Madonna and the Diminishing Returns of Professional Trolldom

In those halcyon days when personal computers were the size of small washing machines and were booted from a pair of floppy disks, there was a text game called Temple of Loth.  Temple of Loth consisted only of text, sometimes spat at the player in the form of a grid meant to represent a map of a Dungeons and Dragons-like set of mystery rooms.

If you modern kids think this sounds a little hilarious, you would have crapped yourselves upon hearing the sounds.  Loth stretched the basic sine wave to its hard 1980s limits, uttering drones, screeches, and eclectic robot-y fart sounds.  

In the Temple of Loth, one spent an inordinate amount of time collecting resources from various rooms and avoiding attacks by monsters.  However, if the game got boring, or if perhaps you had won it and wanted to play it with a different approach, you could steal, kill, and pillage instead of cooperating.  You could attack instead of trade with or ignore.

In other words, you could be a troll.

In the game of life, pop star Madonna is the ultimate professional troll.  Far from the Michigan proletarian gutter trash that spawned her, she has clawed her way to the top of the garbage heap and now occupies a semi-permanent townhouse in the hallowed halls of ‘Murican celebrities, those chosen ones who get to rub altered noses with the one percent (and their wive’s surgeons) at fancy parties.

She did not get to this level by being kind or fighting against actual injustice.   She got there by closing her eyes and pretending whatever/whomever she was doing at the time wasn’t distasteful and disgusting.  She kept doing these things until her sentimental human heart gave up and died. It’s not easy being a troll. Legacy Tho

The gift that keeps on giving

Madonna has given us much, regardless of the fact we can’t return it.  Falsely credited by many stans and herself for inventing the women’s rights movement, she has gifted us with so much more: she paved the way for Kim Kardashian, who claims to have revolutionized interracial dating by letting a guy who did not share her skin color pee on her. This only mattered because it occurred during a time when she was cute did not look like an alien, bulbous species of android fish.  
Back in 1983, it was still considered somewhat shocking when a woman bared her butt cheeks or let her boobs flap free in the wind.  For Madonna, 1983 never ended.  In her mind, the current calendar date is but a long nightmare from which she will awaken, refreshed and legitimately bouncy-faced young again.  Instead, her existence is an ongoing hell of getting older and older, wrinkles and sags popping up in a vicious game of Whack-A-Mole to which she must react by running to her surgeon and painfully mutilating her once-pretty face again and again.  Without an abundance of athletic duct tape, her once firm ass droops like underfull Ziplock bags of vanilla pudding despite a punishing regime of three hour a day weight training and the bland diet preferred by self-castigating Buddhist monks.   Isn't it sad and a little funny when rich people can't even enjoy their money?

Also unhelpful is an unfortunate pill-eating and wine-chugging habit, which has resulted more than a few onstage drunken rants and tricycle riding, plus the soiling of a reputation for once being a punctual, professional entertainer.

The ouchiest part is ripping the duct tape off before going to bed.

When Bullies Grow Up
The painful part of being the popular bully comes when the bully is no longer young enough to attend high school.  Madonna was lucky -- her bully pulpit stretched over many decades, during which time many admirers bought her brand without checking the label.  Now her reign as Mountain King is over, and wannabe Evita/Marilyn/Danerys anything but an old, lonely, tacky, rich auntie sucking down bottles of wine in her gilded New York condo bathroom isn’t adjusting well.  It seems apparent Madonna’s particular poisoned dream is to fall in passionate love, that old timey heterosexual princess-rescued-by-a-handsome-prince trope.  Never mind that she’s tried it several times and it did not work out.  She’s still invested, which is why she believes she must look like the Mother of Dragons character in Game of Thrones instead of what she has achieved: the low rent AHS Freakshow version of Daphne from Dragon's Lair if Daphne suddenly transformed into the bathtub hag from the Kubrick version of the Shining.  

Time for your bath!

Ageism!

Because the super-rich feel a compulsive need to justify their existences (despite their protests having little effect to the masses, who simply wish to see their heads on pikes a la the “Let ‘em eat cake” era of 18th century France), Madonna pretends to champion women’s rights and to take a stand against ageism.  “They are judging me by age,” she complained to Rolling Stone.

Translation from the Bullshitese:

“Nobody cares about when I flash my tits anymore, so like a true troll, I do whatever I can to embarrass and humiliate my children, including publicly criticizing my teenage son’s lack of visible protruding genitalia during a backflip.  I can’t bring myself to admit I’m a garden variety attention whore though, so Imma gonna pretend this has something to do with me being over fifty-five and female.”

The crux of Madonna’s worsening predicament is it is much easier to be a Mean Girl if you are pretty and well, still a girl.  Yes, kiddies, it’s easier and more fun just to log off the old 486 and go outside and play.  For Madonna, such an alternative just isn’t possible, because she would have to actually be musical for that.