Kim’s making history, just not the kind she intended…
Q: How many narcissists does it take to sew Kim Kardashian into Marilyn’s “Happy Birthday, Mister President” dress?
A: That’s weird… I could have sworn I heard the sound… of someone else’s…. voice…?
Ukraine? What war in Ukraine? That’s sooooo last week! Our attention spans, like our imaginations, have shrunk like boiled mohair and we’ve moved on, Murgatroyd McGraw! Tell us, I dare you, tell us why we should spend more than the allotted two days of light-to-moderate concern on some dinky quasi-conflict with no oil, no shock and awe, and, adding insult to injury, all the bloodshed off camera!
Gimme something to work with, can’t ya? What’s the angle, here, the payoff, the claim to fame that’s mainly in Ukraine?
Smocked blouses spring to mind, very Von Trapp Family Singers, but any item of clothing documenting the tragic history of your people in cross-stitch is hard to carry off at the best of times. Pair these with shoes that don’t just require, but are actually made of, socks, and we’re talking a small fortune, especially if you take them to an ethnic cleansing specialist once a year, as Diana Vreeland would certainly have advised.
Then there’s ethnic dancing, which is just one big thing. All ethnic dancing is just exactly like all the other ethnic dancing, its goal being not fun, but marriage.
You have two lines, boychiiks and girlchiiks, and to the cheering sound of a balalaika orchestra they run into each other and grapple in this sort of football scrum until only two of them are left alive.
Then the guy dances around a sword, and the girl makes a cottage cheese pancake, and he goes, “OK?” and she goes, “OK!” and then he slices off part of his ear and he goes, OK?” and she goes “OK! You like fuck my sister maybe!?” and he goes, OK!”
And off they go skippity-hop, hand in hand, singing the traditional, “Me no like-a balalaika”, being careful not to step on the dead bodies of all the other hopefuls.
She eventually develops a thriving acrylic nail practice that she manages from her kitchen and he runs guns and mercenaries to the Middle East. This will just work.
Ethnic dancing ensures everyone from the fat chick, and I wish I could be less specific, up to the village idiot, usually the Mayor, will find there is someone special just waiting around the corner, possibly clutching some Swarovski crystals and a glue gun.
What other selling points? Let’s not forget Chicken Kyiv, and much like you, I imagine Vlad Putin flying over the capital city shouting “Nyaah Nyaa-ni Nyaa Nyaa! Chicken, Kyiv!” through a bullhorn, just to demoralize everyone and throw them off their game.
But, accurate as that may be, it’s not everything. Chicken Kyiv is also a national dish of chicken breast stuffed with cottage cheese pancakes and anything else you need to smuggle across the border under a smocked blouse, and like Vlad himself, it is a difficult dish to love. No country can aspire to greatness that just settles for stuffed chicken breast. Like, put some bacon on it, at least.
Ukraine hasn’t even caught up to the “apple-cinnamon-scented” level, which, when applied to everything you want to smell like cinnamon and apples, for example, cinnamon apple pie, and a few things you wanted to just smell like themselves, like candles and underarms, has long been considered the sign of a healthy, functioning market economy.
Ukraine, a nation of hopeless Luddites, wants to ethnic dance its way into NATO just when every one else is repudiating it! Defending democracy is soooooo last century, and democracy has moved on. It tried to get into your pants, but you wouldn’t even answer its texts.
And now you’re sorry. It’s embarrassing, like old people are embarrassing, clutching their Earth, Wind and Fire CDs and rotary phones, screaming about their cold, dead hands.
It’s like Hillary just discovered tampons one day while walking around singing “You got your own cigarette, baby!” and popping Valium. It’s 2022! She should have her own porn empire and a pik line for a Fentanyl drip, or, failing that, at least a password that’s not “12345678Hillary”.
How will we drag Ukraine kicking and screaming backwards into the twenty-first century when it refuses to cooperate?
