Making Spectacles Of Themselves

There was never a greater embarrassment to America than what happened on Sunday.  A narcissistic, blasphemous, talentless hack from the 1980s who got to the top with self-promotion and deception got on the stage at the World Cup final - which Spain won - and humiliated the United States in a display of egomaniacal self-absorption and did not care who was offended and who was appalled by such atrocious behavior.

And what Donald Trump did was just as bad.

What you thought I was talking about Trump just now?  No, I was talking about Madonna. 

In what was the most unnecessary live "musical" event since Woodstock II out on Long Island in 1979, Madonna headlined a show between the two halves of the final game between Spain and Argentina, where she was joined by BTS, Shakira, and the horrible Justin Bieber.  Madge clearly wanted to be part of a global event - anything to promote her latest LP - and she made it clear to her manager that she wanted to headline the show and wouldn't take no for an answer because it was on her "bucket list."

Oh, yes, I understand how long she'd been waiting for a moment like this . . . like, a whole . . . month!   Because this is the first World Cup final halftime show ever staged in the 96-year history of the tournament.

If a halftime show for the championship game sounds wrong for the World Cup, that's because the championship game halftime show is a uniquely and peculiarly American innovation, starting innocently with marching bands in American Football League and National Football League championships and then the early Super Bowls of the late sixties and early seventies before the NFL (which absorbed the AFL and converted the original leagues into "conferences") chose to start featuring pop singers - the more theatrical the better.  And a lot of soccer fans aren't happy about this attempt to ape the Super Bowl, either.  This was just the icing on a putrid cake that was the 2026 World Cup, in which extra teams were added, ticket prices soared through the roof, and breaks for drinks of water broke up the halves into quarters to allow for more commercials for products like . . . bottled water.

Madonna was obviously pleased with herself, saying, "Music makes the world come together."

Yeah, Madge?  What's that got to do with you? 

And then there was Trump.

By going out onto the podium as the Spanish team held up the Cup in celebration, Trump demonstrated why I argued in February 2024 that he and Madonna are exactly alike.  It doesn't matter that Madonna is one of his biggest detractors.  Trump is so obsessed with himself that he's his favorite subject.  Would you want a hack pop singer who's just as obsessed with herself as Trump is with himself on your side?

In Spain, the image of Trump, looking like a cardboard cutout, was edited out of the team's celebration of their victory.  (That's Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, trying to pull Trump aside, by the way.)  And pundits like Edwin Eisendrath are already talking how he will soon be edited out of American life, once we edit him out office (assuming Trump doesn't edit mail-in ballots and black and Hispanic voters out of the midterms).   Madonna, I'm afraid, will never be edited out of our culture.  Her 2008 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and her record-setting singles and album chart action - along with getting TV networks some of their highest ratings whenever she appears on them - have all seen to that.

Both Donald Trump and Madge are my two most eagerly awaited obituaries, in that order.  There, I said it.

Meanwhile, Americans can stop pretending they like soccer so much.  And yes, I'm glad I watched none of this World Cup.  

Cyberflop

In 2017, when Trump began his first (but, alas, not only) term as President, I was still in the afterglow of having driven a Tesla Model S at a special event sponsored by the brand.  It was at that time that the shark that Tesla would eventually jump started swimming around the company, as Elon Musk began undermining what had been the biggest success story in American auto manufacturing for a new company since Walter Chrysler founded the company that bore his name.  

In 2017, Musk unveiled the second generation of the Tesla Roadster,  and he started taking orders for the car immediately, with a thousand people paying $250,000 for a new car.  That totals to $250 million, a quarter of a billion bucks, that Musk pocketed.  To this day, no one who paid for a Mark 2 Roadster has received a car; it's never been produced.  Instead, Musk focused on entering the truck market with a newfangled pickup that was styled to look like a television remote - the Cybertruck.  What?  A truck designed to resemble a futuristic vehicle in a Hollywood movie?  Why not freshen up or redesign the cars in the rest of the lineup? Nah, too boring.

Musk promised miracles with this vehicle.  The stainless-steel panels would be easier to maintain.  They would be bulletproof.  It would be priced at the same level as and have a bigger payload than conventional pickup trucks.  And the braking system would channel energy used to bring the truck to a stop back into the electric motor in order to make the brakes last as long as the vehicle itself!

Uh, yeah.  The Cybertruck has panels that get dirty easily and are hard to clean, bullets can still have hideous pockmarks on the panels, it costs about a hundred grand, the payload is smaller than an F-150, and Musk's ballyhooed regenerative braking system is an implausible idea that must've come out of one of those sci-fi books he loves.  

