Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and the adult coloring book craze

My father can out-scribble your father.

And so can my President.

Too much attention to political punditry makes Crank a dull boy. An entire trend almost escaped my notice until I went on a wildly haphazard surf across the Internet and discovered the Adult Coloring Book craze.

If you haven’t heard of it until now either, then both of us need to crawl out from under our rocks and take a look at what’s going on around this planet.

I know this may sound crazy, but adult coloring books are the newest new thing. This is bigger than world hunger. Bigger that global climate change. Bigger than nuclear catastrophes. Bigger than a sackfull of rattlesnakes and another one chock full of squirming and wriggling ISIS agents.  Or as an online publication called Publishing Perspectives puts it, “It’s Springtime for Crayola.”

And not only Crayola. Another online publication called The Independent is reporting that a German manufacturer of colored pencils, Faber-Castell, is huffing and puffing to keep up with the demand for its products.

“Currently, we are running more shifts than usual in our factory in Stein, Bavaria in order to satisfy the global needs for artists pencils related to the colouring trend for adults,” reports Sandra Suppa, the pencil-pushing manufacturer’s spokesperson.

But wait, there’s more!

London’s Telegraph reveals:

Colouring books have become a surprising feature of many bookshops’ bestsellers lists in recent years, with Waterstones previously noticing a 300 per cent rise in sales in just one year. 

Melissa Cox, head of children’s buying at Waterstones, told the paper: “Colouring books are doing really well at the moment, which initially surprised us… and we realised adults were buying them for themselves.”

And right there, ladies and gentlemen, you have it: the Ultimate Explanation for Everything. The windows through which you can peer to see why so many people are taking Donald Trump and Ted Cruz so seriously and civilization is going down the crapper. 

It explains why Trump and Marco Rubio were able to get into a nose thumbing match over whose fingers (and presumably, therefore, whose penis) is smaller. Or bigger. It explains why Trump, and Fiorina, and Palin, and others, thought, or still think they’re qualified for public office.

Most of all, it explains why our nation is going to hell in a garishly embroidered hand basket.

We, and evidently the rest of the world, have regressed into a state of complete and utter infantilism. Our pastimes have devolved — from building furniture in the garage, or souping up hotrods, or feeding the homeless, or translating Cicero from the original Latin, to coloring within the outlines someone else has created for us in coloring books, just the way we used to when we were kids.

Speaking of kids, in must be scary has hell to a nine year old to see see your parents acting more like children than you are. And don’t try to defend this by saying that the coloring books are on “adult themes," which some of them most certainly are. That just proves my point. And scares the kids even more.

The planet — I suspect led by the likes of Trump, Cruz, Palin and other Americans, not to mention Marine LePen in France  — is eagerly, no voraciously seeking to dumb the culture down. That may be because reality is just too tough to conjure with. 

The planet is overheating. The seas are rising, yet water shortages are growing. The global  economy is finally colliding against its Malthusian limits as once fertile farms turn into deserts, forests into housing subdivisions, oceans into garage dumps, and fresh air into carbon dioxide. There are no simple answers to all of this, only complex, difficult and costly puzzles.

So let’s skip all that and instead go into denial by acting like children. My father can beat up your father. My fingers  are longer than your fingers and therefore guess what else of mine is longer. My wife is prettier than Ted’s wife.  My president can nuke the puke out of your president.

Where is this leading? What should we do about it? 

I know not what course others may take, but as for me…..hand me that box of crayons.