C’mon! No judgments, girlfriend. I’ve done all that I can do. I’ve put the little Ukrainian flag icon next to my profile name on Twitter and I switched up Facebook to a new frame. Like, I’m involved. I’m into activism. Luckily, blue and yellow go with my dark mode settings, but honestly?
Sooooo IKEA.
Meanwhile, I’m told that Kim Kardashian wore Marilyn Monroe’s iconic Jean Louis “nude” dress to the Met Gala. You know, the dress MM had to be sewn into before singing, and I use the term in its broadest sense, of including not singing, “Happy Birthday, Mister President” to JFK.
Personally I don’t know why she didn’t just add a few patches of stretch Velcro to the side panels and gusset, but that’s me, mister make-do-and-mend. Of course, there’s also “Spanx”.
Moving along, this decision, to wear, you know, Marilyn’s JFK-Happy Birthday dress has conservators of fashion apoplectic, but quietly and covered with tissue paper in a dark, temperature-controlled room.
Wearing an iconic historical dress valued at $10 million can cause, for example, little microscopic tears in the fabric, maybe even the fabric of time at that price point, and Minerva help you if you’re a heavy anti-perspirant user.
This sartorial slice of schlock history is currently owned by, believe it or not, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and I do, who assured everyone that Kim had to sign a contract not to perspire, sit down, lift her arms or breathe during the entire time she wore the dress on the red carpet, before rolling it off like a pair of used pantyhose and slipping her worthless excuse for a life into the replica she’d had made.
Did you hear what I said? The replica. If you’d stop falling asleep you wouldn’t miss shit.
That’s right. She’d had a replica made of the ten million dollar dress, using the money that, along with Jeff Bezos’s money, is not going to solve world hunger. Here’s why:
There’s a big vault full of million-dollar bills, like, a dark, temperature-controlled vault under the Arizona desert where Kim and Jeff and Elon go when life gets demanding. I’m sure you totally know this, and it just slipped your mind.
Once the six-foot lead doors are bolted, they get naked—no funny business, either, sex is sex, animals can have sex, this is money. Animals, do not, yet, have money, which is why we look down on them and generally show them disrespect by, for example, eating them—they get naked and smear themselves with almond butter and roll around and around and around in the million dollar bills, and whoever has the most bills sticking to them when the timer goes off gets to use that money, but, and here’s the relevant bit, thanks for sticking around, it has to be for something “fun”.
Giving food to dark-colored people in third world countries, like Somalia or the US, is not “fun,” in case you hadn’t noticed.
Well, do YOU think it’s fun? Is that how YOU spend your Saturday nights, you who hail from Des Moines? Right, so, put down those pearls, Little Miss Vera Virtue-Signal. Puh-leaze.
Anyway. Sarah Scaturro, chief conservator at the Cleveland Museum of Art and formerly a conservator at the Met’s Costume Institute, was frustrated by Kim’s decision of what to do with her win of the subterranean almond-butter money.
“So my worry,” she said to the LA Times, “is that colleagues in historic costume collections are now going to be pressured by important people to let them wear garments.”
Which is odd, because my worry is that Russians will rape more Ukrainian babies before shooting their mothers in the back of the head, and maybe Putin nuking New York City, but that’s probably because you get crankier as you get older. I probably should just chill more.
Kim wore the real dress, the dress that touched the sweaty, acetone-scented skin of Marilyn Monroe, and only changed into the replica once the damage had been done. Why? For the same reason that Elon Musk bought Twitter and that Jeff Bezos flew his own spacecraft into not-quite-space-enough.
She wore it for the same reason the Kardashians have their own private fire department, or why the conservative members of the US Supreme Court are banning abortions, and are ordering an enquiry into that decision being leaked, did they think we wouldn’t notice if it was Friday instead of Wednesday? Were they saving it up for Christmas? “Our surprise present to ourselves is your bodies!”
Or the same reason why Ron Desantis and Greg Abbott are leading the now worldwide campaign vilifying and virtually outlawing gay men and transgenders.
