Donald Trump Viewed As A Frustrated Porn Publisher

For reasons far too trivial and meandering to go into now, I recently had reason to reevaluate the careers and cultural / professional standings of Hugh Hefner, Bob Guccione, and Larry Flynt.

Let the record show I was acquainted with Mr. Guccione, having worked briefly as an editor on one of his many publications, and found him to be in his personal interactions with me and the staff a gruff but friendly sort, generous to a fault, and someone who stuck to his word.

Hefner, of course, staked out the prominent brand with Playboy while Guccione chased hard on his heels with Penthouse and Flynt’s Hustler picked up the leavings in a distant third place.*

Hefner scored a number of positive points:
Despite being a skin magazine, Playboy was an erudite and classy publication; he called attention to and examined contemporary cultural hypocrisy; he championed the underdog and the marginalized long before mainstream media did.

On the down side, Playboy -- despite being an erudite and classy publication -- was still a skin magazine; his examination of contemporary culture was from the point of view of a typically self-satisfied midwest Babbitt (simply a Babbitt not embarrassed by his own sexual peccadillos); and his championing of the underdogs often came with a thick serving of patronization and self-serving stereotyping.

He was, despite his numerous flaws, one of the chief architects of American culture after WWII, and had he been savvy enough to know when to leave the party and retire to semi-obscurity (as did a handful of other 50s and 60s trendsetters with a better sense of timing), he would be remembered far more fondly and far less problematically than he is today.

Guccione, as noted, was always chasing Hefner and as a result, always in Hefner’s shadow.

As a publisher, the argument can be made he was far more successful than Hefner; General Media (the blanket titled for his magazine empire) published dozens of magazines, only a fraction of which were in the skin trade.

His magazines published a lot of insightful journalism during their existence, and while one can argue he pushed the envelope to an extreme Hefner only reluctantly imitated, Penthouse did offer a mix of craft and artistry that other competitors lacked.

(We had guidelines on what we could do literally down to the millimeter of where certain things could be positioned, enabling us to lean right against the line separating the legally tolerated from the legally banned.)

Guccione sought class and never seemed to grasp that it was something one was born into (or on rare occasion, can imitate).  His attempts to emulate class -- while stylish and artistic in their own right -- never reached the innate level of Hefner.  Despite his successes, Guccione never felt he made it to the same winners’ circle Hefner occupied.

(To his credit, what class Guccione did possess was genuine.  When a blackmailer approached him with candid photos of Hefner, Guccione acquired the set, turned the blackmailer over to the cops, then sent the photos to Hefner with the assurance he made no copies and would not print them.  Hefner appreciate this gesture and the two maintained a formal and distant yet nonetheless real respect.)

Third (though he would probably prefer “turd”) in line, far behind the other two, squats Larry Flynt, the last survivor of the great original trio of pornmeisters.  

Flynt beat them all, running a far more successful empire than the other two (Hefner’s has shrunk to a shadow of its former self while Guccione’s has disappeared entirely),  He owns casinos, and not the hoity-toity high rent kind Hefner and Guccione might aspire to but the grubby pits filled with working class stiffs black, white, and Asian.  (Whoever in the Flynt organization who decided to open up their casinos to Chinese style games was at least in that respect a flippin’ genius.)

Flynt hates class -- utterly despises it -- and in the past repeatedly tried to knock down every icon of propriety he could find.

He is, ironically, a soul brother to the Trump chumps who support the current (as of this writing) occupant of the Oval Office (though Flynt might prefer “the Offal of Vice”).  He had a hard luck / hard scrabble childhood, fought and clawed and scratched his way up from nothing to the head (on paper at least) of a large financial empire, and has been relentlessly assaulted by both the establishment and the marginalized.

He’s a typical redneck peckerwood thumb-in-their-eye type who might otherwise enjoy the shenanigans of Donald J. Trump other than the fact that he would doubtless hate Donnie for ripping off the common worker and the small business owner so often and so badly.

It speaks volumes about Deplorable Donnie that he can’t even match the high ethical and moral standard of Larry Flynt.

Chew on that one all you want.

. . .

This post is not about Hefner or Guccione or even Flynt, though I will invoke the latter as a cultural touchstone on occasion.  

(I will, at some future point, come back to examine the three in greater detail, but that’s another post for another time.)