I'm tempted to say that Tesla has become the automotive equivalent of one of those real-estate companies that sell worthless properties to land speculators for enormous sums - "You didn't buy any property there, did you?  I swear there was a lake!" - but that's not entirely true, because unlike the second-generation Roadster, the Cybertruck actually got produced.  But not very well.  Not only are its stainless-steel panels worthless, they don't fit properly onto the truck, and their edges are so sharp, you could peel a potato with them.  The single windshield wiper is so pliable, it's limper than an overcooked ramen noodle, and the slope of the windshield is so low-slung that rain water cascades up it.

Also, the Cybertruck is so big and bulky that one can easily hit a pedestrian if you don't look carefully enough, and if the cameras aren't working (a typical problem with the Cybertruck), you could run over someone and not even realize it until after its too late.  For that reason, the European Union has banned the sale of the Cybertruck in its member states for its failure to conform to EU pedestrian impact standards - standards the American automobile regulatory system does not have, thanks to a lax regulatory culture in Washington and the demand for monster wagons on light-truck chasses.  And when it comes to providing safety for those outside the vehicle as well as those inside, the Chevrolet Suburban and the Ford Expedition aren't exactly all that much better.  And all of those SUVs and pickup trucks posing threats to smaller vehicles are the reason we don't have cars like the Volkswagen Polo and Renault Twingo offered for sale in These States. 

Did I happen to mention the Cybertruck's loose-fitting plastic gas-pedal cover?

Road testers at auto magazine and on auto-news YouTube sites have known about the Cybertruck's defects for months, but the Cybertruck's flaws are only coming to the fore now among the general public thanks to Tesla's current woes and Musk's megalomaniacal  desire to dismantle American government. Tesla has become the auto industry's most discredited brand; the Cybertruck has become the auto industry's most discredited Tesla.

Tesla at this point is probably beyond saving, but Musk will remain unscathed because he'll still have his billons as well as his profits from Starlink and SpaceX (which has numerous government contacts.  Butt the Cybertruck should prove that, far from being another Walter Chrysler, Elon Musk is turning out to be another Malcolm Bricklin. 

Having failed to start his own car company, Malcolm Bricklin decided to sell us the Yugo instead. 

Whale On the Beach! Whale On the Beach!

After a week, Trump has done more damage than most Presidents have done in a year.  And he has three years and 51 weeks (more or less) to go.

He just pardoned every January 6 insurrectionist rather than just pardon the non-violent ones (both of them), and he's stopped research and reporting on fatal diseases.  He's already sicced ICE on migrants, beginning with a fish market in Newark, New Jersey, in my backyard (actually, as an Essex County suburbanite, I'm in Newark's backyard, but given that suburbs are held in greater value than cities in These States, let it pass).   And in case you thought he was bluffing about tariffs, he just slapped import taxes on Colombia, so be prepared to pay more for coffee, which has long been a necessity and will be even more of one so we can remain alert.

Some of the fears over Trump are, to be sure, overblown, like the increased likelihood of nuclear war, but I don't believe Trump will let that happen.  He's a real estate developer at heart, and he knows that nuclear fallout is bad for business.  But we might be hoping for Armageddon to bring us some badly needed relief.  The good news regarding Trump is that people who voted for the bastard are wising up to his lies and they've come to realize that he'd rather help Big Pharma raise prices on prescription drugs than reduce the price of eggs.  The bad news is that it's too late.  He's in power and there's pretty much nothing we can do about it.  I watch folks like Cheri Jacobus on YouTube telling people to fight back, and I recall that line in National Lampoon's Animal House in response to Bluto's complaint about his fellow Delta frat boys just "lying around" after being expelled from college - "Well, what the hell are we supposed to do, you moron?"

America is washed up, just like a beached whale.  But there is a difference between These States and a beached whale.  You can save a beached whale.

Surfside

The condominium collapse at Champlain Towers in Surfside, Florida is a moment of shame for engineering in this country.  The building  - part of which is still standing - was constructed in 1981 and should have lasted a long time. Instead, the developers took shortcuts with the construction, particularly worth the waterproofing on the pool deck.  The deck apparently was not sloped to allow water to drain away properly, which caused water to infiltrate the concert and lessen its structural integrity.  This is not the definite cause of the collapse, but it's a very likely cause for the disaster.

In fact, the homeowners' association at the condominium found a lot of structural-integrity problems in the concrete as recently as 2018, and fixing them would have cost thousands of dollars per resident.  Warnings about the structural integrity of the concrete were made as resident as this past April.

Some people think that such a residential building of such size and height (twelve stories) should have never been built.  I wouldn't go that far, but I do think that this disaster could have been avoided.  Ans hundreds of people would not have lost their lives.

And that is all I have to say abut this story, at least for the time being.