Because, first of all, gay men are out to recruit your kids, a program which has been a signal failure in the implementation, because the continent is not awash with ten-year-old boys mincing around screaming, “What a dump!” except in Florida, where every adult not from Florida tends to participate in that critique.
Secondly, transgenders don’t really recruit your kids because they’re too busy avoiding being murdered, which involves a lot of staying inside, or running, or killing themselves, which you’d think would at least get an honorable mention from Abbott for saving him part of his budget. I call that ungrateful.
Transgenders are getting the axe because, you know, they’re just weird. Let’s face it. Not weird like saying that non-existent wind mill farms forced on Texas by the non-existent Green New Deal is the cause of Texas’ failure to cope with snow, or getting your neighbours to report you to the Gazpacho Police if you drive someone to an abortion clinic in your taxi, so they can collect a bounty of ten thousand dollars. Not that kind of weird.
It’s that kind of weird that doesn’t cause any harm whatsoever, to anyone, even accidentally. No harm caused to anyone. To a governor of Texas, now, that’s weird.
She wore that dress— by the way, I said “wore” but actually she couldn’t cram her fat ass into it, even after dieting; she had to leave it unzipped, but it’s OK, she was just able to cover her shame with a white fox stole, which is certainly my preferred strategy—she wore the original just long enough to make the five people who care, but they really care, upset, for the same reason Dug-Up Ford, whose psychotic, mirthless grin is so big he had to order dentures that wrap around three hundred and sixty degrees, is ramming his unnecessary highway through a section of Toronto’s vulnerable green belt, or digging up Duffin’s Creek wetlands in Pickering, contrary to all the advice he hired advisors to give him:
They’re all doing it to say, “Fuck you. We can do this. Go ahead, stop us.”
And they’re all political leaders, Kim Kardashian and the Boys in the Band included. Anyone with billions can buy their own bespoke “democracy” and paper over the cracks of capitalism, figuring out who gets to get saved, so we’ll call them heroes. This is our idea of leadership, these are the people we want to emulate as we throw money at them like handfuls of Smarties.
These are the people who embody inequality, dogs eating dogs, instead of the baseline of equality that’s so desperately unexciting to us. How can we exult in others’ wealth, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, without believing that at least some of us will always have to be miserable? Lazy slackers to the man, if we felt safe and secure we’d lie in bed all day, just not the same way our safe and secure heroes lie in bed all day.
We don’t want democracy. We want the promise of the American dream, even if we’re eating alfalfa sprouts in deepest Alberta. We want to dream about making a shitload of money, fucking the system, and disengaging from society because it’s hard work dealing with all these other people who have the gall to say they want their rights, too.
Rights? What they really want is handouts. Just not the same kind of handouts our heroes get, as they lie in bed all day.
These mouthy moguls talk and behave like the world’s new royalty, King Jeff, the Earl Musk, and Princess Kim, and we buy into that totally. Instead of bloodlines and Debretts Peerage we count the billions to decide whose coronation we’re celebrating.
(Remember how Trump was mocked, but actually secretly admired, for “grab ’em by the pussy!” Here’s a bro who tells it like it is, thought all the bros. But when it came out that he wasn’t as rich as he’d let on? Now, that was embarrassing. That was important news.)
But the first reminder that they’re from the same beer-barrel as us is the contents of their wishlists, a crass collection of the useless, the juvenile, and the unnecessary.
Kim’s Christmas prezzie to herself we’ve dealt with, that pathetic ten minutes in a ten million-dollar antique body stocking, worn once by a third-rate actress, that didn’t even fit, and maybe there is a god.
Jeff’s toy was a rocket ship, into which he crammed his ugly bald head, some McDonald’s hash browns and a rich friend or two to make the most wasteful, unnecessary, immoral flight in history, while forest fires raged below and millions spent another day scrabbling through garbage dumps for sustenance. Nothing was gained: no new knowledge or discoveries. We already knew about black holes, and quasars, and that Jeff Bezos is a piece of shit.
