Fast food, fascism, banality 🍔

Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄

🎵 The song for this post is Sugar, Sugar, by The Archies. 🎵

Because we live in The Hell Timeline, we were treated to this:

Helen Rosner wrote a great thing about the spectacle:

Trump, in typical form, spun Monday’s catering as ultimately the fault of his political opponents, an inevitable result of his own elective government shutdown, which has left hundreds of thousands of federal employees furloughed—including, presumably, the White House kitchen staff. Trump, a purported billionaire, made a big deal out of the fact that he paid for the fast food out of his own pocket. But we might wonder if there is also something more pure in his decision to bring in a drive-through feast for the history books: an attempt, however opportunistic, for a man who loves fast food to fulfill his straightforward desires—a gilded hall filled with as many fried and griddled patties as money can buy, more Filet-o-Fishes and Quarter Pounders than one body could possibly consume, the teetering towers a quantifiable testament to his Presidential power.

But before this, she wrote another piece on the President's eating that I like more, and find relevant to the idea that he probably just ordered this because it's what he thinks it's cool:

It’s possible that President Trump has very good reasons for preferring his steak well done. Maybe he makes a yearly practice of trying a medium-rare ribeye, just to make sure that his preferred doneness is truly a matter of subjective preference, and not some damning psychological tell. But his other eating habits, even in the context of his reported germophobia, speak to a gastronomic risk aversion — a fundamental lack of trust — across the board. He prefers fast food, and rarely varies his order. His favorite dish at Mar-a-Lago is the meat loaf, and that’s not even some inspired chef’s creation, it’s the meat loaf of his childhood, his mother’s own recipe. He has a well-documented aversion to eating with his hands. When he dines at Jean-Georges, the three-Michelin-star restaurant in the Trump International Tower in New York, he asks for a personalized order — ”the special thing you made for me,” Chris Christie recalled him requesting of a server — rather than the innovative, creatively constructed dishes on the menu. Donald Trump is not a man who likes to try new things, and that says a lot about him.

They're both better when read to completion! They're not long! 😄

(also, he definitely didn't pay for the fast food like he claimed. this is the man who took money from a charitable foundation to pay a $7 Boy Scout registration fee. he cashed a check for 13 cents. he's the cheapest bastard you know)

In general, I don't like meme-ing fascism; I was pretty irritated by "covfefe" jokes, and MAGA hat parodies feels like the humor equivalent of slapping Googley Eyes onto a swastika. Ridiculing and humiliating fascists using humor is great! But toothless, cutesy displays that trivialize the shit we're in just reminds me that this is just a game or a distraction for a lot of well-intentioned people.

But for this event, in the spirit of "Woman Takes Short Half-Hour Break From Being Feminist To Enjoy TV Show", I enjoyed a lot of the clowning folks have done on this one:

This is the news photo that would make a returning time traveler realize they fucked something up. via Jess Dweck

Matt Barbot put it side by side with the Pale Man from Pan's Labyrinth (you can see the scene here)

pat tobin referencing "you know you're doomed" from Goodfellas.

Re-posted by many (I plucked it from here), this is my favorite, referencing Steamed Hams, (great explainer here, original scene).

Also, The Atlantic did a "50 Unthinkable Moments of the Trump Presidency". And On The Media did a great segment with Daniel Dale on just how much this fucker lies. I'll never forgive the 62 million dipshits who voted for him.