You’ve got to love geometry. What size, what shape, what position relative to everything else in the immediate vicinity? These are good, pure, wholemeal questions. Filled to the brim with roughage and a lack of ambiguity, they impart a sense of self-satisfaction with the certainty of the whole thing.
Until they go all Non-Euclidean on your ass that is. Non-Euclidian geometry is the province of specialist thought. It’s use of relaxed metrics, the replacement of parallel postulates, and willingness to cut free and loose with the odd hyperbolic or two. Such concepts are inaccessible to the mathematically challenged.
Not that it matters. An unwillingness or inability to grasp a concept doesn’t delegitimize it. You might not understand how electromagnetic waves are propagated but then, so what? As long as your phone knows how to send and receive an SMS, do you really need to know the physics that underpin the action?
And anyway, haven’t we got enough to deal with the more mundane Euclidean stuff that seems to get in our way on a daily basis?
Take the pyramid for example.
We’re Off To See The Wizard
In a recent article in the New York Times regular columnist Charles M. Blow set forth his view of President Donald Trump’s entire career as little more than a house of cards shuddering in the wind. As nothing less than a badly executed reiteration of the oldest trick in the book.
The pyramid scheme.
And whilst the thought of a confidence trickster in the White House might feel like you were just kicked in the dick by a quarterback wearing winklepickers a silver lining can be found by those willing to search hard enough for it. Because the story of the con man is one so well tread that we pretty much all know how it ends.
It ends badly.
For the confidence trickster, that is. Whether through greed, bad luck, an ill-advised overreach or just some good old-fashioned karma, somewhere down the line the spell is broken. At some point, the curtain is pulled aside and the fraud is revealed in all its ugly, naked fury.
Those taken in are left dumbstruck, astounded at their own gullibility, perhaps ashamed that they forgot one simple golden rule.
If it sounds too good to be true it probably is.
The Wonderful Wizard Of ID
“The con Donald Trump committed on his voters is slowly coming undone. He is not honest. He is not a brilliant deal-maker, he is not even competent. His entire life, Trump has sold shimmer and called it silver. It was and is all an illusion, a brand built on selling banality with braggadocio. He shaped vapors into dreams and delivered them to those hungry for a taste of the showy, hollow form of the high life he came to represent. He was successful at exploiting those with an ostentatious appetite for the air of success. Trump’s life story is a pyramid scheme of ambitions.”
That Trump’s ability to hawk the gaudy to the ostentatiously-minded was without question an asset in his pre-political days. Although multiple failed ventures dogged his career, there was always another sub-standard product to slap his name upon.
Because Of The Wonderful Things
Trump Steaks, Trump Magazine, Trump University; all these things promised something they had no hope of delivering.
Quality.
They never claimed to be value for money after all. They were deliberately pricey. That as the whole point. Because the products were all style and no substance, designed with one and only one goal in mind. The enrichment of Donald J. Trump at the expense of those too foolish to see him coming.
Anyone can sell a cut of meat at an exorbitant price; people will pay good money for the “best.” Still, if Trump was to actually offer the best then that would cut into his profit margins. Surely, there must be a better way?
There sure is.
Take Trump Steaks for example. Customers were asked to pay up to $999 for something that had in the words of one reviewer had:
“No redeeming qualities.”
That was, according to another,:
“Dreadful pieces of meat.”
And that inspired a third to ask:
“Does greasy and tasteless remind you of anyone?”
He Does (For Himself)
Blow seems to concur.
In his view, Trump’s entire existence is one of exploitation.
As Blow explained, Trump reflected upon his ability to sell the ephemeral and came up with a winning formula. Paint a turd gold, slap an unreasonable price upon it and then foist it upon:
“… A people struggling through a drought of opportunity and he exploited their weaknesses…”
In doing so Trump was able to exploit the principle weakness of Americans who saw prosperity recede into the distance of the past. He tapped into their:
“… Shrinking sense of economic security and growing nativist tendencies.”
He gets points for that.
If He Only Had A Heart
Perhaps he even thought he was giving people what they wanted. Perhaps in his mind, the experience of eating a Trump Steak or endorsing a Trump policy has nothing to do with the actual quality of the product.
Far from it.
The value lies in the experience, in the simple pleasure of being in possession of a slice of the good life. His profferings are designed to literally overwhelm the senses. The steak should melt in the mouth. Being denied health care should run second to the simple joy of America being great again.
These Non-Euclidean products don’t make any sense because they transcend the normal rules of reality. They dodge simple truths about the universe and create their own pocket dimension where quality has more to do with the typography on the package than with the passage of time or the nuances of the Realpolitik.
Which isn’t surprising because, as Blow pointed out, Trump:
“Doesn’t speak so much from facts as from feelings. For him, the truth is malleable and a lie is valuable. He creates his own reality rather than living in the reality of others. Deception is just a tool; betrayal is just an inconvenience.”
Donald Trump said he was going to destroy ISIS in 30 days and, for those of you paying attention, it’s still there. But for those who balk at such things, facts are missing the point. Enjoy the message, enjoy the spectacle; look at the packaging and caress the luxury price tag.
But the substance of the policy? The meat of the argument?
Well, unless you have a hungry pet, throw that shit in the garbage.
Because it’s not fit for human consumption.
Watch Trump’s top 5 failed business ventures.
Featured Image via imgflip
