Contemporary American culture is full of characters who, often for a silly reason, get 15 minutes of fame — and then crash. A man sitting in the front row during last week’s presidential debate/town-meeting, distinguished by his red sweater (which he wore because he split his suit pants earlier in the day), was cast in the corporatist media as the embodiment of the undecided U.S. voter. His name is Ken Bone. Eagerness to cash in on any fame is now an established American value, so Mr. Bone set out to sell his own line of “Bone Zone” t-shirts and seek sponsorships, including something from Uber. But in the closet of most flash-in-the-pan heroes is a catalogue of things from a less glamorous past — and Bone is no exception. Under a pseudonym, he has boasted on-line about his affection for nude photos of famous actresses and … ummm … pregnant women (he called the latter “beautiful human submarines” on a site called PreggoPorn). He’s also admitted on-line to forging car insurance documents and to supporting a Florida vigilante’s murder of an African-American kid as “justified.”
The next step for every fallen one-day wonder is to apologize, and Bone did just that and — showing symptomatic tone-deafness — said he wished he “could do so directly” to one of the actresses he lusted over. Typical.