Wrecked In the 80’s

God, the 1980s were…a lot of things.

I wrote about some of this. Reading E. Jean’s new book has brought back a host of new memories. And I don’t need to share them all – nobody wants to know my shit; it’s literally not important. I do need to share that New York in the 1980s and 1990s was an utterly insane scene of huge hair, large shoulders (on men and women alike), and kabuki-style makeup, all of which I enthusastically participated in (though my hair would never reach the societally-prescribed volume). E. Jean, in this photo, looks tame by comparison, and that woman has had more of a life than most people could ever dream of. Including me – I could never do what she did. That social scene ultimately made me nauseous. I like reality, where people can’t commandeer private jets and restaurants don’t have bouncers and red carpets.

I’m grateful I never met anyone named Trump in my travels. The more I read of E. Jean’s book, the more grateful I am.

What’s important to understand about Trump is that, while the rest of the country associates him with glamor and the height of the social pyramid, in the 1980s and 1990s in New York, he was a gauche monster. When building Trump Tower on the site of the defunct Bonwit Teller, he promised the famous friezes – amazing Art Deco sculptures that were a prime example of early 20th century American art – to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. However, just before he was supposed to donate these friezes, Trump called in a crew with jackhammers to destroy them, and, as his alter-ego John Barron, lied to the press about their artistic value.

The depth of pettiness.

Everything with Trump boils down to pettiness.

Recently, I was at a trade show and there was a brochure – I won’t say from whom, but it was a major IT company. And the brochure said, “Sail the great wealth transfer.” It was about getting clients who are HNWIs – High Net Worth Individuals.

The brochure was not subtle. It was not hiding, it was not pretending to be anything other than what it was – the great wealth transfer, folks, is from US TO THEM.

And what do they do once they have our money? They throw weddings. They isolate themselves from pandemics on yachts. They create weird world views that involve most of us dying. They are eugenicists.

Just as Trump gleefully destroyed artworks that had real value and were meant to go into a museum (where you can go for free – it’s pay what you can), these guys (and they are all guys) want to vacuum up every last spare coin from the couch cushions and spend it…on stupid shit.

The 1980s were the precursor to all of this. The greed is good philosophy. The power ties. The…big-ness. As long as you were big, you were okay – it didn’t matter who you pissed off. Satire was indistinguishable from real life. Satire was, in fact, a documentation of real life.

Yeah, I don’t like what Bret writes, but I know it’s true, and I hate it. He’s been correct about too much. I used to argue with him, on the basis of this book – he was quite gracious about that, and used to invite me to his shindigs at his big loft on the Lower East Side. Bret has always been correct about these assholes.

The line – from Trump destroying those friezes to Bryan Johnson wanting to live forever – is a straight one. It’s about huge fortunes and huger egos who are allowed to run rampant over the lives of actual human beings who are pissing in bottles and working three part-time gigs trying to make rent and buy food – to say nothing of health insurance.

Sail the great wealth transfer. From us to them. Whole businesses are being made from it.