Shade 'n' Fraud

... In which I throw the first at the second, and unattractively gloat.

Behold the panorama above. Rachel took this photo at one o’clock Saturday afternoon at Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair on the National Mall. There’s one good thing one can say about this event: Unlike many state fairs and county fairs and even two-bit itinerant pop-up suburban carnivals, there are no long lines!

That’s because there is nothing to be had there that could reasonably be described as “fun.” It is a joyless, dreary slog around a vast area with ludicrously too few people, people who are milling aimlessly around, apparently stupefied by its lifelessness. It is also a marketplace for selling Trump’s dystopian vision of a version of an America he prefers.

Whee.

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This is the very event that was promising to be a tragicomedic flop weeks before its gates opened. Virtually all the scheduled C-list performers dropped out because of suddenly remembered prior engagements the dawning realization that Trump had hijacked the event and would turn it into a crass political rally for himself, and that their collaboration with such a man might decimate their fan base.

On Day One, a few thousand people from all corners of the country briefly assembled to hear Trump deliver opening remarks about his grand and glorious America filled with a happy, fulfilled, grateful Americans, remarks he delivered from behind bulletproof glass. The few thousand in attendance thinned out fast as many hundreds of them wandered away before Trump was finished talking. Then all the ice cream melted because of a power shortage. Parents looking to console themselves as they tried to console their shuffling, scuffling bored kids were told that, regrettably, this was a beer-free event to honor the president's teetotalism.

Rachel and I decided it was only fair to give the fair a second chance, so we visited it on a fair day that promised a fair chance of fun.

The first thing we saw was a big stage in front of a dozen or so people, behind whom was a vast expanse of empty grass. Someone was at the mike, saying “Testing, testing….” We drifted away after exactly ten minutes of this. The testing was still going on twenty minutes later. Some fairgoers appeared to have been standing there the whole time.

On another stage Abigail Adams was talking, gamely portrayed by an actress nicely dolled up in period clothing. You can watch a snippet of this sad spectacle here:

Abigail was trying to explain to the twelve or fifteen spectators the evolution of the wording of the Declaration of Independence, starting with “we hold these truths to be absolute ….” Then she backed up, and said, “No, we hold these truths to be apparent…” and then she closed with her planned call-and-response finale … “No, it became ‘we hold these truths to be…. “

Nothing. She had to supply the final line herself.

When she was done, the sparse, inattentive crowd had thinned even further. There was one tentative, forlorn clap — just the one -- that disappeared into thin air.

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One booth at this supposedly apolitical event is run by AMAC, the Association of Mature American Citizens, a far-right advocacy group that sells itself as a conservative alternative to the presumably communist-infiltrated AARP. The booth is distributing its glossy magazine, the cover story of which carries this headline:

THE GREAT AMERICAN COMEBACK - How Trump Is Setting the Stage for an Era of Historic Prosperity.

At the AMAC booth I picked up this freebie, a rubber jar-lid-gripper.

Another tent helpfully offered a free charge-up for your cell phone. As you did this, you were inundated with sales pitches for “Trump Accounts,” yet another federal thing Trump has slapped his name on. It’s a new program to invest money for your newborn’s future, and it has been criticized for favoring monied families at the expense of the poor.

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God, at least, was everywhere in this supposedly secular event, funded in good measure by the taxpayers.

At one booth, run by a group called Revival Ministries International, I was handed something called “The Gospel Soul-winning Script” which I am apparently supposed to carry with me at all times to proselytize the promise of eternal Salvation through Jesus Christ, the Lord. It’s about 300 words long and reads like a telemarketer’s cold-call script with “(fill in the name)” helpfully added at all appropriate points, as in the familiar spiel “Bruce, I am telling you, Bruce, this is how, you, Bruce, can find redemption between Jesus and yourself, Bruce…”

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One tent, piloted by the Secret Service, showed two black custom-made Cadillacs that presidents ride in — the actual cars Trump uses. I actually found this interesting, to see them up close. They are built like brick shithouses on wheels. But more interesting, sharing that Secret Service tent were a tricked-out Harley Davidson hog, and what appeared to be a super-fancy golf cart. Here’s me with the golf cart.

I found the Secret Service agent who was supervising the tent, a woman who’d been forced to listen to an endless loop of the chorus of “Macho Macho Man,” intended to celebrate her profession. I asked her what Harley and the golf cart were all about, and she rolled her eyes and said — this is a direct quote — “I haven’t a clue. They just appeared there. They have nothing to do with us.”

Many of the tiny pavilions were small rooms representing individual states, with exhibits on the walls earnestly touting the wonders of their state. Many of the Northeast and Northwest states never got around to submitting exhibits, for some reason. But the big, square, stolid middle states were well represented, if not rivetingly conceived and executed. Waay down at the end of the state exhibits, in the caboose of the pavilions, was … Puerto Rico. Mostly, it featured (unopened) bottles of tequila and this video of a pretty lady, salsa dancing.

But even further away, the very last pavilion after Puerto Rico was this one, labeled not with the name of a state, but with this:

Yes, Dowdle. WTF is Dowdle? We checked it out for you.

Dowdle, it turns out, is a guy. A guy named Eric Dowdle, who was there, in his pavilion, hawking his wares. He is from Utah. He is an artist. He paints colorful, corny, uplifting scenes of Americana, and sells them as jigsaw puzzles. He was selling them, right there in the far corner of the Great American State fairgrounds, right next to Puerto Rico.

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We were hot and exhausted. There was a row of food concessions, as teased by these jaunty awnings:

Drumsticks! Hot dogs! Soft-serve!

Oooh, soft serve. That would hit the spot. We went in. The food concession place resembled a dimly lit, not all-too-clean horse stable. It sold mostly Thai food. Also, hamburgers for $22.

There was no soft serve. We asked why. Was the power shortage still unfixed?

No, said a lady at the burger counter. “The signs are misleading,” she said.

When we exited the food court, I looked at the awnings again. They had also advertised beer.

In short, this whole event seems to have been planned by the American Society of Last-Minute Douchebags.

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So, I know what you are thinking. You are annoyed that I am actually enjoying making fun of this American embarrassment? I make no apologies for that. As I wrote just the other day, Donald Trump is a simpleton. He can delude himself about almost anything, because he is poisoned by ego and because he does not understand subtleties. But one thing he understands, and it gnaws at him, is bad turnout. It’s how he’s measured his whole life: By the numbers.

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Back on the street, outside the The Great American State Fair, heading toward the Metro, we encountered our first actual line. It was maybe 50 people long, winding around a corner. We looked. It was a barbecue block party. Looked like … fun!

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll.

This is going back in the Gene Pool for a day. I wrote about something that is sort of the opposite of Shade ‘n’ Fraud / schadenfreude: It’s called a “shanda for the goyim,” Jewish people’s dismay when a Jew does something publicly bad in a way that tends to confirm unfair and inaccurate stereotypes about their people.

Here’s the Gene Poll:

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Okay, we’re done. In the meantime:

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