Last Saturday, we went to the Pleasure Pier in Galveston to celebrate our daughter's birthday. Along with my wife and daughter, there were three of Louisa's closest friends, all keen on braving wintry weather while whipping about on the park's roller coasters.

Icy winds sweeping off the water, it turned out, were the least of our challenges. But they were the beginning of an education in what we might call the Pleasure (Pier) Principle.

As the kids huddled together by the entrance, I walked up to the cashier window and requested four children's tickets. The cashier eyed the group and pointed to a sign: only those 48 inches and smaller qualified for the discount ticket. Aha. Avid milk consumers, the girls, though ten and eleven years old, towered over the limit. (Since the average American nine-year-old already reaches 48 inches, the Pier, though it carefully avoids the word "child" in its pricing chart, has redefined childhood to eight years and younger.)

Well, it is Louisa's birthday party, my wife and I told one another. As I signed the credit card bill, the cashier remarked, as if it were an afterthought, that four of the Pier's rides, including the roller coaster, were "down." I looked again at my receipt: the $120.13 we had just forked over was non-refundable. Aha, again. Lamely, I joked that since those four rides equaled more than a quarter of the attractions, we qualified for a 25 percent discount. The cashier didn't laugh, and the girls were still waiting. Breaking the news to them, but adding that the wind was roller coaster enough, we snapped on our ticket bracelets and entered the park.

With fewer rides to go on, the girls made the most of those that were open. Yet kids like variety when it comes to having their brains shaken and scrambled. To compensate for the lost rides, we promised Louisa and her friends that they could also play the games. In for a dime, in for a dollar, as my grandfather always said. We walked towards the gauntlet of games, with employees too cold and callow to be true carnies, indifferently bouncing basketballs and rattling hoops on either side for our attention. Three tosses of a ball into a basket, three tosses of a hoop over a bottle, with an array of stuffed crayons to choose from as prizes, all for $3, certainly seemed worth it.

Until, that is, walking up to the counter, we discovered that it was $3 per toss.

Trudging to the ATM conveniently located to one side, I had another "aha" moment. This particular "aha," however, edged towards an epiphany. As I handed out wads of cash to the girls the way Pedro Escobar's thugs do with Colombian villagers in the series Narcos, I glimpsed an infernal logic at work. Once we overstep a budget threshold — an amount that we expect, or can afford, to pay — the sky suddenly becomes the limit. Having already spent far more than I expected, I readjusted my expectations of a "just" price. Now, $3 a toss seemed perfectly reasonable. Cheap, even. So, too, did the $8 for a slice of laminated pizza, or $4.50 for a molten lump of dough that passed for a pretzel. The Pier won, I had lost, but I was ready to embrace the loss with gusto. Some might call it the rapture of the depths, but I prefer to think of it as the Pleasure (Pier) Principle.

As the girls moved from game to game, and I savored a $9 Corona, I thought about other applications of the principle. Consider the American political scene, for example. When Donald Trump first announced he would build a wall along our border with Mexico to staunch the flow of rapists and drug lords into our country, I was surprised. When he added that he would have Mexico pay for the wall, I was again surprised, but a bit less so. My surprise was even less when I read Trump's demand that we bring back waterboarding. By last week, when Trump declared we should monitor mosques and create a database for Syrian refugees, I thought "Heck, why not?" Like the $15 I spent on a watery beer and leaden bagel at the Pleasure Pier, Trump's remarks had, by dint of repeated excess, become part of the day's menu.

So, too, with Ben Carson: just as I readjust to the world on the Pier, I readjust to the doctor's world, as well. Consider the long arc of his obiter dicta, from the statement that straight people leave prison gay through his conviction that a Muslim should not be allowed to serve as president to his claim of non-involvement with a bogus health supplement company for which he served as front-man for ten years. All I can now do is savor, like my Corona, Carson's insistence that he really did stab someone during his youth, though no one can locate the victim or remember the event. Really.

As we left the Pier, we walked under the brightly lit sign "Galveston Island Historic Pleasure Pier." Of course, as a country we've long played fast and loose with the notion of "historic." But maybe, just maybe, the founders of the Pier, opened three years ago, are onto something important. Perhaps the pier is as historic as this year's Republican presidential campaign. Both one and the other reveal that when it comes to peddling fantasy rather than fact, the market will bear much more than one might wish.

Robert Zaretsky teaches at the University of Houston and is the author, most recently, of "Boswell's Enlightenment." He's currently writing "The Empress and the Philosophe: Catherine the Great, Denis Diderot and the Eclipse of the Enlightenment."



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