DeSanctimoniously pussy-whipped
Obviously, people would rather vote for a real man with a fake tan and who grabs the pussies as opposed to identifying with them, writes
Last year — or about a million light years ago in “real time ”— Budweiser Lite attempted to attract a younger audience to beer by appealing to the LGBTQ plus plus plus community through the valiant efforts on Instagram and TikTok of one Dylan Mulvaney. They met with some resistance. Dylan was a newly minted transfluencer at the time, as in she’d recently decided to identify as a woman. On the path to self-discovery and dozens of commercial endorsements, this lovely creature sadly found herself at the epicentre of the American culture wars. No “real men”, it transpired, wanted to drink Bud Lite under these circumstances.
Manly social commentators like Kid Rock (who’s veering towards Grampappy Rock these days), who was married to Pamela Anderson for a year and therefore very, very heterosexual, called for an immediate boycott of this “depraved” company. Consequently, Bud Lite’s actual consumers crushed actual cans of beer underfoot on the socials, resulting in Anheuser-Busch’s stock falling by 20% in the middle of bomb threats on beer plants and counter boycotts by the gay bars of Chicago when Dylan was dropped like a hot, bedazzled potato.
It was a proverbial storm in a beer mug. Leading the charge in Florida, where guns are bigger and alligators roam, was governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis or DeSanctimonious as the other Florida presidential hopeful Donald Trump would style him from his supervillain lair, aka Mar a Lago. Ronnie, a Yale and Harvard alumni but still a “man” of the people, threw in his two cents by stating that he’s sick of “woke companies trying to change our country” and that “pushback is in order across the board”.
That’s why it’s particularly moving that in his speech and on his Xit interview on the channel formerly known as Twitter, DeSanctimonious quoted Budweiser’s payoff line from an old ad campaign: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts,” conceding utter, humiliating defeat and promising that he doesn’t plan to stand in the way of the Don on his path to re-election.
He must have got it off Google in one of those nice, pre-packaged Instagram quote posts thinking he was quoting Churchill — because, obviously! But alas, this rousing sentiment was, in fact, an inducement to drink beer in the face of abject poverty and complete despair back in The Depression. It was coined long after Churchill’s political star (burnished by his daring escape during the Anglo-Boer War) had waned, but before World War 2 had cast him into his new role as “elder wit and orator most quoted by less eloquent politicians trying to gain gravitas in the face of total disaster and annihilation”.
In any event, DeSantis quoting the beer company that used to be No 1 in the US (but which is now No 2 after Modelo Especial —a Mexican beer that comes from over the border and under the wall) has a special flavour in a year of election campaigning that promises to make “America Great Again” while killing off the great American beer by taking it down a notch or two. I hazard that this US election will trade on all the old playground insults that the generation of ancient men who lead the US know and understand so well.
Donald Trump is 77, so when he wants to take down his much younger opponent, namely Ron DeSantis, he calls him a pussy and implies he likes cross dressing and wearing high heels. Obviously, people would rather vote for a real man with a fake tan who grabs pussies as opposed to identifying with them. Nikki Haley is the only other Republican insane enough to stand against Trump (she really does wear dresses and heels). With her, he’ll go for the other old chestnut: “over the border” insults. Like Barack Obama, she can’t really be an American — isn’t she some kind of immigrant? She can’t be top beer.
This playground-inspired banter would be funny if the septuagenarians and the four score and twenty-one crew (Biden has outlived his biblically appointed time by 11 years) weren’t making the kids feel old with their immature behaviour.
It seems the more geriatric the rulers of the world become, the older Gen Zs (people born between 1997 and 2012, so the oldest are 27) feel. Apparently Gen Zs are ageing faster than millennials (1981-1996) — at least according to the viral hashtag #ageing like milk. You used to be able to take your weary bones offline and do your ageing privately, reappearing on the platforms with a better filter. Now you age in real time on TikTok. A visual diary of your changes keeps you company, recording every slip and slide down the path to perdition and, eventually, expiry.
There are some theories about why this cohort of youths are ageing faster than the preceding generation. Impending cataclysms brought on by the old men in power, global weather implosions and total annihilation as per the doomsday clock (which remains at a comforting 90 seconds to midnight after being reset this week), wars aplenty and a constant stream of information regarding baby Botox and “prejuvenation” beauty marketed at Gen Z and their precocious followers, Gen Alpha.
This group grew up on extreme makeup tutorials. They watched Kylie Jenner become a billionaire on the strength of her “beauty brand” and her own outrageous lip filler (she’s since semi-deflated her pout). They understand the power of a good filter but also beg the plastic surgeons to make them look like their filters in real life because the lapse between filter and reality is a deep chasm of existential woe and, “who wants to live there?” Plus, they spent two years of their educational lives on zoom and have replaced boob jobs with nose jobs as the most requested plastic surgery intervention (the camera makes your schnozz look bigger online).
They could also, and I am spitballing here, just be getting older. As Buddha said, “Everything that has the nature to arise will also pass away.” True, unless you’re in your dotage, in which case you should totally run for president and remember the good old days when men where men, beer was Bud Lite, and Ron deSanctimonious was pussywhipped by a guy with better Viagra and hair. I wish this stuff would get old already.