Enough Mugs!

With less than a year until the general election, it is time we come to terms with the fact that I will not be your next President.  Although I am constitutionally eligible to hold office, 2016 will not be our year.  2020 does not look good, either, but we will not cross that bridge when we do not come to it.

Ladies and gentlemen, our entire campaign would have been an uphill battle.  A profound lack of funding, combined with my own dismal charisma ratings and almost non-existent name-recognition, would have proven to be insurmountable obstacles.  However, not all is lost.

The ideas we have generated over the course of the last seven minutes, ideas born out of the incendiary environment that is modern America, can still be brought to light.  These are ideas that other, less-losable candidates can carry with them to the White House.  These ideas are as follows:

In the realm of health care, we propose that health care cost be based on actual market forces, not the whims of monkeys throwing darts at numbers.  If you do not believe in the monkey-dart hypothesis, then you have clearly never looked at an Explanation of Benefits form sent to you by your insurance company.  These forms are full of figures that not only seem to have no real basis in tangible health care products, these numbers seem to fluctuate based on a patient’s level of health insurance and number of lawn ornaments.

This is like walking into a car dealership and having this conversation.

Customer:  How much is this car?

Car Dealer:  Well, that depends. How much insurance do you have?

Customer:  Uh, what?

This is absurd.  We propose that health care costs be based on how quickly the customer can either run a quarter mile or how far they can throw a can of soup.  This is equally as stupid as monkeys flinging darts, but at least this way the customer will have a modest incentive to stay in shape, which will lower health costs overall.

In the realm of cyber security, we propose that all social media sights establish what will henceforth be known as a “Trending Filter.”  Why?  Because I don’t know care if Alyssa Milano is breast feeding her kid. I don’t.  There may have been a point in my life, around 1992, maybe, when this would have been news to me.  That day has passed.  Just because I have logged into my Facebook account does not mean I am a bored pervert.

We propose that these “Trending Filters” be color-coded in such a way that the user can select to what level of stupid they are exposed.  For example, a college-educated, political moderate who does not believe in ghosts could set their trending filter to “Fresh Laundered Khaki.” An unemployed teenage boy, on the other hand, could set their trending filter to “Fifty Shades of By Myself.”  Whatever works.  We are just tired of being tempted to click on stories about unicorn fossils.

On the manufacturing front, it has come to our attention that there are too many coffee mugs.  My kitchen cabinet alone has three times as many mugs as any reasonable person needs, collected over years as a recipient of last-minute gift-giving. 

We propose the institution of a “Year of Mugilee” cycle.  Mugs can be manufactured and sold for three years.  Then, on the fourth year, no mugs can be created.  You can borrow mugs and give old mugs as gifts, but no new mugs can be made.  Over time, this will decrease the clutter in our kitchen cabinets and also allow for a more pragmatic use of porcelain.  Admittedly, this is not our strongest idea.

Our final plan comes from the world of education.  Many students, beginning at about the age of seven months, begin to develop a disdain for formal schooling.  This distaste originates from a number of factors, but whatever the cause, students who do not like school almost always make it less productive for the other three people in the room.

Our current system makes students attend school until they are almost adults.  That’s dumb.  We propose the establishment of giant community food plots designed to give unmotivated students something to do besides text each other behind my back.  Students who do not want to go to school can be bused, free of charge, to these food plots.  Here they will be given the opportunity to grow a variety of geographically viable produce.  In lieu of grades, students will be compensated with fresh fruit while the excess produce is donated to community food banks.  Communities without food banks can put the food in mugs.

In closing, I would make a pretty bad President.

Gravity

Skiing downhill is easy.  This might sound ridiculous for those of you who, like me, have skied and almost died in the process. The reality is, however, that going from the top of the mountain to the bottom is not all that complicated.  If you are not overly concerned with how you look, whom you hit, or what bones you break, skiing downhill is simple.  Ski slopes are slippery.  Gravity does most of the work.

Skiing uphill, however, is a heftier trick, which brings us, naturally, to a discussion about  pornography.

As many of you know, Playboy was in the news lately for making a rather peculiar announcement: it is no longer going to publish non-articles.  This magazine, known for more than half a century as a place to find non-articles, will stop doing so, and the reason is quite simple:  market saturation.  The supply of non-articles has become so shockingly immense, so easily available on laptops, desktops, smartphones and tablets, that apparently it’s just not reasonable to actually try to sell such a product on glossy paper.

Thus, Mr. Hefner, the magazine’s founder, has inadvertently become this weird “victim” of his own enormous success.  I use the term “victim,” loosely, of course, because, by worldly standards, Mr. Hefner has done quite well.  Over the course of his nine decades he has garnered wealth, fame, and the consequences of each.  He’s had a life.  However, his flagship publication, which reached its peak in 1975 with over five million subscribers, now has a circulation of around 800,000. What makes the entire story ironic is that one could argue that he designed this scenario sixty years ago.

From the very beginning, Hefner saw his publication as more than just a way for men and adolescent boys to look at pictures of naked women.  Hefner saw himself as a top general in a 20^th century American culture war.  He was going to change the way American society viewed sexuality. He was going to fundamentally adjust what he considered puritanical sexual mores.

And he did.  Not by himself, of course, but by packaging images of “the girl next door” in between engaging text, he designed his magazine to be a more respectable alternative to the seedier mediums stashed away in the closets across America.  Over time this very juxtaposition diminished what many considered illicit content in the first place.  Although considered profane at the time, the earlier centerfolds would hardly raise an eyebrow now in few places outside the Middle East.

This erosion was by design.  When commenting in the New York Times about the decision, Scott Flanders, Playboy’s chief executive, had this to say, “That battle has been fought and won.  You're now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it's just passé at this juncture.”

            Before continuing, I think it’s reasonable to pause and just let that comment sink in.  Mr. Flanders, to my knowledge, was not being ironic or making a clumsy attempt at humor.       He apparently equates being able to view “every sex act imaginable for free” as some kind of first amendment victory lap, which now brings us back to skiing.  

The “slippery slope” theory basically states that once a society allows one thing to happen, such as looking at centerfolds of scantily clad women, it will eventually allow anything to happen, such as, well, the above paragraph. 

Now, it is important to admit that this process does not always play itself out.  For example, early immigration patterns caused many Anglo-American Protestants to fear that the nation would eventually be ruled by the Vatican.  Let in the Irish-Catholics, the thinking went, and eventually the entire nation would be run by papists.  Clearly those concerns were unfounded, as evidenced by a brief glance at an American history book.

            However, sometimes the “slippery slope” theory is spot on, which seems to be the case here. 

            In closing, I am not, by nature, much of a finger-pointer.  For one, my own life has hardly been one to emulate, and secondly, the world is just too complicated to try and blame one effect on a solitary cause. It is worth mentioning, though, that as our culture’s acceptance of pornography and pornographic imagery has mellowed, the divorce rate has gone up, sexual assaults on campus have increased, global human sex trafficking is running rampant, and the exploitation of our most innocent has only worsened. 

Can any of these societal ills be blamed entirely on pornography?  Of course not.

            But I do have a skiing question to ask before it gets too cold:  are we getting close to the bottom?