Dynasty

What do d-bags love more than Falcon Crest?

Dynasty.

We’re not talkin’ Kennedys and Kerrys here, we’re talking Bush. D-bags looooove Bush. Why?

Most people like to think America was founded by Puritans: God-fearing, hard workers who earned every penny they made. These guys were so pure and good they didn’t even pass their wealth to their kids when they died, they gave it all to the church or Harvard’s endowment so their kids would have to make every penny too. Most of the d-bag ranting that gladdens the hearts of talk-radio ditto heads across the land relies on this myth as the foundation of its self-righteous rage. Government is bad because wicked spendthrift patricians like Franklin D. Roosevelt want to take away the money we made the old fashioned way — through work and self-sacrifice — and give it to the morally reprobate, the welfare queens and pimps who want nothing more than to get one over on honest folks, the lazy “bums” who only want “loose shoes, tight pussy, and a warm place to shit” (to borrow a phrase from Earl Butz).

But this is only half the story, and to a d-bag the uninteresting half. Having someone to hate, and seeing yourself as the persecuted little man is unquestionably key to a d-bag’s sense of self; however, there is beneath that pose a more powerful myth that attracts d-bags’ reverent awe. In the 80s Joan Collins and Larry Hagman played two mythical archetypes of aristocratic America. Alexis Carrington and J. R. Ewing represented everything a d-bag could love. They were landed gentry: their wealth literally came out of the Earth that they owned and controlled like feudal lords; they were vain, proud, arrogant and cruel, and their wealth protected them from reprisal; and they were visibly rich — one look at Joan Collins as Alexis, and you knew she was money. She could roll out of bed at five in the afternoon after sleeping off a night of champagne, cocaine, and sex with her gardener Dwayne and still reek of glamor. Her every gesture screams “I deserve it.” And because they never had to work for anything they could be as ignorant, uneducated, and anti-intellectual as they pleased.

During the 80s this was still, as yet, a d-bag fantasy, an almost illicit wet dream of what every d-bag wanted but couldn’t have. During the 80s the patricians were still up-East liberals who wanted to tax and spend, folks like Kennedy and Kerry and even Poppy Bush. The d-bag culture heroes were more along the Puritan line: self-made men like Nixon and Reagan who truly came from nothing to the highest office in the land. Fortunately privilege and ignorance were married in the happy person of George W. Bush. For the first time at the turn of the 21st century you could be a d-bag and have it all. And now, thanks to the efforts of dynastic d-bags, you can leave it all to your kids.