Space Oddity, Goodfellas in the White House, and my New Coping Mechanism
A friend of mine in her forties hosted a birthday party last week at New York’s most glamorous new club with the dress code of “drop-dead sexy,” which gave me a burst of insecurity. People in my circle are very good at “drop dead.” Sexy, not so much. Fellow guests experiencing the same self-doubt texted me for suggestions. One woman who was coming straight from a meeting at Booz Allen went so far as to look up “outfits that are dead sexy” on ChatGPT and sent me its suggestion.
I guess Lauren Sánchez could wear this outfit to an office-to-dinnner gathering, or, with the addition of a crash helmet, to outer space.
For a week, we were bombarded with the beauty preparations of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket crew, captained by Sánchez, Bezos’s fiancée, and featuring five other celeb women, including CBS Mornings host Gayle King and pop star Katy (Let’s “put the ass in astronaut!”) Perry in full glam of fake eyelashes, lipstick, and blowout. Was this the high point, literally, of the trout-pout tyranny of Instagram? Real Housewives of Uranus, here we come!
As a promo for Blue Origin’s space tourism, this was a slam dunk for Bezos. His target customers are willing to pony up $450,000 for a ten-minutes whirl in the cosmos. But the truth is, this demo left the planet a long time ago, insulated in their monster mansions behind electronic gates, their private security, drivers, and personal chefs, their concierge doctors on 24-hour call, and the seductive buttery leather seats of their private planes.. Down below is old-school Earth, where the rest of the human race can scroll their social media feeds, marveling at all the fabulousness, forever out of their reach.
I will, however, salute Gayle King for going mano a mano with the remaindering of women over age 55 in professional life. While Gen Z is still whimpering on Slack about the summons to come into the office, Gayle is the network warrior who rises at 3:24am every morning to be on set, fearlessly defenestrating R. Kelly or braving the flack when she refused to ignore Kobe Bryant’s sexual assault allegations in an interview with WNBA great Lisa Leslie after he died. As Gayle boarded the Blue Origin shuttle, her lifelong terror of heights suddenly made this space caper something more epic. Now we know that blasting past the Kármán line at age 70 in a skintight bodysuit is the latest requisite for older women to defy cultural gravity.
Made Men
Just as we saw that the amplification of X made hitherto secretly angry people crazier and more vindictive, Instagram has made us all more vain and narcissistic. Now, with Trump, we have the cultural additive of unfettered avarice and vulgarity rolled out to the rhythms of reality TV. “Anyone who has a billion dollars must be doing something right” is a favorite Trumpian aperçu quoted by Michael Wolff.
Trump 2.0 is intoxicated – and liberated by – the astronomical wealth of the Silicon Valley crowd and the moral weightlessness that goes with it. Inhaling their wealth and power like secondhand smoke, Trump sees himself as Lord of the Sky, reveling in his ability to demolish the global economy with tariff thunderbolts, then congratulating himself when his 90-day pause cranks the market up again.
“For Trump, everything is a shakedown, the way it was for Vito Genovese, who is Trump's model of governance,” my friend Leon Wieseltier ruminated Sunday. “Every crisis, foreign or domestic, is assessed for its financial opportunity, and crises are manufactured for this purpose. He doesn't have a worldview but a cognitive handicap, the incurable myopia of infinite self-interest. Money is his country; and more money is his diplomacy, a kind of one-man imperialism. (America will withdraw from the world, but not from the world's money.) The sole objective that comes even close to money is revenge, which is the only thing that Trump will pursue even without the prospect of remuneration."
Trump’s press conference with El Salvador's president Nayib Bukele was like a video wiretap of a meeting of John Gotti and his wise guys hanging out at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park. Bukele, in his chic, trim beard and hipster black T-shirt under his high-end suit (I am still hoping to learn the brand of his after-shave) couldn’t stop smiling at his good fortune to be seated in the Oval Office. Urbanely, he endorsed Trump’s grotesque refusal, backed up by his made men Stephen Miller and and Marco Rubio, to extricate the innocent Maryland father of three, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from a Salvadoran hellhole. For Bukele, he no doubt hopes that the $6 million payday he’s received to lock up deported immigrants from the U.S. is just the beginning of a new revenue stream from the Washington cartel. “Homegrowns are next,” Trump commented to him on a livestream posted by Bukele.
It’s not personal, Sonny, it’s strictly business.
Gold Rush
In his latest distraction maneuver, Trump is touting his remodeling of parts of the White House. He’s already glitzed up the feng shui in the Oval office, now increasingly looking like Joan Rivers’ apartment. After he rips up the grass in the Rose Garden in favor of paving that won’t snag Karoline Leavitt’s stilettos, Trump says he’s planning a new White House ballroom he hopes will equal the glories of his Mar-a-Lago monument to mammon. Trumps said, “there’s more gold in the ballroom than anybody’s ever had in a ballroom before.”
One thing tyrants and dictators seem to share is execrable taste in decorating. How many times have we seen the images of liberated Iraqis, Syrians, and Libyans roaming through the palaces of their fallen despots, ogling the empty marble halls, gold taps, and enormous, headless Ozymandian busts of their (hurriedly) departed Dear Leader? (Pity the lonely giant Barron Trump growing up amidst the Ba’ath Party décor of the penthouse in Trump Tower!) Will we one day see similar images of the Trump White House as gawking interlopers of the future, perhaps arriving from Elon Musk’s colony on Mars? And will they gaze in wonder at the relics of the American seat of power and might, now destroyed by the mad caprices of a president who thought he was king?
Call to Order
Everyone has their coping mechanism at the moment. Last weekend, mine was finding unexpected peace of mind watching the House of Commons emergency debate over whether or not to save the steel plant in Scunthorpe. PM Keir Starmer called all MPs in on a Saturday over Easter recess to vote on whether the British government should step in after Chinese owners of the steelworks in the gritty northern UK town called time on its £700,000 a day losses. (Parliament voted to save it, a hopelessly nostalgic move, one feels, for a country that is already broke, but a political necessity for a Labor government.) It was infinitely soothing to watch the live feed of the back-and-forth from the House of Commons. Here were well-informed public servants from each side of the aisle having a substantive argument about a matter of national economic importance and its impact on 2,700 workers and their communities.
In the U.S., Fox News was the original culprit for ending civil discourse. Now Trump, with his Sharpie executive orders and campaign to outlaw dissent on college campuses, is using authoritarian techniques to bully and quash his critics into silence. By comparison, how dignified the UK’s ancient chamber of government seemed! How sane and courteous, like a flashback to another world, when earnest men and women of purpose could make the wrong decision in the right way.
Like "Joan Rivers' apartment" was somehow perfect. I've never seen it but I didn't have to.
I suppose you already know that reading your creamy and well-spiked prose is like eating the kind of chocolates a billionaire Forrest Gump might ingest as he clambered aboard a rocket to go, em, really high up there. I had been trying manfully (sic), but without success to deal with the Overgroomed Celebrities' irrelevant rocket promo as well as the fact that our government has finally owned its true identity as a mashup of Nazi Germany and the Mafia when my internal PC entered a never-ending loop: Do we apply for an exit visa now, or ought we first plot an overthrow based upon writing yet more impassioned letters to our congressmen? Anyway, gracias. I needed something sweet.