We all know that the presumptive GOP nominee has pledged to "Make America Great Again." Being a bit of a wonk myself, I'm interested in details. While I admit to being somewhat encouraged by his recently released list of potential Supreme Court justices, as someone who borrows his political credo from the Duke of Norfolk*, I want more. A Washington Free Beacon analysis finds that there are at least eight things Trump won't be able to make great again.
1) The Pepsi logo
I should say at the outset that I am not a Pepsi man. It's not even one of those Beatles vs. Stones questions that involves a category mistake: It is obvious to any thinking person that Coke is superior. But even among goods of a distinctly lower order, it is still possible to make relative value judgments. The current Obama-inspired logo is worse than the one with weird bubbles from 2003, which is in turn worse than the hideous blue from 1998 that I always associate with the Star Wars prequels for some reason.
When I think of the logo from my early childhood, I am overcome with nostalgia and an aching sense of loss. I do not expect that Trump will be able to recover the serenity of those summer afternoons on the beach at St. Joseph with the only kind of soda available at the snack bar.
2) The Lions logo
Also on the logo front: Doesn't everyone else miss the old simple-looking Lions logo, the one that didn't look like an Xbox character? I miss the days when my grandfather would open a can of A&W for me and pour it into a glass emblazoned with the image of the lion with the tiny white dot for an eye, a gaping mouth, and no forepaws.
Trump only cares about winners. You think he'll do anything on behalf of Lions fans? Doubtful.
3) Original 151 Pokemon
Talk about the mystic chords of memory: Christmas Day 1998. I remember my Gameboy died just after I captured my first Pikachu in Viridian Forest. From Bulbasaur to Mew (if you were lucky), those were the days.
Now there are more than 700 of these creatures. The new ones are hideous:
Who is this disgusting creature? The original Pokemon were mostly straightforward caricatures of real-life animals: Squirtle was a turtle, Mew was a cat, Arbok (read it backwards) was a snake, and so on. This guy looks a bowl of dinner mints put into a blender with browned ground beef, then dumped on top of a Totoro with machine-gun barrels for fingers. Trump's kids are either too old or too young to have played these games, so he lacks the experience necessary to deal with this issue.
4) Mono versions of songs meant to be heard in mono
Half the reason to be a vinyl snob is to avoid the awful, washed-out, lazy stereo mixes put together by engineers who had nothing to do with the recording process and that were later digitized by indifferent label employees to make a quick buck from aging Boomers. Just listen to the original mono version here of "Unchained Melody":
Then try this stereo version made for an early ’70s comp, one that you will almost always hear on the radio nowadays:
It sounds like someone put gauze over the microphones. Trump is not a details man; he won't even notice.
5) Star Wars Special Editions
There are so many issues with these, most of them well known. I hate everything about them, even things that most fanboy types have no problem with—for example, the replacement of the original creepy emperor with Ian McDiarmid for (I guess) continuity's sake in The Empire Strikes Back.
I don't think Trump cares about nerds either.
6) Old Gmail
The new Gmail with "Hangouts" and the pop-up composition window and all that rubbish is so difficult to navigate and so hard on the eyes that I am going back to an old theory of mine that the whole enterprise is a vast Masonic conspiracy. At least one person on YouTube says Trump is himself a high-level Mason infiltrator, so good luck making any headway here.
7) Lego
See the child-knight, pious, his heart promised to no lady save Our Mother, atop a white steed riding silently under the harsh yellow sun. It is an Eliotic waste land. A Yeatsian buzzard leers. The few remaining stone structures are inhabited by spectral creatures who whisper that his quest is but folly and will lead to his doom…
These are the things I think of when I look at pictures of ’90s-era Lego castle sets. A pal of mine put it best on Twitter recently when I showed him a set from my youth.
@matthewwalther this picture fills me with a spiritual longing.
— Harrison Lemke (@hplemke) May 10, 2016
Lego has gone steadily downhill since licensed sets and figures began to appear: Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Lords of the Rings, Minecraft, Scooby Doo. Somehow it drains the beauty out of them. Instead of a retreat from the banal world of advertising and uniformity into one's private well-ordered Danish kingdom, playing with these blocks is just another merchandising opportunity:
If anything I think a Trump Lego set is probably in the works soon.
8) Smoking in Congress
This was once so common that it is actually difficult to search for pictures of it in the AP database, as it was unworthy of remark when the images were originally captioned. Watch Nicholas Katzenbach, the man who made George Wallace move from the famous door, demonstrate the only way to give congressional testimony:
As one anonymous Democratic staffer put it a few years ago, taking smoking away from our elected officials and their staffs and guests "is silly 'feel good' crap by a bunch of do-gooders." And as I have noted on this blog, Trump is a teetotaling non-smoker. This will not be one of his priorities.
*I.e., mindless unthinking reaction. As his grace said in 1540, "It was merry in England afore the new learning came up; yea, I would all things were as hath been in time past."
UPDATE May 18, 2016, 4:45 p.m.: An earlier version of this article used the word "Legos" to refer to Lego sets in general. The correct plural form of "Lego" is "Lego." We regret the error with all our hearts.