Washington Post Magazine humorist Gene Weingarten hasn’t been heavy on the Trump mockery this fall, but he picked the wrong theme on Sunday. Since the column deadline is three weeks in advance, Weingarten dared to write a “Trump gasped and withered away” column. Whoops.
In between the two columns of the article was a wisecracking disclaimer: “This column was written three weeks ago and will no doubt seem confusing, even disturbing, if Donald Trump won the election. Readers who wish to complain can reach the author through the U.S. Consulate in Amsterdam, where he is seeking asylum.”
The headline was styled like an obituary: “The Boys-Will-Be-Boys Guy (10,000 B.C.-2016)”. Weingarten began his Trump-lost piece like this:
The Boys-Will-Be-Boys Guy died Tuesday after a long battle with modernity. He was as old as civilization itself.
The end came with the results of the American presidential election, which repudiated the B-W-B-B Guy so thoroughly that he gasped and withered away. Witnesses say his last act was to reach his right arm out in what appeared to be a fevered, delusional attempt to honk a breast.
The B-W-B-B Guy adopted many aliases over the years: cad, rake, playboy, pickup artist, bounder, playa, frat boy, as well as such recent trivializing formulations as Gropey McGroperson. But he always remained the same guy, one who felt entitled to paw women, degrade women, objectify women, while remaining free from criticism based on the dubious claim that his gender has a genetically uncontrollable impulse to breed.
Weingarten, who poses on the Internet as a smarty-pants guy, somehow can’t imagine that Post readers can read “frat boy Gropey McGroperson” and think immediately of Bill Clinton, the husband of “President Hillary.” No, Weingarten pretends this is just a conservative thing by mocking Bill O’Reilly (whose accuser alleged he confused the words “falafel” and “loofah”) and Justice Clarence Thomas (“Long Dong Silver”).
The B-W-B-B Guy’s health began to decline during the heyday of the feminist movement and was hastened by public cases involving prominent, powerful men who put on their payroll busty young things who could not type, who French-kissed employees without their consent, engaged in unwanted phone sex with co-workers while loudly fantasizing about the use of falafel as a shower sponge, and casually referenced, in conversations with female employees, Long Dong Silver. But the B-W-B-B Guy’s life was not in jeopardy until this election cycle when his favorite surrogate, a boorish billionaire developer, began to lose badly to a female opponent whose popularity ratings suggest she is less desirable to the public than certain nonfatal intestinal parasites.
Well, that last clause turned out to be true. Notice the Post Magazine illustrated this inaccurate rant by suggesting Trump was subhuman and turning Darwin's evolution backward. Imagine any publication daring to mock Obama in this way.
PS: On a different web page, Weingarten uncorked his loathing for Trump by comparing him to the child villain of a 1950s short story who kills people remorselessly:
The plot involves a very little boy named Anthony Fremont who has godlike powers that he deploys with astonishing viciousness and cruelty upon anyone he feels is "bad." Because Anthony is so young and immature, he has zero sense of proportion, or any capacity for remorse, or any real understanding of the consequences of his actions. He is a petulant, foot-stomping, spoiled kid.
Anthony causes people he does not like to turn inside out, so their viscera florps to the outside of their bodies, and they gurgle to death in horror as others watch. That sort of thing. Then he buries them in the cornfield. He does all this with his mind. Some people get buried alive in the cornfield. It is all very unpleasant…
You probably know why I am mentioning this. Yeah, I think it's going to be like that in the White House for the next four years, or however long Trump lasts.
