Category Archives: The Everyman Chronicles

Bad Bunny and The Paper Towel Presidency


http://childpsychiatryassociates.com/treatment-team/maggie_mcgill-200/ The president says he’s never heard of Bad Bunny. That tracks.

Donald Trump told Newsmax this week he had “never heard of” the Puerto Rican megastar headlining next year’s Super Bowl halftime show.

“I don’t know who he is,” Trump said. “I don’t know why they’re doing it. It’s ridiculous.”

That’s a curious stance toward one of the most streamed artists in the world — three straight years atop Spotify, six chart-topping albums, and a world tour that sells out in minutes. Then again, Trump has a gift for turning ignorance into identity.

Bad Bunny, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, didn’t seem surprised. His career has been a long, rhythmic rebuke to the paper-towel presidency — that image seared into memory from 2017, when Trump tossed rolls of Bounty into a Puerto Rican crowd after Hurricane Maria killed nearly 3,000 people.

Bunny has been replying ever since.

In 2017, he performed at a hurricane relief concert wearing a shirt that read, ‘Eres Twitero o Presidente?’ — “Are you a Tweeter or a President?” In 2024, when a Trump-rally comic called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage,” Bunny shared Kamala Harris’ post condemning the remark, reminding fans that Trump “offered nothing more than paper towels and insults.”

His new video, “Nuevayol,” opens with the Statue of Liberty draped in a Puerto Rican flag. A Trump-like voice on the radio apologizes to immigrants — Mexicans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Cubans — before dissolving into static. It’s mock repentance with a beat.

So when Trump allies erupted over the NFL choosing Bunny for the Super Bowl, the music industry just shrugged.

Corey Lewandowski, now a Homeland Security adviser, joked that ICE agents might “attend” the halftime show. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem promised to send immigration officials to Levi’s Stadium, calling the NFL “weak.”

Bad Bunny, meanwhile, keeps playing his own field. His sixth album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos (“I Should Have Taken More Photos”), a love letter to Puerto Rico, sat atop the Billboard 200 for weeks. He sings mostly in Spanish, which may be his most subversive act in a country where even empathy gets translated before it’s believed.

In a September interview, he explained why his current world tour skips the United States. “There were many reasons,” he told I-D Magazine, “but one was, like, (expletive) ICE could be outside my concert.”

That wasn’t paranoia.

The irony is that their feud feels inevitable; the loudest voice in politics meeting the loudest voice in music. Both built empires on volume. Both understand performance. One plays stadiums. The other plays the country.

But only one does it for joy.

Bad Bunny’s work drips with affection for the Caribbean that raised him. Trump’s politics run on grievance. Bunny wants to move the crowd. Trump wants to move the goalposts.

Their clash says less about music than about how culture changes power, and how power, when it loses rhythm, mistakes silence for dominance.

In truth, they need each other. Every rebel requires a tyrant. Every tyrant needs a soundtrack.

When Trump feigns ignorance of Bunny, he’s doing what he always does — elevating the opposition by pretending it doesn’t exist.

Next February, the world will watch a Spanish-language halftime show in California — dancers, horns, verses — while the president scowls from somewhere safe and soundproof.

He’ll say he never heard of Bad Bunny.

Bad Bunny will make sure that he does.

The Happiest Ghost Town on Earth


You can hear the music echo at Disneyland now. That is how quiet it has become.

Main Street still smells like popcorn and sugar. The castle still glows like a memory. But the crowds, the pulsing artery that once made the place feel alive, have thinned to a whisper.

The average wait time across Disneyland this fall hovers around 16 minutes, the shortest in years. Once-notorious lines for Indiana Jones Adventure or Space Mountain barely scrape half an hour. Even Rise of the Resistance, the park’s premier draw, rarely breaks an hour. For a park built on waiting, that is a quiet revolution.

So why the emptiness?

Start with costs. A one-day park hopper ticket can clear $200 per person, and that is before you buy Genie+, a $35-a-day skip-the-line pass that is now practically mandatory. Add food, parking, and the gift shop trap, and a weekend visit can run a family of four more than a used car payment.

Locals, who once poured through the gates as casually as stepping into a mall, are balking. The park still prints money, but it is pricing out the very crowd that gave it a heartbeat.

Then there is timing. Fall has always been the shoulder season, wedged between summer’s madness and the Christmas crush.

But this year’s lull feels different, almost deliberate. The numbers are ghostly: average crowd ratings of 1 out of 10 for several September weeks. Walk the park on a Tuesday and you might think you stumbled into a private screening. Lines that once stretched past churro stands now look like rehearsal cues.

Add to that the closure drag. Pirates of the Caribbean is down for maintenance. Haunted Mansion is swapping into its Nightmare Before Christmas overlay. Several rides are throttled or under refurbishment. Each closed attraction acts like a small power outage, dimming the current that keeps the park humming.

And there is fatigue, both digital and emotional. The reservation system that was meant to “manage the magic” has turned every visit into a spreadsheet. Guests plan rides like military operations, tap apps like day traders, and check crowd calendars more than weather reports. The spontaneity that once made Disneyland a pilgrimage now feels engineered out of existence.

The irony is that Disney is not hurting. Per-guest spending is up, and the company’s California parks still rank among the most profitable in the world.

That emptiness you see is curated. Disney has discovered the optics of exclusivity: fewer people, higher prices, same profit. A luxury brand in mouse ears.

But what makes Disneyland special is not its cleanliness or control. It is the collision, the bump of a shoulder, the shared laugh with a stranger, the chaotic democracy of joy. Take away the crowd, and what remains is immaculate loneliness.

The park still runs. The lights still twinkle. The churros still warm. But without the press of people, the laughter, the rush to make one more ride before closing, Disneyland feels less like a dream and more like a memory being kept alive by machines.

The magic is still here; it is just echoing off empty walls.