You ever notice that every era invents a fresh new way for people to humiliate themselves in public?
The Victorians measured skulls.
The 1980s snorted their retirement accounts.
The 2000s bought diet products from people who looked like they hadn’t eaten a carb since the Clinton administration.
And now?
We’ve got people on TikTok beating themselves in the face with household tools because some internet nitwit convinced them that a jawline is the master key to the entire universe.
The First Lady may have enjoyed years of careful cosmetic sculpture. Her beauty is largely in the eye of her beloved Commander-in-Cheese, our Citrus Caesar.
But TikTok isn’t interested in patience.
TikTok wants results.
Immediately.
Preferably with a hammer.
The trend is called Looksmaxxing.
Among the less groovy corners of social media it’s often called Bonesmashing.
The theory is simple:
Money? Jawline.
Love? Jawline.
Career? Jawline.
Success? Jawline.
World peace? Probably jawline.
According to this doctrine, you’re not poor because of economics, bad decisions, bad luck, family circumstances, or the random cruelty of life.
No.
It’s your cheekbones.
Civilization itself has apparently been reduced to a geometry problem.
You could cure cancer, write bestselling books, build a company, raise a family, and land a spacecraft on Mars.
But if your face doesn’t resemble a genetically engineered underwear model carved from imported Italian marble, you’ve supposedly failed at life.
That’s the level of analysis we’re working with.
And millions of people absorb this nonsense every day like medieval peasants gathering around the village idiot after he accidentally discovered Wi-Fi.
For thousands of years humanity used hammers to build houses, bridges, cathedrals, ships, railroads, and modern civilization.
TikTok examined that history and concluded:
“Yeah, but what if we hit ourselves in the face instead?”
That’s the innovation.
That’s the breakthrough.
That’s the genius.
Somewhere every engineer who ever lived is rolling in his grave so aggressively he’s generating electricity.
The theory basically goes like this:
“Maybe if I repeatedly beat the hell out of my own skull, my skull will become a better skull.”
Not medicine.
Not biology.
Not science.
Just a concussion wearing a fake mustache.
The trend takes a legitimate scientific concept about bone adaptation and drags it through the mud until it resembles something scribbled on a men’s room wall at three in the morning.
Meanwhile internet gurus explain the process with the confidence of a man teaching quantum physics after losing a fistfight with a lawn mower.
The confidence is extraordinary.
The evidence is nonexistent.
It’s like watching somebody lecture on aviation while actively falling off a roof.
The Cary Harrison Files airs on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Radio Network. Subscribe here on Substack for the full transcript, extended commentary, and the occasional history lesson that is likely banned in at least 30 states.
Find us at caryharrison.com — and for the love of the Founders, tell a friend.
Membership here sustains public radio
Then come the discussions.
Hours.
Days.
Weeks.
Entire communities staring at photographs of strangers and discussing facial angles as if they’re decoding alien transmissions.
“Observe the orbital projection.”
“Notice the mandibular structure.”
“Examine the maxillary development.”
This is not the Dead Sea Scrolls.
This is not a military satellite image.
Meanwhile normal people are trying to figure out rent, groceries, insurance premiums, retirement savings, energy costs, and whether artificial intelligence is about to eat half the labor market.
The looksmaxxing crowd is sitting in the corner measuring cheekbones like crack addicts weighing copper wire.
It’s spectacular.
A beauty pageant pretending to be sociology.
A self-help movement pretending to be science.
A cult pretending to be a spreadsheet.
And beneath all the jargon lies one unbelievably simple fantasy:
That success isn’t complicated.
That effort doesn’t matter.
That character doesn’t matter.
That discipline doesn’t matter.
That somehow every problem in life can be solved by rearranging your face.
It’s the oldest scam in human history.
The promise that reality can be defeated with one weird trick.
Only now the weird trick involves turning your own skull into a do-it-yourself construction site.
So please.
Leave the hammer in the toolbox.
Your face is not a home renovation project.
Yet you have to admire a civilization that finally stops lying about what it is.
For two hundred and fifty years America wrapped itself in powdered wigs, Latin slogans, marble columns, and speeches so inflated they could’ve floated a blimp across the Atlantic.
Every ceremony arrived soaked in solemnity.
Every public ritual came packaged like stale crackers from a museum gift shop.
But now?
