#but it would have been equally plausible for him to admire their independent spirit and low maintainence costs

[artbyblastweave]

Years ago my father made a really astute observation about Ron Swanson, which is that the character is engineered in such a way that he’s going to have a polarized opinion on almost anything that comes up, *but* that opinion could be positive or negative, breaking in whichever direction is funniest. He picked up an umbrella and said, “Ron would look at this, and he’d go, “The noble umbrella has a clarity of purpose largely absent in todays youth; it’s the product of thoughtful and driven engineering, a market-provided means for the individual to solve their own problems instead of complaining about the weather and waiting for the government to do something about it . We should all be like Umbrellas.” Or he’d say something misogynistic about people who won’t expose themselves to the forces of nature now and again. And you’d just nod along no matter what he said.”