You can be forgiven for just wanting this week to be over already, especially when it comes to political news. A stressful and literally life-threatening possibility of destroying our already precarious and damaged health care system was narrowly avoided. The new White House Communications Director gave Republican parents yet another reason to be proud their party has such great role models for their kids. And North Korea fired another damn missile.
But there’s a flake of tasteless, odorless gold atop this shit sundae, just waiting to not be savored as we count down the hours until we can disappear inside a whiskey bottle for a few blissful hours of peace and serenity, possibly while listening to that pretty great new Tyler, The Creator album. Yes, a meaningless yet symbolic story about the noxious tenets of hyper-capitalism also transpired today, as The New York Times reports a doodle of the Manhattan skyline drawn by the now-president back in 2009 has sold at auction for the surprisingly high price of $29,000. And when we say “doodle,” we mean “childlike scrawl in which the only recognizable building is Trump Tower, of course.”
The auction, held by autographs-and-memorabilia-centric Nate D. Sanders Auctions, began the bidding at $9,000, but closed after 11 subsequent bidders put in a price, with the “winner” (much as one “wins” a particularly scarring form of STD) shelling out $29,184 for the drawing. The auction house founder, Mr. Nate D. Sanders himself, says that such a high price for a presidential autograph is rare outside of founding fathers. “It’s an extremely high price, and it’s pretty much unprecedented for a modern president. Trump has that ‘wow’ factor,” he added, which, if there’s one thing people from all sides of the political spectrum can agree on, it’s that our general reaction to most of Trump’s behavior is indeed, “Wow.”
The line drawing was sketched by Donald Trump as “part of a charity event benefiting the fight against illiteracy in September 2005.” Does it mean anything that a doodle made 12 years ago by a barely literate man-child who now commands the United States fetched $29,000, outside of further evidence that rapacious capitalism cares nothing for reason, morality, or even basic logic? It does not. Nonetheless, it is worth noting, if only as a symbolic footnote for the future page of history in which we find ourselves now living, our country spearheaded by a sentient lesion on the body politic, who with a little luck and continued flirtation with international collusion may yet find himself living out the remainder of his days in a cosy oubliette. (No one tell Trump what that means, we’re pretty sure he thinks it’s a French palace.)