Looks like Musk and Trump have taken over the Republican Party’s elephant from tusk to rump.
Hey…that has a ring to it.
I’m a donkey guy myself. Can’t help it; I come from a “working class” family, although I’ve never been that nuts about working. I think my father, a union man, voted for the GOP’s Eisenhower. Practically everybody did. I’m so old I saw Eisenhower twice, more on which later. And don’t get me started on Truman. Saw him too. Missed Lincoln.
(Side note: Proper journalism requires using first names as well as last on initial mention. So, for the preceding paragraphs the first names are Elon, Donald, Dwight, Harry and Abraham. Thanks.)
I was never that comfortable with coming from a working class family because of my lack of affinity for work. I had an older relative on my father’s side who was infamously lazy and when I was young, I was constantly warned not to be like him.
But I couldn’t help it. I was never that nuts about “work,” preferring to sit around in my youth doing not much. Some young men of my generation were proudly known as “good hard workers.” I never had that problem.
It was noticed by an observant neighbor woman who told my mother I sat around too much. I didn’t even care for playing sandlot sports; too much work running around the bases or up and down the field. And don’t get me started on golf, and I never did. I preferred lying in hammocks, looking at the stars or going to theaters and looking at the movie stars.
When I got older, I held a few jobs that actually involved physical work, but then I discovered journalism, much of which involves sitting around until a house burns down, somebody gets shot or a flood occurs. Fine with me.
Before I found journalism, I found the study of economics in college encouraging (you get to sit around a lot in college), especially economist Thorstein Veblen’s “The Theory of the Leisure Class.” Finally, a social class I liked.
Veblen was a colorful Norwegian — yup, it can happen — who spent much of his life in Minnesota well over 100 years ago. He was highly respected in academic circles but not so much by the very wealthy, his “Leisure Class.”
I don’t sense that Trump and Musk (or Musk and Trump, if you prefer) think much in terms of their class affiliation, comfortable with being in the upper, billionaire classes, even leisure, although they seem pretty busy these days dealing with lower classes.
One sign of membership in the Trump/Musk classes: French cuffs. Trump never appears on TV without French cuffs poking out of his suit coat sleeves. This is a sure sign of an affluent upper class member, especially when the cuffs are fastened with gold cufflinks.
I suspect that many of the people who voted for him have never worn French cuffs.
Earlier in this treatise I mentioned seeing Eisenhower twice. The first time was at the Minnesota State Fair when I was a child shortly after World War II. He was still a general, wearing his uniform wandering through the fair with the governor. The second time was in 1952 while he was campaigning for president in Duluth. His motorcade drove to the airport not far from my home and I saw him smile through a limo window.
Truman, who as vice president became president when Franklin Roosevelt died in 1945, campaigned here in 1948. They let us out of school early so we could see him being driven down Superior Street sitting high on the back of a convertible, smiling and waving. He won.
I believe I mentioned those presidential visits in a column several years ago, but many of the then readers are no longer with us. Now I’d better get my (Biblical word for donkey) out of here and lie down.
Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer and continues as a columnist. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org.
