Calvin Trillin is the King of Drollery. He writes nothing but absurdity that seems — on the surface — to be straightforward discourse, but beneath the surface... utter nonsense. With a straight face. If this is a (fair & balanced) tribute to the telling of nothing, so be it.
[New Yorker]
Dear Answer Man: Trump Edition
By Calvin Trillin
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
Dear Answer Man,
After President Trump was criticized for saying that there were some “very fine people” in the Charlottesville march, which was organized by racists and neo-Nazis, the White House apparently spent several months trying to locate those people. Was the search successful?
Sincerely,
Balanced Observer
Dear Balanced Observer,
A few weeks ago, the White House was on the verge of announcing that it had finally identified a very fine person among the marchers—a seventy-six-year-old professor emeritus of art at the University of Virginia named Reginald Thistlethwaite. Although he had joined the march because its ostensible purpose was to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, Professor Thistlethwaite is not a fan of General Lee or of the Confederacy. He is an expert on plinths, and he feared that the removal of the Lee statue would damage the plinth that it stands on—a plinth Professor Thistlethwaite has called “elegant in its simplicity.”
The professor’s hearing being somewhat diminished, he misheard the chant “The Jews Will Not Replace Us” as “The Juice Will Not Disgrace Us”—a puzzling vote of confidence in O. J. Simpson, who was then applying for parole. When Professor Thistlethwaite was informed of what was actually being chanted, he dropped out of the march. (Upon his retirement from the art department, he had recommended the professor who replaced him, who is Jewish, as “a very solid plinth man.”) The White House has resumed its search.
Dear Answer Man,
I heard that, if the President’s big military parade is held, activists will hold a counter-parade about his military record and all the signs will read, “Where did the bone spurs go and when did they go there?” Did I hear correctly?
Sincerely,
Captain Joe
Dear Captain Joe,
Yes.
Dear Answer Man,
When the highly anticipated memo released by Devin Nunes turned out to be a lame smear of the FBI, which undercut its own argument in its final paragraph, I remarked that the only person dumb enough to have written it was the Trump Organization lawyer Michael Cohen, who, in establishing a shell corporation in Delaware to hide hush money sent to the porn star Stormy Daniels, made up an alliterative pseudonym for Daniels but signed his own name on the incorporating documents. Am I right?
Don’t forget: having vehemently denied that there ever was an affair between Daniels and Trump, Cohen expected us to believe that he gave Daniels a hundred and thirty thousand dollars of his own money to keep quiet about something that hadn’t occurred. The man is dumb as dirt.
Sincerely,
Awaiting Confirmation
Dear Awaiting Confirmation,
Claiming, without evidence, that Michael Cohen is the only person in the Trump orbit dumb enough to have written that memo is an unprovoked and perhaps slanderous attack on Cohen’s good name. Consider, for a moment, Donald Trump, Jr. Consider, for a moment, Devin Nunes.
Dear Answer Man,
If Jared Kushner is forced to leave the White House, does that mean there will be no peace in the Middle East?
Sincerely,
Worried
Dear Worried,
Not to worry. The White House has pledged to replace Kushner with someone equally qualified. They are now interviewing a number of thirtysomething real-estate developers with no diplomatic experience and loose interpretations of what constitutes a conflict of interest.
Dear Answer Man,
When President Trump is speaking, he often holds up his hand in what most people think of as the “O.K.” sign—thumb and index finger forming an “O,” and the rest of the fingers held straight up. Is he trying to signal us that everything is OK?
Sincerely,
Puzzled
Dear Puzzled,
This habit dates back to the President’s high-school years. It has long been thought that he was a bully in the military academy he attended, but, in truth, he himself was bullied. Because of his short fingers, he was called “3D,” which stood for “Dainty-Digits Donny.”
He began making the “OK” sign to prove that his fingers were not so short that he couldn’t form an “O” with his thumb and his index finger. (Sometimes he could and sometimes he couldn’t.) The sign, as he uses it, has nothing to do with everything being OK. Everything is not, in fact, OK. # # #
[Calvin Trillin began his career as a writer for Time magazine. Since July 2, 1990, as a columnist at The Nation, Trillin has written his weekly "Deadline Poet" column: humorous poems about current events. Trillin has written considerably more pieces for The Nation than any other single person. Trillin also has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1963, when the magazine published “An Education in Georgia,” his account of the desegregation of the University of Georgia. More than three hundred of Trillin’s pieces have appeared in The New Yorker. His most recent book is Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff (2012). A native of Kansas City, MO, Trillin received his BA (English) from Yale College in 1957. He served in the army, and then joined Time.]
Copyright © 2018 The New Yorker/Condé Nast Digital
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