Wanker of the Week: Frank Bruni

Well, no, Bruni does not think the presidential candidacy of actual billionaire Michael Bloomberg can deliver the United States from the presidency of faux billionaire Donald Trump:

Bloomberg, 76, probably doesn’t stand a chance. He has all the va-va-voom of a ficus tree, all the populism of a Bermuda golf course. And he’s hardly the perfect suitor for a party whose loudest voices are on the left.

Bruni wants a ficus tree to run. He's taunting it to put some fire in its belly.

"Bite me, Bruni, I got more va-va-voom than you ever will!" Photo via Desert Dream Gardens.

The golf course, on the other hand, is a very intriguing case of bad writing,  a kind of rhetorical slippage that's worth analyzing.

The first half of his trope in the sentence is conventional, though stupid. Putting together Bloomberg with a ficus tree, both objects that might or might not possess va-va-voom, is a readable appeal to the world of metaphor (or what I would call paradigmatic relations). You would expect it to be balanced by another one, but that's not what you get.

Instead, you get the putting together of Bloomberg with a Bermuda golf course as objects that might or might not possess populism, and this doesn't make sense. Golf courses don't have or fail to have populism in the way a tree has or fails to have va-va-voom. They aren't like Bloomberg. The pairing is, rather, of an object with a place that the object may like to hang out in—people who still remember Bloomberg from when he was a famous person will remember that Bermuda, where he owns a home, was where he always used to be instead of New York, though I don't recall discussion of whether he played golf there—and it belongs to the world of metonymy (or what I would call syntagmatic relations); Bermuda is an attribute of the ex-mayor, something connected to him. It's in the sentence in fact because, Dowd-like, Bruni wants us to understand that he knows something very weakly gossipy about Bloomberg. Shoving it in there, he knocks his whole structure on its side, stretched between the worlds of metaphor and metonymy, where it moans in pain and loses consciousness.

I don't want to get into criticizing Bruni's lengthy demonstration that Bloomberg is different from Trump. I think that's clearly true. I also don't want to argue with his contention that Bloomberg would be a better president than Trump (he was a better mayor than Giuliani, too, but that doesn't mean he was good enough). I could argue that George Soros, another elderly white billionaire, would be a better president than either one of them, but I wouldn't, if only because as a naturalized citizen he isn't constitutionally qualified, but let's say Warren Buffett, but I wouldn't argue that either. Why not discuss the possible presidential candidacy of the novelist Joyce Carol Oates, or the pianist Keith Jarrett? Why not my brother-in-law in New Jersey, who's a very successful businessman and a hell of a nice guy? Because it's not within the realm of possibility, and a Bloomberg presidency isn't either. It's pure wanking, that's why. That's all I wanted to say.

Bloomberg definitely does play golf, it turns out, with enthusiasm. Here he is enjoying a moment with an actual president of the United States in Martha's Vineyard, 2010, photo by Steven Senne/AP via Norman Finkelstein. Another appealing thing about Bloomberg as compared to Trump is that he's not afraid to play golf on courses he doesn't own. But this is true of almost all of us.