Trump, Charlie Sheen’s Cufflinks and the Sun Mask of Augustus

All rights © Macro Zuppone

Anthropologist Margaret Mead famously said a healed femur bone was the first evidence of human civilization. Not mere existence, but civilized society. That excavated bone — the proof that someone somewhere had healed an injured member of their tribe, helped them survive while they couldn’t contribute to the whole, would be followed by stone tools and bronze jewelry, ceramics, writing implements, art, and evidence of the evolution from nomadism to agricultural societies to industrialization.

And when the space archeologists of the future return from Elon Musk’s Martian pod colony to excavate Trump’s America they will find metaphors among the ruins. What society will we leave for them to study? This crumbling empire won’t be without its absurdist histories.

I offer one example and three metaphors for the futurists researching MAGAmerica.

Charlie Sheen’s Cufflinks
Trump endlessly imagines himself adored by every audience, everywhere. But an Anglophone talk show hosted by a gay Irishman with an international audience is an impossibly more cosmopolitan place than a gimcrack draft-dodger will ever find himself as an anticipated guest.

And it is on this, the deliberately bawdiest of talk show couches, that Charlie Sheen shared with Graham…