No, this post is about Trump hizzowndamsef, and how in many ways -- except for personal integrity -- really isn’t all that different from Larry Flynt.

I’ll give him credit for being a marginally better dresser than Flynt for most of his life.

That doesn’t make up for the lack of integrity, though.

Not by a long shot.

Like Flynt, Trump is fueled by anger at his lot in life.

Unlike Flynt, Trump has done nothing that entitles him to that anger.

Flynt at least ran strip clubs and dealt with sex workers in a far more professional manner than Trump does.

Flynt came from a crappy background and worked hard -- even if you don’t like what he was doing -- to make a success of himself and his company.

He’s entitled to be angry at being treated like shit all his life, having his wife die of AIDS, getting shot and paralyzed by a racist, etc., etc., and of course, etc.

What has ever happened to Trump that wasn’t a direct result of Trump’s own ineptitude, inelegance, and innate illegality?

It’s easy to understand why Trump’s supporters often overlap with Flynt’s fans.

Like Flynt, many of them have endured hard knocks not of their own making.

Like Trump, many of those knocks came as a result of not having enough sense and introspection to see the knock coming and get out of the way!

Flynt, as despicable as one may find him, figured out how to dodge most of the hard knocks thrown at him.

Trump walks into each and every one.

Trump doesn’t thrive, he barely survives by the skin of his teeth.

He uses the privilege afforded him by birth to get by, not any native wit he was born with (probably because he’s lacking in same).

He uses his money and power and leverage to try to keep ahead of fate, but it’s biting hard at his heels.

Trump’s supporters lack that money and leverage, though many of them fantasize they share in Trump’s power.

Ha!

They have inflicted great damage upon themselves by resolutely refusing to deal with the realities around them.

Larry Flynt may be no shining Horatio Alger example, but he at least took rational, proactive steps to elevate himself out of his situation.

Trump’s supporters, like Trump himself, are often mentally lazy and lack the self-awareness needed to successfully navigate life.

As a result, they remain stuck in dying towns, in dead end jobs (where any jobs are available), dreading each new day as more and more people unlike them advance ahead of them.

And in their simplistic mindset, they see those people as The Other -- black and brown and red and yellow and rainbow.

In truth it’s not their color that differentiates them.

It’s their mindset.

They are a new generation that sees the problems and challenges far more clearly than Trump’s supporters ever have.

Because if Trump’s supporters possessed that insight, the first thing it would tell them is that Trump himself -- and those like him who possess a smidge more style and social grace than he does -- is the author of much of their misery.

And that they, as supporters of Trump and other robber barons like him, are responsible for a goodly portion of the rest.

They’re angry -- like Trump -- and they want to strike out at the world and inflict the same pain on others that they feel themselves (again, without acknowledging they brought much of that pain upon themselves by refusing to recognize when it’s steamboat time, you steamboat).

Flynt, for all his sins and shortcomings, never sought to inflict pain on the world.  (No, he had specific targets, and took great glee at peppering them, but for the world at large he displayed no animosity.)

Larry Flynt is a demonstrably smarter, better, and more honorable American and human being than Donald Trump could ever hope to aspire to.

© Buzz Dixon

*  Al Ries is an American marketing guru who’s made the observation that there are two and basically only two models of brand domination in the market place:  One where a single brand dominates the market (Microsoft), followed by two runner-ups spaced evenly apart (Apple and Linux), then a plethora of niche brands; and one where two brands fight for the top spot (Coke and Pepsi) with a distant rival in third (RC Cola), followed by niche brands.  Which of the two models sum up the Playboy / Penthouse / Hustler brands is open to interpretation and when one decides to peg the evaluation. Insofar as Playboy was and is the brand definer, they clearly own the pole position; insofar as Penthouse / General Media is defunct as an organization and Playboy is virtually moribund, the Flynt / Hustler empire wins by default.

In terms of actual cultural influence, Hefner’s Playboy clearly wielded the far greater influence over a far greater stage and a far greater period of time.  Penthouse remains an also ran, respectable in what they accomplished in terms of cultural impact if not editorial content, while Hustler remains as a cultural cautionary tale, not something to be emulated.

As for the niche brands, students of pop culture such as yrs trly can differentiate and explain the varying minute degrees of difference and influence among such follow up / knock off magazines like Adam, After Hours, Cavalier, and Rogue (among many, many others), but the average person today is blissfully unaware of their existence, much less why anyone should care,