His Pillow
For a long time I would go to bed early. And before going to bed early, I would watch Fox News. I needed to laugh, and Fox provided laughs in all directions. Sometimes I’d do the dishes or wash my face while having the sound on in the background. And I became increasingly puzzled by the exhortations of Mike Lindell, a.k.a. the My Pillow Guy.
Mike Lindell sells pillows, slippers, and bedsheets. And his sheets are purportedly made with Giza cotton, which is “grown only in a region between the Sahara Desert, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Nile River.” “You can get my Giza Dream bedsheets for as low as $39.99 a set!” he’d proffer, as my head sank into my non-Giza pillow and I readied myself to turn out the light. “Geezer dream bedsheets,” I’d think, already in that liminal space between consciousness and oblivion. “What are geezer dreams? Is that like a sexual fantasy… I like older men, but not that much older… Zzzzz.” I was mistaking his correct pronunciation of the provenance of his materials for the way I’d heard people yell things on the streets of New York, as in an elderly man stealing a hot dog from a cart, and someone shouting, “Hey! Stop that geezah!”
In any case, Mike’s sales pitch got me thinking. It really is a shame that we conservatives and libertarians are now forced by a dominant left-liberal culture into creating our own — well, everything. My Pillows are pillows for right-wingers. And the more I watched this man, with his pornstache and his ostentatiously faith ‘n’ flag aesthetic signaling, the more I was filled with pity. There are just some things conservatives are shut out of.
For example, tote bags. The left’s monopoly on the tote bag community is an abomination — an injustice that must be rectified. We all know these tote bags. There’s the New Yorker one, the NPR one, and any sort of canvas grocery bag that screams “I would never do anything as gauche as use PLASTIC for my food purchases.” I’ve seen “Nevertheless, She Persisted” tote bags, “VOTE!” tote bags, “Decolonize” tote bags, “Shop Local” tote bags. Anything that declares “I am more cultured and morally superior to you” will suffice.
The more I thought about this, the rage of my inner patriot arose within me. WE NEED OUR OWN TOTE BAGS! But a cursory search online yielded paltry results. Sure, there were some standouts. This one really hit home:
And I mean, I fuck with this:
But then it hit me. There is no conservative case for tote bags, because they’re not something a conservative would carry. They’re merely an approximation of something liberals carry. It’s not an accident that the canvas bag phenomenon arose in the era of Louis Vuitton luggage. The tote proclaims, “See, I’m not a vile, conspicuous consumer. I’m untainted by the greedy, stodgy, status-driven ways of the world. I have good taste.” And something in me feels like foisting the tote bag on a nice traditional manly man is going to immediately make him feel like a quivering pair of meat curtains. So what should conservatives carry? And what is more, how can one possibly account for us in all our dazzling variety?
Crunchy cons, they of herbal remedies and homeschooled Evangelical children, should only carry items in baskets. I adopted this practice long ago, because I’m ahead of my time and motherfuckers can’t get on my level.
For those who are not Vuitton-averse, consider this leather selection for our moderate RINOs:
I am of the opinion that a true libertarian should not carry accessories at all, other than perhaps a musket, so as to be as free and unencumbered as possible. Over the last several years I have taken, man-like, to carrying everything in my pockets — from sandwiches to lipstick. It has served me quite well.
Epilogue
This week Ross Douthat posted a tempting tweet that referenced two other tweets about music from the 1990s and its connection to political theory and a vanished cultural landscape. He then fleshed out the idea in an essay for his newsletter with plenty of historical tidbits. In August, I wrote (albeit in a much more impressionistic way) in these pages about the link between hacky sack bands and a kind of long-lost liberal congeniality.
Interestingly, someone replied to his essay with a mention of how the anti-establishment earthy energy of these artists has resurfaced on country radio.
This tracks: I listened to hairy armpit singers in the early 2000s (shout-out to Paula Cole!) and listen to Luke Bryan, Jason Aldean, and Kip Moore now. My positions have remained largely the same. It’s the ongoing political realignment — expressed so beautifully in Douthat’s “How the Right Became the Left and the Left Became the Right” — that is responsible for that artistic impulse bubbling up elsewhere.
There’s also a brilliant essay to be written on the figure of Pete Wentz — he of mall-emo, Fall Out Boy fame — and the extent to which his persona presaged the explosion of baroque male suffering we now witness. Is there something about this man, with his 2008 tale of overdosing on Ativan in a Best Buy parking lot, and lyrics like “I’m going nowhere fast / It could be worse, I could be taking you there with me / …it looks like I’m still on my own” that foreshadowed the opioid crisis and incel culture?
That’s a story for another day.