What Happens When Your Only Entertainment is Cable and a Lunchables

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Oct 5

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Lunchables are disgusting; the sandwich meat is always way too thick and hydrated with preservatives, the cheese manages to have room temperature flexibility even when refrigerated, and the “desserts” are little more than nougat blocks. However, if you’re really hungry and your only option for food is a cash vending machine, you may just eat one. I had the pleasure of being stuck with a Lunchables lunch this past Sunday while I watched Meet the Press. This particular episode excited me because Carly Fiorina, one of seventy-three GOP primary candidates, was making her first appearance following her infamous remarks about Planned Parenthood’s propensity for collecting the brains of fetuses. You cannot make this shit up.

Fiorina appeared confident when confronting an incredulous albeit respectful Chuck Todd.

“It is absolutely true that Planned Parenthood uses taxpayer dollars to harvest the brains of fetuses,” Fiorina was keen to state throughout the interview. The first time she said it, Chuck Todd held a steady expression of sincerity; the second time, you could really see the lights of his eyes brighten. They brightened not because he was beginning to laud Fiorina’s abilities. They brightened because like the rest of America, Chuck Todd was scared shitless.

Fiorina and the other skin-walker politicians that are in the race with her are to current politics as Lunchables are to a person’s hunger. They are easily accessible (Fiorina and Trump literally have me believing Social Media is now a transistor wedged between Satan’s ass-cheeks), temporarily pacify political hunger, and nine times out ten they will fuck up your bowel movements. All of these awful distinctions, and yet, here we are watching this woman pretend to be Chicken Little in a pantsuit on national television.

My theory regarding the rise of Fiorina, Dr. Ben Carson, and Donald Trump in American conservatism is drawn from one of my favorite historical barometers of politics: All in the Family. While the social implications of Archie Bunker’s rise to fame have been heavily examined in academia—it’s not a part of the dinner table conversations that fondly recall the show’s best one liners. All in the Family’s success was arguably due to moral backlash following the free love hysteria and radical thought of the 60s. Good writing aside, people weren’t buying “Archie for President” bumper stickers because they found it kitsch; they really wanted an Archie Bunker in office. It’s no coincidence that following the show’s final 1979 run, America would overwhelmingly elect conservative America’s deus ex machina Ronald Reagan to our country’s highest office.

In 2015, baby boomers are really fucking confused by all this talk of fluid sexualities and genders. They are perplexed by this burgeoning compassion for the poor and think that anyone age nineteen to thirty-five is basically a standing, breathing Kubrickesque pile of entitled shit. Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina fucking get them, man; hell, even the black dude gets them and they can’t even speak jive. So of course they’re all floating around in double digit poll-numbers.

As funny as all of this is, it’s nothing short of terrifying. Boomers tend to be people that vote;
millennials tend to be people who vote only when shit hits the fan. For the conservative block of America, the fan is spinning and the room stinks. So consider this—while some people may care enough about their bodies to find a farmer’s market and buy green healthy stuff, some people would rather have a Lunchables because they are really, really hungry and need something to tie them over. So if you’re eighteen to thirty-five (hell, if you’re eighty and managed to navigate to this URL) and sane enough to fear anyone worth millions of dollars, with lots of political clout, and who thinks Planned Parenthood is Auschwitz for American babies, go fucking vote, please. The last thing we need is a Republican who inadvertently starts a war with Mexico and/or literally every woman in the world.