Burrow Forever

Like the mole people

MAILBAG

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For many of us who were Extremely Online a decade before the term was born—avant la lettre, if you’re Julianne Moore in the Big Lebowski—Drew Magary was a formative influence on our young-adult sensibilities.

(He still is, but he was then, too.)

I imagine he’d find that fact a little horrifying—which is why he was so well-suited to the role. (The people who want to be leaders are so rarely the people we’d want to be led by.)

This motherfucker could make anything funny—even sports minutiae, which is nuts, because then as now, I know what sports are but have little idea what sports do. I blame Drew Magary for the fact that I read close to 100% of the content that Deadspin posted between 2009 and 2013, invariably when I was supposed to be working.

At one job, my boss finally replaced my laptop with an ancient desktop computer incapable of connecting to the internet in hopes of helping me refocus on the database… of… families our nonprofit supported. If I ever Make It Big I’m gonna donate like, a bunch of money, to the nonprofit. And now that’s in writing.

(Turns out ADHD being over-diagnosed generally doesn’t mean you specifically do not have it.)

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This past NFL season, my hometown team, the Cincinnati Bengals—famously the number-one losing-est franchise across the big four North American sports in the 90s—made it to the Super Bowl. My parents are great but I want Joe Burrow to adopt me, as well.

The Bengals ultimately lost the game despite their unusual opponent: Southern California’s second-best football team, the putative “L.A. Rams,” a Potemkin farce freshly bamboozled from their Midwestern home and persuaded, like Jennifer Connelly at the end of Requiem for a Dream, to imitate enthusiasm for bored ghouls. The Rams in L.A. are like a puppet show for kids in which the kids are puppets too. Additionally, Philip Rivers looks like a puppet.

[Editor’s note: It has been brought to the attention of Available for Parties that Philip Rivers 1. Does not, and has never, played for the Rams. 2. Is retired. 3. Still looks like a puppet]

Also, he has a horrifying Get Out-ass family.

Anyway, the Rams won the Super Bowl.

I visited Los Angeles shortly after. There were zero visible celebrations of the victory beyond a congratulatory billboard from Golden Road, a beer brand. Golden Road is brewed locally in L.A. to the extent that L.A. can be said to possess locality.

Golden Road’s branding is specific. Specifically, the brand endeavors to distract craft-brewing fans from their 2015 buyout by Anheuser-Busch, i.e. Budweiser Incorporated. Presumably, Golden Road’s social microtargeting¹ excludes opponents of monopolistic business practices.

Incidentally, Anheuser-Busch itself is similarly specific, brand-wise.²

Anheuser-Busch marketing relies heavily on Normal Rockwell town squares, amber waves of grain, and colossal horses. The horses are technically Clydesdales but maybe that’s just a euphemism for equine Marfan’s? I’m not a doctor or horse.³

Surely it’s innocent that the apotheosis of all-American brands leverages employs all-American branding?

Not since Anheuser-Busch’s 2008 takeover by InBev, the colossal Belgian-Brazilian conglomerate. At least they kept the—kept a lot of “B” words, involved.

Suds to plowshares

On HBO’s Succession, Brian Cox plays Logan Roy, a Promethean business titan seemingly modeled on Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone.

The show also depicts Roy’s offspring, most of whom are hapless, and all of whom want a shot at running the business.

By the time the Busch clan, kings of the King of Beers, reaches its fourth generation, you’d be forgiven for recalling Logan’s reluctance to share the reins.

Under the tenure of August Busch IV, which is his real name, Anheuser-Busch was swallowed whole by InBev’s hostile takeover. Until then, Busch Four busied himself racking up awards for Super Bowl ads.

There’s pathos here. Surely Busch Four was raised—not without reason!—to hold Best Football Beer Video as the measure of a man’s worth. And he won them, and won them, and lost the company.⁴

Later, Busch Four was arrested (though not convicted) for a DUI in a helicopter, which is a true story. My job application for the Succession writers’ room is the previous sentence copy-pasted into Final Draft.

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To summarize:

Multinational corporate capital⁵ hoovered up a beloved American brewery, which hoovered up a local Southern California brewery, which hoovered the Super Bowl victory of its fellow carpetbaggers—the local nearby football team—into its local Los Angeles marketing. Hoover should’ve sponsored the stadium.⁶

Where was the beloved American brewery headquartered before being kidnapped to Davos? St. Louis, Missouri—home of the St. Louis Rams, Super Bowl-winning local heroes, before they were kidnapped to L.A. to win an asterisk-ass championship and be heroes to no one except prisoners hoping to find the silver lining in Stockholm Syndrome.

Finally, where did the founder/president of Golden Road attend college? Fucking Yale, of all places.

That said, she did a good job naming her brewery. Excluding the fact that “Golden Road” sounds like a B-side third-world dictatorship in the 70s, one the Hague never got around to. Eventually a junior producer at Vice discovers their Wikipedia, noting that the short-lived regime was the first government in the region with a porn-addicted minister of defense. Vice sends a war reporter who looks too young to drink. He interviews the local mayor about growing up under the Golden Road: “Honestly mid. Four-fifths of the village survived. We were so hopeful they would execute Todd. Yell at him a little, at least.”

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Where did that tangent come from?

Spoken like the L.A. Rams fan. We found you! Sit tight. Brian Cox’s character from Bourne Identity wants to study you in a CIA lab.

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The most memorable part of Drew Magary’s old Mailbags were his readers’ descriptions of physically shitting themselves in public. It was kind of his thing. Usually but not always unrelatedly, Magary never misses an opportunity to make fun of Cincinnati fans for our local cuisine, Skyline Chili, which, as a taste best acquired by being born here, is usually horrifying to outsiders. (Doc Roon has lived here for decades and as far as anyone knows, she has never darkened the door of a Skyline. Living here and not eating Skyline is comparable to visiting McDonald’s and asking for the vegan menu.)

So when the Bengals made the Super Bowl this year, for the first time since I was in pre-school, I thought to myself, “Fuck you, Drew Magary, you beautiful bastard.” It was a “beautiful bastard” kind of moment (in my head).

Then when the Bengals lost to the kidnapped Rams, I thought, “Fuck you, Philip Rivers, you Muppet-looking crypto-Mormon. Good work naming your son Gunner.”

Anyway! As suggested by my mailbag above, maybe my Thing—rather than my readers shitting themselves in the daytime—is getting negged by my readers in public. It’s important to have a niche.

SEE YOU NEXT FRIDAY, DEAR FRIENDS.

1. Marketers divide people into buckets or “tribes”; the Indifferent to Oligarchy bucket is thirsty. Folks.

2. Say that five times fast ok I tried, not that hard bye

3. I was not made aware of this paragraph’s misspelling of Norman Rockwell until several weeks after publication; I wish it had been on purpose, and it is too cute to change.

4. They[?] say[?] generals are… always fighting the last war…

5. I get such a gross kick out of “Belgian-Brazilian” being real. Real Bond villain shit.

6. But presumably one of their brand strategists produced a killer postmortem-learnings deck on the failure.