Now the Sultan of Spectacle has achieved what lesser civilizations only dreamed of:
A giant UFC cage on the White House lawn.
Get Cary Harrison's New Book ‘Almost Dead: The Final Conversation Before the Author’s Planned Death’
This is not a metaphor.
Not a symbol.
Not performance art.
An actual cage.
Steel fence.
Fists.
Blood.
Concussions.
A glorious chain-link monument to national honesty.
We should appreciate the beauty of it.
At long last America has stopped hiding the machinery and parked the engine block directly on the front porch.
This is transparency.
This is government finally showing up without makeup.
The critics say it cheapens the presidency.
Cheapens it?
That’s like worrying a strip-mall tattoo parlor might damage the reputation of a strip-mall massage parlor.
The beauty of the moment is that the foreplay is over.
No more pretending legislation is a gathering of philosopher-kings.
No more pretending cable-news panels are intellectual exercises.
No more pretending politics isn’t already a reality show with better lighting and worse writing.
The lingerie is gone.
The lights are on.
The camera is rolling.
And standing there in all its majestic glory is the governing philosophy of the modern republic:
“Yo, bro. Watch this.”
The event reportedly includes fights, giant crowds, celebrity entrances, patriotic storytelling, and enough spectacle to make an ancient Roman emperor look up from feeding Christians to lions and say:
“Easy there.”
Fighters may emerge from near the Oval Office itself.
Read that sentence again.
Ten years ago saying it aloud would’ve earned you a psychiatric evaluation.
Today it’s event planning.
But the masterpiece—the deep-fried Twinkie of governance—is the suggestion that the cage might stay.
Not temporarily.
Not ceremonially.
Possibly forever.
Like the Eiffel Tower.
Imagine the field trips.
“What’s that building?”
“That’s where executive decisions are made.”
“And what’s that giant steel cage?”
“Also where executive decisions are made.”
Finally.
Truth in advertising.
No confusing symbolism.
No decorative nonsense.
Just a giant octagon squatting on federal property like a pit bull guarding a pawn shop.
Now I know some of you are struggling.
You’ve spent years carrying around standards.
That was your first mistake.
Standards are heavy.
Standards hurt your back.
Standards require effort.
Drop them.
Throw them into a ditch.
Bury them behind the septic tank.
Let them sink into the national sewer system where they belong.
Because once your expectations fall low enough, everything starts looking magnificent.
The pothole becomes infrastructure.
The strip mall becomes architecture.
The gas-station roller dog becomes cuisine.
And a UFC cage on the White House lawn becomes the crowning achievement of Western civilization.
“Who’s a good republic?
You are.
Yes you are.
Look at you.
Big strong democracy.
Good job.”
The whole thing feels less like a civic celebration and more like government and entertainment finally moving in together after decades of awkward flirting.
The political class and the entertainment class are wrapped around each other like two drunk pythons fighting over the same space heater.
Sponsors are drooling.
Influencers are posing.
Consultants are invoicing.
Everybody wins.
Or at least everybody gets content.
And content, apparently, has replaced the Constitution as the primary organizing principle of public life.
The old republic dreamed of citizen philosophers.
The new republic dreams of title fights with executive parking.
The founders imagined sober debates about liberty.
Their descendants debate walkout music and betting odds while scrolling memes on the toilet.
That’s not decline.
That’s evolution.
The Rose Garden caterpillar didn’t die.
It turned into a monster truck.
And honestly?
Who among us doesn’t enjoy a monster truck?
The mask is off.
The curtain is down.
The circus bought the building.
The clowns got security clearances.
The concession stand became national policy.
And the Grand Potentate of Pay-Per-View is standing there with the ribbon-cutting scissors.
God bless America.
Now touch gloves, talk trash, crack open a Pabst Blue Ribbon, and let’s see what fresh lunacy crawls out of the cage next.
The full conversation in the video above and wherever you get podcasts. Search: The Cary Harrison Files.
Text or leave a voice message: 310-737-TALK
Membership here sustains public radio
The Cary Harrison Files — KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles/ Pacifica Radio Network. More at caryharrison.com, Instagram: RealCaryHarrison or youtube: @CaryHarrison · Text or message us any time: 310-737-TALK
Available for iOS and Android
Copyright Audiences United, LLC – all rights reserved.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.