Using Candy to Understand the World

Donald Trump Jr, devoted family man and bold slayer of large helpless mammals in Africa, took half of his daughter’s Halloween candy away, as a way to teach her the perils of socialism.  He told her that her candy was going to “some kid who sat at home.”  Life in the Boomer Lane is grateful her dad didn’t simply give her a gun to protect her candy, as a way of teaching her about the Second Amendment.

LBL doesn’t know about you, but she has personally never encountered a child who voluntarily sat out Halloween, enjoying his couch, rather than going out into the streets trolling for candy.  If such a child exists, she would like to know about him.  If anything, children are encouraged to hit the streets, in order to provide parents with a wider range of  candy than what they are sneaking from their own candy bowls.

LBL would love to devote an entire blog post to Junior and whatever other fascinating thoughts are fermenting in whatever fascinating object that inhabits his head. Given his understanding of socialism, LBL is pretty sure that his understanding of other issues must be just as intriguing. But this post is actually about candy, and so LBL will leave Junior to his own inherited devices and deal with a topic that doesn’t give her massive anxiety.

We begin with a brief history of candy:

Candy was created approximately a zillion years BC, about five minutes after the discovery of honey. Prehistoric man dried honey to make taffy. Prehistoric children screamed a lot when they were denied taffy, and prehistoric moms threatened prehistoric kids with no taffy if they didn’t behave. Prehistoric bees watched the entire prehistoric drama unfold and said, “We are so fucked.”

Conveniently, the advent of candy coincided with the advent of both dentistry and Weight Watchers.  Candy continued to wreak havoc throughout the millenia, until, in 1911, the Mars family came along and started the company that bears their name. Candy had become big business, and Mars became the wealthiest family in the US in 2016.  By now, candy was made with a bunch of ingredients that had nothing to do with honey, although a forward-thinking bee predicted, “We are still so fucked.”

Fast-forward to today’s uber-materialistic world, in which, when the wealthiest of the wealthy are bored with their $1.9 million Koenigsegg-Regera automobile and their $750,000 Greubel Forsey Invention Piece 2 Quadruple Tourbillion watch (free shipping with Amazon Prime), they can savor a $350 bar of To’ak chocolate, made from three ingredients: cacao, cane sugar, and microscopic bits of Egyptian pharaohs.

Junior’s Tweet, although proudly flaunting his family’s long history of limited mental acuity, did, in fact, cause LBL to realize that candy was a perfect metaphor for life:

Candy doesn’t harm people. People who eat it do.

Some relationships are assorted chocolates. They look great from the outside, but then you bite into one and it’s that gross jelly stuff and there’s no trash can nearby.

Humanity is chocolate. Everyone agrees that they love it, except some people really only like dark and some people really only like white and some people really only like Gummi Worms.

The supposed wealth of our current president is a big chocolate bunny: really solid from the outside, but then you take a bite, and the chocolate tastes cheap, and it’s all hollow inside, and the whole thing starts cracking apart if you press on it.

The perfect GOP health plan is leftover chocolate: It doesn’t exist.

And specific candy bars:

PayDay/Cup-o-Gold: Extra bonus for the .1% after the tax bill is passed

Milky Way: Next item to be eliminated by science deniers

ZERO bar: benefit to middle class from GOP tax plan

SKY Bar: new immigration ban–anything coming from the sky is barred from entry