CSotD: Delta Force
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Michael de Adder spins Melania's husband's TIME cover, marking her part in our shattered dialogue, but don't laugh too hard.
If you dare to think you're not part of the problem, then you're surely not part of the solution.
It's not just a jacket. It's a fashion statement about us, and about the society we've built, that goes nearly as far back as Melania herself, who was only eight years old when Bluto smashed that guitar.
Let's remember that Flounder and Larry only went over to the Delta House because at the Omega house they were considered as undesirable as minorities and the disabled.
What an insult!
The all-white, American-born Deltas didn't want fat people, either, but had to take Flounder as a legacy.
Good thing, too: Larry and Flounder and all of us would otherwise have missed out on the joy of racist, sexist, cruel partying, set in a time when the uptight squares were supporting JFK.
The Deltas really didn't care. Did you?
Because after all the laughs were over, Bluto became a Senator with a big car and a hot wife.
The joke was that he'd been a rich preppy frat boy all along.
You might wonder how a crude, racist, sexist pig like that could get through a decent college and rise to such heights, but, then again, at least they didn't suggest that he'd made it to the White House.
What did we think was so funny?
If you want a depressing look at our world that doesn't forgive anybody for having laughed, go to Netflix and stream "Drunk, Stoned, Brilliant, Dead," the story of the National Lampoon, Animal House, SNL and the rest of the preppy, elitist gross-out humor movement.
Meanwhile, Melania didn't spray-paint that jacket herself. It's an off-the-rack item.
Which, as this Ellis Rosen cartoon suggests, doesn't let her off the hook for having worn the thing.
I used to defend Melania as a victim, dedicated to protecting Barron and little else, but she's lost me here.
I have no explanation for why she wore it, except that her spokesperson's statement that "It's just a jacket" and has no meaning is as stupid as wearing the damn thing in the first place.
As for being tone deaf, I'm not sure why a First Lady would be wearing clothes with slogans of any sort — it seems a bit déclassé unless you're attending a Super Bowl or something — but then I'm not sure why a 48-year-old would shop at a teeny-bop place like Zara, either.
Unless it's because she likes "sheriff" shirts and handbags with Indian good luck symbols.
But beyond any of those issues, there remains the question of how someone in the public eye could wear that particular slogan even in good times, let alone in a time of crisis?
Well, the fact is, we're all Deltas, and not giving a damn — Lalo simply translates the Spanish company's jacket into a potentially more vulgar Spanish term — is stylish, and as humorous as leaving a bunch of frightened young white college girls in a bar full of scary, scary negroes.
If we thought that was funny — and leave us not bullshit one another on that count — why wouldn't it be clever to visit imprisoned children with a jacket proclaiming that you don't give a damn?
None of which forgives Melania's insensitive cruelty.
Rather, it is intended to suggest that we look deeper and not pretend that she's out on the edge far away from the rest of us.
We're all Deltas, and even those of us who didn't vote for Bluto didn't summon up enough votes against him.
We figured the worst he would do would be to spew mashed potatoes over the table at a state dinner.
Meanwhile, way too many of us have wet our pants and run away over the news that little Yanela Sanchez was not actually taken from her mother and that the pair have — lucky them! — been imprisoned together.
This, our one-time allies on social media now declare, means it was wrong to use that heartbreaking photograph as a symbol of the fear children experience when confronted by authorities at border crossings.
(Psst — I think this TIME Magazine cover was Photoshopped, too. Horrors!)
When the first "oh dear, this picture isn't real" messages popped up on Facebook, I assumed they were coming from Russian bots and I'm not sure some of them weren't.
But plenty of them are coming from real people who had previously decried the inhumane policy but are now somehow convinced that, because the particular child in this particular photograph is not a victim of the specific full-blown policy of separation, her fear and upset cannot represent those who were.
This is the stupidest goddam bullshit I have encountered in a very long time.
If someone had taken a picture of a kid pitching a fit at a Target store and published it as an example of kids at the border, that would be bad.
But this is a frightened refugee kid responding to a confrontation between border agents and herself and her mother, and to suggest that she is reacting any differently, or less authentically, than the kids who ultimately end up in cages assumes that these kids know what's going on at the moment and what will happen next.
Mostly, it's a chickenshit excuse to do nothing.
Most soldiers never fire their guns and most of us are content to find any excuse to let the other fellas fight the battles.
But quit cowering in your foxholes: As soon as we saw the photo, we all knew what would happen next:
The fascisti would begin nitpicking it to deflect its clear and obvious impact.
And you bought it.
Welcome to Delta House.
If you're looking for an excuse to wring your hands and do nothing, you've found it.
But, even if you're not looking for an answer to Melania's question, you've found that, too.
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