Elon’s playpen is a factory that’s like a bubbling, roiling yogurt culture of racism that just keeps giving, with segregated staff, and cowed, demoralized employees all gathered together to manufacture autonomous cars that drive like your Great Aunt Ruby after she got the drops in her eyes at the optometrists, except she didn’t kill anyone.
We nod sagely as Musk pontificates about “freedom” and other topics with the trenchant insight of Readers’ Digest Magazine and trolls users on the social media platform he now owns. They think government is like a business, and they’re the CEO.
It’s just a replica of democracy, a souvenir of some place we did the guided tour of, but never truly appreciated.
It’s bait and switch, a scam, like when I used to ask my parents for money so I could buy them Christmas presents, which meant they effectively bought themselves that walk-in closet’s worth of silk-polyester squares and enough bottles of Old Spice to marinate a whale, or, actually, Dad.
Kim and Jeff and Elon are the royalty we crave and admire, what we want instead of the mentally taxing work of democracy. And they are all mentally ill, deeply, deeply mentally ill.
They are sick for attention, sick for power, sick with the sickness only money can buy. They are inhuman. They are the epitome of success in our time and they are zombies of money. They crave attention like a gay man craves a dick with shaved balls, like a heroin user craves another penetration of his vein.
Maybe they can all put on dead Marilyn’s dresses, climb into Jeff’s space dildo, and Tweet something snarky about transgenders from a little higher up than Mount Everest, and maybe, just maybe this time they’ll realize there’s no need to hurry back.
Like, don’t worry about the litre of milk.
We are all capitalists in the same way that we’re all racists: by default, out of sheer intellectual and moral laziness.
Conservatives are capitalists because they get rich from our passivity, our cowed belief that “the market will decide” and our terror, which they instilled in us, of altering the outcomes.
“That Jeff Bezos! Bless his cotton socks, he doesn’t pay tax! “
And do we tut-tut at his refusal to give back at least a bit of what he stole? Do we slap him in jail as quickly as we slapped, say, Martha Stewart, who was “made an example of”?
“Maybe…. one day I won’t have to pay tax, either…!”
Because our bird brains go right to: “Taxes! Bad! Tea Party! Freedom!”
Really, could the outcome of taxing Jeff until he only had, say, one billion dollars be worse than the outcome we have now? Tax Jeff until his pips squeak, he’ll still be fine. I promise you.
So what if there’s a little inflation! Tax the excess profits! You’d think we’d proposed rearranging the planets to spell “Things go better with Coke!” but it’s really very simple: If you wouldn’t let your five year old do it, don’t let corporations do it.
Would you let your five year old take all the toys from all the other kids and hide them in his corner? Of course not! You’d give him a little smack on the bum, tell him he’ll die alone and miserable in a trap house if he continues being so fucking selfish, then make him give the toys back.
Would you let your five year old pee on the floor then not clean it up? NO way! You’d force him on his hands and knees and hit him with a belt while he cleaned it up, then dock his allowance! Same with companies who pollute!
Would you let your five-year-old come into the living room at two AM and interrupt your grown up conversation with “I think Mummy and Daddy are a couple of stupid cocksuckers!” Of course you wouldn’t endure even a second of that before explaining to little Johnny that just because you can say it doesn’t mean you should, and that nasty talk is kind of intimidating. Then you’d hold his head in the toilet bowl while flushing it until he remembered.
Now, wasn’t that easy? Just fucking do it! Punish cheaters and liars and sneaks and criminals who steal and pollute. Distribute wealth until no one’s in poverty and everyone has the basic comforts of life. If they want more, they’ll have the safe space to be inventive in and earn more. Do you really think the only thing driving achievement is suffering and poverty? Bullshit.
Why do we care what conservatives think? They’ll think it anyway! If there’s nothing bad enough, they’ll make shit up. Just tax the rich, get rid of poverty and
you’ll wonder why you waited so long for just waffles when you could have had waffles and ice cream.
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