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.