Messing About in Boats
“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing... about in boats — or with boats. In or out of ’em, it doesn’t matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it.”
There’s been a distinctly nautical theme to the dystopia recently, which I think started when the president became very publicly delighted about a boat parade in his honor organized by a bunch of Florida dads with wraparound sunglasses and untreated anger management issues. Soon after, devoted members of the Khmer Yuge began firing up their Evinrudes from North Carolina to Oregon, and in certain sectors of the media boat parades swiftly became a more reliable gauge of presidential approval than public opinion polling.
But it’s not just his camouflage cargo beshorted base that’s left dry land behind. All of the philosopher kings of modern conservative thought seem to have found their sea legs as well: Fox News favorite Brian Kolfage, who crowdsourced $25 million to single-handedly build a border wall, was arrested for spending donor cash on a 40-foot luxury fishing boat that he dubbed Warfighter. The same day, his business partner Steve Bannon was arrested aboard a 152-foot yacht off the coast of Connecticut. In early August, Jerry Fallwell Jr. was photographed with his pants unzipped and a drink in his hand during a party aboard a 164-foot yacht. It makes me wonder if this is how the Reagan Revolution ends – not with a bang or a whimper, but just a series of increasingly odious right-wing dipshits encountering disaster on the high seas aboard larger and larger boats.
Sooner or later every successful cult takes to the sea. A slow, multi-century boat parade is what brought Christianity to the Americas. In the 1960s, the Church of Scientology dealt with legal troubles on multiple continents by repeatedly fleeing to international waters aboard L. Ron Hubbard’s private armada of yachts. Even now that the Scientologists have returned to land, sailing occupies such a rarefied position in their mythology that the church’s most devoted servants and scholars still salute each other and dress like extras on The Love Boat. Landlocked cults have worse luck: the Branch Davidans holed up in the desert outside of Waco, and look how that turned out for them. Maybe that’s what motivated the conservative faithful to haul anchor at last.
Or maybe it’s simply the logical end point for a movement that passionately believes that the world would be better if it was more like it was in the past. They’ve given up on rolling the clock back to the traditional values of the 1950s – now they’re trying to return to the good old days of half a billion years ago, when our early ancestors, the microscopic Saccorhytus, frolicked in prehistoric oceans. Scientists say they had huge mouths and lots of teeth, so most of the speakers at the Republican National Convention already seem to have a head start on their return to tradition.