On Monday morning, in the haze of that electrifying Super Bowl, a trending topic on Twitter was #boycottbudwiser.
It can’t be much fun to be a Donald Trump fan right now. To feel persecuted and outraged at the same time, all the time, that’s not fun. Blindly cheerleading for incompetence? Not fun. To wake up each morning on the wrong side of history, to be a patsy in a cynical game of fear and loathing, to embrace authoritarianism in the name of patriotism, to ignore irrefutable evidence your unhinged leader is a bumbling emperor with no clothes, this is not fun.
If this wasn’t bad enough, these poor rubes keep trying to gin up solidarity with some of the most laughable boycotts of all time. Cereal! Star Wars! Starbucks! Snack foods! Hamilton! Pepsi! Saturday Night Live!
And now “Budwiser,” which is apparently how you spell Budweiser in the ramshackle and poorly educated territories of Trumpville.
The irony is 90-proof. The same people who abhor political correctness and jeer at “safe spaces,” the ones who mock “snowflakes” and “cucks,” watched a football game this weekend and were triggered by a beer commercial.
The 60-second spot, titled “Born the Hard Way,” dramatizes the 19th century journey of Adolphus Busch, co-founder of Anheuser-Busch. In the ad, he leaves Germany to chase down his American dream. He encounters danger and xenophobia — “You’re not wanted here!” — before launching his suds empire in St. Louis.
In any other year, such a sepia homage would be about as controversial as a bar stool. But in these seething times, the frenzied denizens of Trumpville aren’t in any mood to let imaginary slights pass without fierce rebuke.
The ad was “political,” they claim, a shot at Trump’s Muslim ban.
These chuckleheads don’t seem to realize that multimillion-dollar campaigns take months to plan and execute. That ad was in a stage of advanced storyboarding long before the election. Nor do they care that if they were to climb up their own family tree, they’d eventually reach a branch that has a migrant leaf or two. They don’t realize or care because there is a shortage of logic, decency and honesty in Trumpville. It’s just easier to #boycottbudwiser or anything else — avocados, Airbnb, hair product, Audi — that seems to be a Trojan horse crammed with vile endorsements of everything you already stand against.
In some ways, I get it. After watching a different Super Bowl ad, I’m now tempted to boycott Mr. Clean. With the rise of neo-Nazis, I can no longer abide a muscled mascot with a shaved head who dresses in all white and is obsessed with cleansing. It’s disturbing. I’m also offended by the misleading notion that chores can be sexualized. My wife is not going to jump my bones if I squeeze into yoga pants and shimmy around the living room while mopping the hell out of our floors.
Stop lying to me, Mr. Clean. Let me live in peace and filth.
But that’s just one product. Two weeks into this presidency and Trump fans are now in danger of running out of things to boycott. If they don’t start pacing their fury, if they don’t engage in some emergency reflection, they’ll soon be forced to grow their own food and limit all travel to foot or Harley Davidson.
On Sunday night, for example, the “enemy list” for Trump fans grew by nearly 100 after some of the biggest companies in the U.S. joined the legal action against the ban. Does this mean Trump fans must follow their established protocols and shun those companies? This won’t be easy.
It’s one thing to cut Apple Jacks out of your life. It’s quite another to swear off Apple. You can survive without Pringles or Eggos. But how are you supposed to remain cocooned inside a partisan echo chamber or stay abreast of future boycotts without Google, Facebook or Twitter?
Those are basically the superhighways inside Trumpville.
Sorry, Trump fans, you must also immediately stop using Uber, eBay, Netflix, Microsoft, Yelp, PayPal, Reddit, Intel, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Spotify, among many others. Hopefully, you’re not a Chobani or Warby Parker enthusiast because, yeah, those companies are also on the enemy list.
You can’t even wear your Levi’s anymore.
It’s sad. Trump fans are hurtling toward a day of reckoning they can’t yet see. The revelation will dawn, out of the blue, as they sit in empty basements, surrounded by empty feelings: Trump was the only thing we should have ever boycotted.
vmenon@thestar.ca
vmenon@thestar.ca
The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
