theculturedmarxist:

ryebreadgf:

Apparently not. They’re still at it.

As one of the daughters in The Busch Family Brewed gets ready for prom, her knucklehead brother comes bounding down the mansion stairs shirtless and, embarrassingly, begins to flex on her high school date. I watched the reality show struggle to make drama from the shallow lives of these bland people, and I wondered how much of the real world the seven Busch kids will ever know.

It’s hard to say who the last “normal” Busch was—the last one that wasn’t drenched in wealth. Busch Zero, Adolphus Busch, was born a wealthy German lad of a wholesaler. His father sold brewery supplies in the Grand Duchy of Hesse. The pattern extends far into the past. But it seems like the effect of the weight of this historical wealth is that each Busch patriarch develops a daddy complex that manifests in either hedonic nihilism or micro-managing rage.

Behind closed doors, Busch III was a petty hard-ass. The Fourth tried living up to his father’s expectations but was rewarded with Donald Trump Jr.-style degradation. As Knoedelseder writes in Bitter Brew, “[The Fourth] showed up for a meeting with A-B’s California wholesalers at the Los Angeles brewery one afternoon, sporting a pair of pointy-toed lizard-skin cowboy boots, and his father immediately bawled him out in front of a subordinate. ‘When the fuck are you going to learn to dress like a business person?’ he barked. The Fourth pointed to his father’s feet and said, ‘Well, what do you call those?’ August III looked down at his hand-tooled Lucchese dress boots with tastefully rounded toes and said, ‘These are aristocrat boots.’ Pointing at his son’s feet, he declared, ‘Those are shit-kickers.’”