“Mad Men and Troubadours”

The peripatetic life of the journeyman folksinger has seen our man Tommy Treacle wearing sundry musical hats. From his bid to write horror-movie themes to reworking heavy metal songs into folk ballads to a foray into political tunes, he has generally eschewed the conventions of the touring troubadour. While he’s seen his share of dive bars and roughneck saloons, enough to earn a few scars and sordid tales from the road, he always looked for ways to find new audiences. During one particularly fallow stretch, he took a stab at writing product jingles. In this first example, you will hear an old ad spot from the 50’s for Ban Deodorant, which is followed by his own demo version done in the early aughts. The irony here will not be lost on his friends and family since Tommy rarely ever used deodorant himself.

Tommy even shopped his wares around Madison Avenue but to no avail. He watched the entire series of “Mad Men” and did find inspiration (saying he looked more like Bert Cooper than Don Draper) but grew dispirited when he discovered that Secor Laxatives is not a real product. He claimed it was his best jingle (I’ll try to uncover it!). Our second ditty is his take on FLOMAX, which dates from 2007 and follows an actual product advertisement for the same. And, for the record, he always contended his urinary stream was stronger than Secretariat’s.

There were a few others, including for Preparation H, but I’m not sure the world is ready for that one. It’s pretty graphic.

“My Menagerie”

My friend TH lovingly used A.I. in crafting this image of me as a Talosian from the Star Trek episode “The Menagerie” (1966). They were a society of humanoids with brains 3x that of man. After the devastation of nuclear war, the survivors went underground and developed heightened psychic abilities, but ultimately fell to an obsession of creating illusions and distortions with their minds. And in that way the parable runs parallel to Trump and his MAGA horde — although their brains are, on average, about 1/3x.

“Trump’s A-hole Conclave”

The Narcissist-in-Chief “jokes” his way to infamy . Dante has a special place for him on the 9th Circle where he can perform the Sisyphean task of cleaning gilt-gold toilets, continuously caked with the effluvia from Circles 1-8, with his forked tongue.

Since Trump offhandedly endorsed the notion of him becoming pope, I wanted to offer a few papal names that he might deserve:

Pope Decadent X

Pope Doucheus Amoralis III

Pope Un-Innocent IV

Pope Anus Equinus IX

Pope Idiot Maximus

Pope Irredeemable V

Pope Judas Democratis II

Pope Fuckface I

Gimme a fucking break… the only things he worships are himself and money… although I will endorse the homoerotic underpinning!

I want to talk for a moment about these “artworks” of Jon McNaughton. I have come to appreciate them as perhaps the most succinct embodiment of the projection and hypocrisy of the MAGA movement. It is, in short, an unapologetic trolling exercise. I think the overarching theme of the modern Republican movement is pure FANTASY, much of it of the sinister kind. Power and policy based on lies and half-truths. For McNaughton these visions come conveniently in both bright, aspirational and also dark, apocalyptic colors. He’s Bob Ross for the paranoid, conspiratorial, gun-toting, white nationalist, homophobic, incel coalition. It’s all so fucking sad and ridiculous.

The political problem of triangulating with an opposition force ran Clinton into trouble as he tacked to the center and signed the ill-advised criminal justice bill while balancing the budget; yet they still gutted him over the Lewinsky affair (Blowgazi). The chief inquisitor, Newt Gingrich, at the time cheating on his wife, showed them the way and now, true to form, they herald Trump — the serial groping, philandering and porn-star paying dirtbag — as their holy deliverer. That asymmetrical dynamic has only increased since the 1990’s in the “post-truth” and “alternative facts” era. The GOP has turned itself into what Paul Newman’s character in “The Sting” called “the big con.” You can’t win a game if one side keeps changing the rules and, even then, won’t abide by them. It’s an administration run, literally, by members of FOX News, which itself creates a dizzying stream of propaganda, fearmongering and counterfactual stupidity. They succeed daily at Steve Bannon’s exhortation to “flood the zone with shit.” In fact, that would be an apt tag-line — “FOX News: Flooding the Zone With Shit Since 1996!”. Obama faced the same headwinds, as evidenced by the absurd faux outrage over his TAN SUIT (to ponder: how many tan suits equals an attempted stolen election?).

Notice the tan shorts and comment about his excessive golfing, as if to prove my point. The GOP machine has perfected the “art” of projection. At least Obama didn’t cheat at golf. And the conflagration presumably refers to the radical left’s “War on Christmas.”

It is well known that there are a great many more words in the English language for negative attributes than positive. I think the wordsmiths were preparing us for the extreme buggery and skullduggery from the likes of McCarthy-Nixon-Trump, the axis of weasels. Psychologists have a term that well applies here, the “dark triad,” which includes the following pathological charcteristics (all fully max’d out by Trump himself):

Narcissism

Machiavellianism

Sociopathy

What differs in Trump 2.0 is that so many more of his administration, and in the Republican Congress, share some or all of these negative characteristics. It’s a gigantic morass filled with mis/disinformation, conflicts of interest, illegality, non-transparency, and an utter lack of expertise. A menacing-clown-car driving wildly around the country with “dirty” fissile material in the trunk that contaminates anything within a hundred mile radius, while also playing really shitty music. The White House is now a gilded Porta-Potty for all the “waste, fraud and abuse” that comes out of Trump’s mouth. Yup, it’s a Dark Fantasyland that McNaughton and FOX and QAnon have created and continue to prop up. To the upside, you could teach kids a panoply of negative vocabulary terms based in DJT alone. But first, a little music theory. As some will know, a musical cord is made up of three notes (a triad), often the root, the third and the fifth of a given scale in Western music. A particular chord is called “tritonic” if it contains a “tritone,” which is a dissonant interval of three whole tones between two notes. In the Middle Ages, it was sometimes referred to as “the Devil’s interval” for its spooky evocations and is frequently employed in horror films like “Halloween.”

“Mucho-Macho-MAGA-Man… I want to be a MAGA-Man!”

So I began thinking in “triads” or chords, vis-a-vis Trump/Musk, Inc. Here are a few tritonic chords sketched out as examples. Feel free to build your own chord library at home!

Destructive

Divisive

Duplicitous

That works pretty well. Let’s try another:

Sadistic

Sycophantic

Sleazy

Fun, right?! And also damn accurate!

Heedless

Hypocritical

Huckstering

There are so many possibilities. It’s hard to stop!

Mean

Manipulative

Maniacal

Would you like more….???

Disruptive

Destructive

Defiling

It just never ends…..

Bombastic

Bullying

Buffoonish

… sadly for us…

Un-Constitutional (Authoritarian)

Un-Christian (Assholes)

Un-Scientific (Asinine)

But to veer away from the alliterative, I offer these last few:

Incompetent

Vengeful

Corrupt

With their typical actions characterized as…

Fabrication

Projection

Bluster

Then finally we have the home triad…. and this should be their new slogan (but, then again, why stop at three??):

FANTASY…!!

VENALITY…!!

CRUELTY…!!

BIGOTRY…!!

HYPOCRISY…!!

MENDACITY…!!

Absurdity is, quite obviously, the whole point. TrumpWorld is more like the fantasy inherent to a video game or theme park or secular cult than any unified and coherent political philosophy. And McNaughton’s art certainly captures the essential unevolved fakery and delusion that so characterize Trumpism. He nails it. I must give him that.