas every day, or ever, really. So I happily waded over to her when she took her place near her owner back on the riverbank. He handed me a hunk of baguette to feed her, which she just as happily chomped down, unaware of her lack of fishing etiquette.
Was it a monumental event? Would it wow a YouTube audience? Probably not. It’d be rather ho-hum. But a ten-brown-trout afternoon with a surprise appearance from a polar dog was exciting to me, the only person it needed to excite. I wouldn’t trade it for any CGI’ed alternative, or whatever other circus is unfolding in the fake world.
Bluebird update: More news from meatspace. Bluebird Brood #15, discussed here, and pictured below, is about to fledge. They’re getting big. It always makes me weepy when the young’uns leave home. So I might have to numb the pain with another trout run.
Bonus Track: Since the late, great Tom Petty’s name was taken in vain upstairs, here’s one of his A-list songs, “Wildflowers.” (He has plenty more where that came from.) A beautifully simple tune. As he told Performing Songwriter magazine back in 2014: “I just took a deep breath and it came out. The whole song. Stream of consciousness: words, music, chords. Finished it. I mean, I just played it into a tape recorder and I played the whole song and I never played it again. I actually only spent three and a half minutes on that whole song. So I’d come back for days playing that tape, thinking there must be something wrong here because this just came too easy. And then I realized that there’s probably nothing wrong at all.”
This is a posthumously released home-recording demo of “Wildflowers.” I probably like the full studio version better. That’s here if you’re so inclined. But the video for the home recording is so wonderful, that I’m going with it: