The big US event in 2016 was the election of The *ILK as a joke to many voters and that turned into a 4-year national nightmare for many of us. From that jumping-off point, the NY Fishwrap's Jennifer Finney Boylan offers a survey of joke-campaigns for US president. If this is (fair & balanced) discomfort with unintended consequences, so be it.
[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x NY Fishwrap]
Trump And The Boaty McBoatfacing Of America
By Jennifer Finney Boylan
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
Even now, four years later, it feels like a joke. The joke we played on ourselves.
No one thought it more ridiculous than the candidate himself. Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former consigliere, tells us that the 2016 campaign was supposed to be a branding opportunity, a means to an end, to be sure — but that end was never intended to be the White House.
So when he won the election, the joke was on Donald Trump. But also on all of us.
Michael Wolff — remember when his book Fire and Fury [2017] was so shocking? — wrote that election night left Mr. Trump and his circle dumbfounded and afraid. Don Jr. told a friend that his father “looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears — and not of joy.” Steve Bannon, according to Mr. Wolff, described Mr. Trump as disbelieving, and then horrified.
Many of the people who voted for him probably thought it was a joke, too, at least until he won. He was our very own all-American Boaty McBoatface.
If you have somehow avoided Twitter for the last four-plus years (and if so, lucky you!), Boaty McBoatface was the result of Britain’s Natural Environment Research Council decision to let the internet name its new polar research vessel.
More serious suggestions included Shackleton, Endeavour and Falcon. But the winner, with nearly 125,000 votes, was Boaty McBoatface, a name submitted by a former BBC radio host as a joke. The name the council finally selected, Sir David Attenborough, came in fifth, just behind It’s Bloody Cold Here.
To get Boaty McBoatfaced means that you’ve made the critical mistake of letting the internet decide things. In other words, as much as we revere democracy, there are times — and they do typically involve the internet — when one’s fellow citizens deliberately make their choices not in order to foster the greatest societal good, but, instead, to mess with you.
Because they want to send a message. Because they think it might be kind of funny. And above all, you know: because they can.
Sometimes a Boatfacing seems all in good fun: The city of Austin, Texas, got McBoatfaced, for example, when it asked the internet to name its waste management service. The internet obliged by suggesting it be named in honor of Fred Durst, the frontman of the rock band Limp Bizkit.
Taylor Swift and VH1 got McBoatfaced when they asked the internet to choose a location for her forthcoming concert. The internet obliged by choosing the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. (Ms. Swift, proving once and for all that she is a good sport, donated $10,000 to the school, before settling on another venue.)
But sometimes these episodes can take a darker turn. Mountain Dew got McBoatfaced when it asked the internet to name its new flavor. The internet — largely driven by members of the message boards Reddit and 4chan — obliged by naming the new flavor “Hitler Did Nothing Wrong.”
And in 2016, when America asked its citizens to take seriously the business of choosing a president — that was the darkest turn of all. (Donald Trump happened to be the favorite candidate of the 4chan politics board.)
There are a lot of reasons people chose Mr. Trump in 2016. Some voters just loathed Hillary Clinton. Others genuinely yearned for the traditional Republican agenda: cutting taxes, appointing conservative judges. But surely there was another group who chose Mr. Trump for the lulz. Because a system that had given them choices they despised was a system that deserved to be trolled.
It’s enough to give disruption a bad name.
In some ways there is nothing more American than pranking the country for a good cause — or no cause at all. The comedian Pat Paulsen (a regular on the “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour”) ran for president many times between 1968 and 1996, using the slogan, “We’ve Upped Our Standards, Now Up Yours!”
In 1940, the comedian Gracie Allen ran as the nominee of the Surprise Party, whose mascot was a kangaroo. (The campaign slogan: “It’s in the bag!”) That fall she received a few thousand write-in votes.
The snake-wielding musician Alice Cooper has run every year since 1972, the year he released “Elected,” a song which he’s rereleased for this year’s campaign. (Lyrics: “Everybody has problems, and personally, I don’t care.”)
And then there’s Vermin Supreme (yes, it’s his legal name), who describes himself as a “perennial symbolic protest candidate.“ In 2016, his platform included mandatory toothbrushing laws as well as free ponies. In 2020 he came in third in the Libertarian Party’s primaries; he currently supports that party’s nominee, Jo Jorgensen.
In an email exchange last week, I asked Mr. Supreme (yes, I do love typing “Mr. Supreme”) about his many candidacies, and the role that disruption can and should play in our political life. He wrote, “Humor is a tool that has allowed me to amplify my voice and channel my anger into something that inspires.” He’s now founded the Vermin Supreme Institute, which he says uses “humor, direct action and mutual aid to uplift the disaffected, disenfranchised and disempowered.”
It’s hard to argue with any of that, and quite frankly, a platform of free ponies sounds a lot better than what Donald Trump has given us for the last four years. I love the spirit of anarchy and joy that Vermin Supreme brings to politics. I’d even vote for him, to tell you the truth, as long as I knew he would not win.
Which is probably what a lot of people thought about Donald Trump last time round.
All of which is to say, I’m saving the anarchy and joy for my daily life. In the voting booth, I’m going to be serious. How serious? Like the fate of the country is literally on the line. Which it is.
This month, Britain’s polar research vessel, the Sir David Attenborough, began sea trials, in preparation for its maiden voyage to Antarctica next year. What is the name of the vessel’s robotic mini-sub, you ask? Why, that would be Boaty McBoatface.
Did they give any consideration to naming the sub It’s Bloody Cold Here? You have to admit it’d be amusing, at least at first.
But some jokes get less funny, the more times you hear them. If you ask me, four years is enough. ###
[Jennifer Finney Boylan, a NY Fishwrap contributing opinion writer, is a professor of English at Barnard College (NYC). Her most recent book is Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs (2020). See Boylan's other books here. Her Op-Ed essays publish in the NY Fishwrap on alternate Wednesdays. Boylan is the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University as well as a professor in the Department of English at Barnard (NYC). Boylan received a BA (English) from Wesleyan University (CT) and an MA (fine arts/writing) from the Johns Hopkins University (MD).]
The frenzy of The *ILK (*Impeached But Not Removed) Lyin' King's demented pursuit of re-election has produced a stream of crazy talk, no matter the location, during the late days of the 2020 election. In his visit to the state of Michigan, when his minions began to chant, "Lock Her Up" (from the 2016 campaign), The *ILK responded (sotto voce): "Lock them all up." What a splendid response from a US president! If this abortive attempt to overthrow the government of Michigan by kidnapping and killing Governor Whitmer was treason, the words of The *ILK during his recent Michigan "rally," confirmed that he is a T-R-A-I-T-O-R.
If this is the (fair & balanced) response to traitorous speech, so be it.
[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x The Atlantic]
The Plot To Kidnap Me
By Gretchen Whitmer, Governor of Michigan
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
When I put my hand on the Bible at my inauguration, it did not occur to me that less than two years later, I would have to tell my daughters about a plot against me. But earlier this month, I learned that a multistate terrorist group was planning to kidnap and possibly kill me. Law-enforcement announced charges against 14 people as part of the plot. As jarring as that was, just over a week later, President Donald Trump traveled to Michigan, and when a crowd chanted “Lock her up” after he mentioned me, he said, “Lock them all up.” [italics supplied]
I am not surprised. I have watched the president wedge a deeper divide in our country; refuse to denounce white supremacists on a national debate stage; and launch cruel, adolescent attacks on women like Senator Kamala Harris [D-CA] and public-health leaders like Anthony Fauci. And while I won’t let anything distract me from doing my job as governor, I will not stand back and let the president, or anyone else, put my colleagues and fellow Americans in danger without holding him accountable.
Every time the president ramps up this violent rhetoric, every time he fires up Twitter to launch another broadside against me, my family and I see a surge of vicious attacks sent our way. This is no coincidence, and the president knows it. He is sowing division and putting leaders, especially women leaders, at risk. And all because he thinks it will help his reelection.
Even now, as leaders from bothsides of the aisle call on him to tone down his violent rhetoric, Trump just keeps going, hostile as ever. He is trying to distract Americans from his failure to protect our families and trying to divide us further to win the election. He has taken to Twitter to spread lies and launch cheap insults against those with whom he disagrees. Eight months into the pandemic, he still does not have a plan to protect our frontline workers or rebuild our economy. He has only lies, vitriol, and hate. And as we saw earlier this month, his violent rhetoric puts leaders across the country in danger.
We cannot count on President Trump to rebuild America. We cannot expect him to unite us against violence and hate. Fueling the deep divisions within our country is a tactic he has been using for years, often with the help of social-media platforms like Facebook, which domestic terrorists used to organize the plot against me.
I grew up during a time when Republicans and Democrats routinely worked across the aisle to get things done, whether it was at the federal level or at the state level right here in Michigan. I grew up in a bipartisan household, with a dad who worked for a Republican governor and a mom who worked for the Democratic state attorney general. This was a time when, as the late Representative John Dingell wrote in his last words to America, leaders “observed modicums of respect even as we fought, often bitterly and savagely, over issues that were literally life and death.” Our leaders knew that at the end of the day, we are all Americans; we all deserve to be treated with humanity and respect. And they were bound by their calling to public service. Those were the values I learned when I sat down at the dinner table with my parents every night.
That is what this election is about. This election is about looking our kids in the eye and proving to them that we did everything in our power to build a stronger, safer, more sustainable America for everyone.
The past four years have been the worst version of America. Ever since Donald Trump first stepped foot in the White House, we have moved away from the common ideals and values that are supposed to unify us as a country, putting leaders across the country—including me—in danger. This president has failed our country, and it is on all of us to come together to turn things around. We deserve better. ###
[Gretchen Whitmer is the 49th governor of Michigan. She was elected in 2018 after serving as a State Representative (2000-2004) and State Senator (2005-2015). She left the State Senate due to Michigan's term limits law. Whitmer received a BA (communications) from the Michigan State University and a JD from the Detroit College of Law at Michigan State University.]
Satirist John Lithgow Discusses The Main Problem With Satirizing Public Figures Like The *ILK (*Impeached But Not Removed) Lyin' King
The title of today's blog-post nearly included on of these satirists: Aristophanes (444 BC – 385 BC), Chaucer (1343 – October 25th 1400), Erasmus (October 28th 1466 – July 12th 1536), Voltaire (November 21st 1694 – May 30th 1778), Mark Twain (November 30th 1835 – April 21st 1910), or Ambrose Bierce (June 24th 1842 – Circa 1914), all occupants of Wikipedia's Ten Greatest Satirists list. However, today's essay is about satirizing public figures in the early decades of the 21st century with an emphasis on you-know-who. If this is a (fair & balanced) consideration of satire in our public life, so be it.
[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x WaPo — DC Fishwrap]
Skewering Trump Is Delicious Fun, But I Can’t Shake My Case Of The Satirist’s Dilemma
By John Lithgow
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
These are giddy days for satirists. The pompous, incompetent, duplicitous and corrupt characters who have shambled in and out of the Trump administration have provided a mother lode of material. I’ve joined in the mockery myself, writing and illustrating a pair of books of doggerel poetry skewering President Trump and his rogues’ gallery. My name for him is “Dumpty.”
I’ve had a grand time writing my smartass poems, and the books have provided me with the purgative thrill of venting my political spleen. But at the same time, I’ve struggled with a lurking ambivalence about the whole satiric enterprise. Call it the satirist’s dilemma.
I’ll illustrate the satirist’s dilemma with a story from almost 50 years ago, when Richard Nixon was nearing the end of his first term as president.
On the morning of June 17, 1972, I arrived for work at WBAI-FM, New York’s freewheeling, left-leaning radio station. My job there was to produce and perform gonzo radio satire for $75 a week, as I had not yet managed to land a single acting job in New York theater.
As usual, I consulted the Reuters printout for the morning’s breaking news. During the night, five burglars had been arrested after breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate Hotel.
Our tiny crew was gleeful at the news. Within an hour we had written and recorded a five-minute parody of the old “Mission Impossible” TV show. In the sketch, I was the voice of Attorney General John Mitchell, overheard on a pay phone as he briefed a covert operative on the Watergate break-in.
“Your mission,” I drawled, “should you choose to accept it …” and so on. I ended the sketch with the timeless line, “This tape will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Jim.”
Everyone at WBAI thought our sketch was a riot. The station put it on the air just before the evening news broadcast. As I recall, it didn’t get much of a response from listeners, but my pals and I were enormously pleased with ourselves.
It took about nine months, during which time Nixon was reelected in a landslide, for the epic Watergate saga to heat up and grab the nation’s attention. It was yet another year before he was finally driven from office.
The moral of the story? Satire is necessary, and it’s a helluva a lot of fun. But it has its limitations.
Needless to say, I didn’t become a professional satirist. But I’ve never forgotten the sheer adrenaline rush of throwing satirical darts at the wretched excesses of powerful people. Periodically, I’ve returned to it as a performer, from a 1988 appearance on “Saturday Night Live” in full drag as Margaret Thatcher to a turn last year as a maniacally wine-swilling Rudolph W. Giuliani on Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show.”
But the satirist’s dilemma persists.
For one thing, satire tends to preach to the choir. The laughter at Trump and company isn’t coming from his base. Their satire of choice is Trump’s cloddish sense of humor, such as it is, on display during his political pep rallies. To the extent his followers are even aware of my books, their tone of dismissive snark only angers them.
This leads to a second source of my ambivalence: Satire changes almost no one’s mind. It is cathartic, cleansing and essential. It throws a glaring spotlight on social outrages and makes them live on more vividly in collective memory. But it’s rarely transformative.
A couple of great comedians have succinctly illustrated my point.
Peter Cook was the darkest and arguably the funniest member of the 1960s English revue "Beyond the Fringe." When he founded a London comedy venue called The Establishment Club, Cook declared to the press that he wanted it to resemble “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler.”
Then there is Kate McKinnon’s far more rueful take on the same harsh truth. She opened “Saturday Night Live” days after Hillary Clinton’s shocking defeat in the 2016 election. After spending months performing her hilarious spoof of Clinton, McKinnon sat at a piano and sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” in a rendition suffused with heartbreak and regret.
Both Cook and McKinnon knew the limitations of satire.
So do I. My trifling poems, I’m quite sure, will do nothing to remove this appalling president from office. But I boost my spirits with the thought that there is one person out there whose talent for outrageous self-parody is doing the job quite nicely.
And that’s Donald J. Trump. ###
[John A. Lithgow is an actor, musician, poet, author, and singer. Lithgow is best known for his work in theater, television, and film. He is the author of Dumpty: The Age of Trump in Verse (2019) and the just-published Trumpty Dumpty Wanted a Crown: Verses for a Despotic Age (2020). See Lithgow's other books here. He received an AB magna cum laude (history and literature) from Harvard University (MA) and, as a Fulbright Scholar, received an MA (drama) from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (UK). After graduation, he served as the Director of the Arts and Literature Department at WBAI, the Pacifica radio station in New York City. He launched his stage career in 1973 in David Storey's "The Changing Room" at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway. Lithgow received his first Tony and his first win for his performance for Featured Actor in a Play for that inaugural performance. A year earlier, Lithgow made his film debut in "Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues." In television, Lithgow is probably most widely known for his starring role as Dick Solomon in the 1996–2001 NBC sitcom "3rd Rock from the Sun." Lithgow has received two Tony Awards, six Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, an American Comedy Award, four Drama Desk Awards, and has also been nominated for two Academy Awards and four Grammy Awards.[3][62] Lithgow has received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.]
In the email that delivered today's TMW 'toon, the 'toonist (Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins) wrote:
Hey All,
This one was really fun to work on. Nothing like a having a nice holiday theme to give you a little inspiration. (Obviously you need to read the ghost dialogue in SCAAAAARY GHOST VOOOOICES). This is also basically my final cartoon before the election — next week I’ll be trying to split the difference on that once-every-four-years problem of a pre-election deadline with post-election publication.
I knew I was going to do some sort of haunted house thing, but I had to figure out the underlying theme. Was it going to be a house of actual horrors — kids in cages, militias, etc.? Or, what I ultimately went with, a cartoon emphasizing the ways in which Trump is trying to scare his own base? (I also had one draft in which the two characters were undecided voters who were completely unterrified by all of it, but it didn’t really work all that well and I don’t think undecided voters are much of a factor this election.)
Pretty early on it occurred to me that the obvious title was “Trump Tower of Terror.” Which then presented the problem of gesturing visually toward a skyscraper shape in the title panel, but I think that ended up working out reasonably well.
I also knew that I wanted Trump to evoke the old EC horror comics Crypt-Keeper narrator/character (I don’t know much about the subsequent tv show but he may be familiar to some of you from that). The look of that character evolved over the years — in the tv show, he has a much more skeletal/rotting corpse appearance. I needed it to still be a recognizable caricature of Trump, so I opted to go with the simpler, original comic book version.
Some of you will undoubtedly wonder why I didn't use the EC comics font (last seen in the Thing That Ate America's Brain). The problem is, that font takes up much more real estate than my normal font -- I couldn't squeeze in everything that I wanted to squeeze in, using it.
Anyway, as we finally approach this election, it’s a truly terrifying Halloween season. Let’s hope we are finally about to wake up from this endless nightmare.
In closing, as Halloween and Election Day are looming, if this is a (fair & balanced) lampoon of US politics, so be it. [x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x TMW]
Trump Tower Of Terror
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)
[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the US, as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in the SF Weekly. Perkins received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]
In answer to the question in today's essay-title: What can we do if a coup d'etat is fomented by The *ILK (*Impeached But Not Removed) Lyin' King and his paramilitary minions? If that is the (fair & balanced) question of the day about the 2020 election, so be it.
[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x The New Yorker]
What Can You Do If Trump Stages A Coup?
By Lizzie Widdicombe
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
Ah, election season. There’s a patriotic buzz in the air. Bumper stickers and lawn signs all over the neighborhood. Now comes the time when we check the location of our polling places, make a plan to vote—and pack a “go bag” in case we need to take to the streets in sustained mass protest to protect the integrity of the vote count. That last one is not something you’d expect to be doing in the United States, but things are different in the Trump era. For months, the President has been warning that he might not concede the election in November if he loses, telling reporters who asked him to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, “There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation.” It sounded ominous, although it was hard to imagine how he could make good on the threat to stick around no matter what. Then, media organizations began publishingpiecesoutlining the myriad ways in which the President and his allies might turn a narrow loss into a win. The possibilities include familiar tactics—contesting mail-in ballots and turning the process into Bush v. Gore on steroids—and others that sound straight out of a police state. For example, Trump could summon federal agents or his supporters to stop a recount or intimidate voters. According to some experts, this would constitute an autogolpe, or “self coup”: when a President who obtained power through constitutional means holds onto it through illegitimate ones, beginning the slide into authoritarianism.
OK, then. Time to start getting ready. But how, exactly, do we do that? In September, a group of organizers and researchers published a fifty-five-page manual called Hold the Line: A Guide to Defending Democracy, which has been downloaded more than eighteen thousand times. And the Indivisible Project, along with a coalition called Stand Up America, are preparing their members to take to the streets if Trump contests the election results. “I’ve been beating the drum on this particular cause since July, and I’m delighted to see so many people coming around to it,” the activist and sociologist George Lakey said recently. His own “Aha!” moment came when Trump sent federal agents in military fatigues to Portland, Oregon, to tangle with protesters. “It hit me, the way Trump is dealing with Portland, Oregon, that’s a test,” he said. He guessed that Trump was hoping to provoke a violent backlash from the protesters, so that he could lay the groundwork for not accepting the election results, under the pretense that the country had descended into violent chaos. “Trump can be underestimated by the left,” Lakey said. “He gets made fun of, but he’s shrewd.”
Lakey, who is eighty-two, is best known for his book A Manual for Direct Action, from 1964, which was often referred to as a bible for the participants of the civil-rights movement. Since then, he has trained activists in countries including South Africa, Thailand, and Sri Lanka in their struggles against repressive regimes. “In the US, we’re used to waiting for social change,” he said, referring to multiyear efforts like the civil-rights or women’s-rights movements. But defeating a coup is different. “Everything happens really fast. You’ve got sometimes three days, sometimes a week, sometimes three months to beat a coup.” The average American activist needed a new skill set. “This is the teen-ager who’s been playing excellent football, and now he wants to play baseball,” he said. “He can’t just walk on the field and be great. He needs to learn a new set of rules.”
In August, Lakey helped form a group called Choose Democracy that has been circulating a pledge committing people to “nonviolently take to the streets if a coup is attempted,” which has more than thirty thousand signatures. And he began giving a series of training sessions via Zoom called “How To Beat an Election-Related Power Grab.” On a recent Thursday, at 7:30 p.m., more than five hundred concerned citizens tuned in. They exchanged greetings on the group chat:
Hello from “Bad things happen” in Philadelphia!
Please do more of these!!! I know lots of white suburban women who are interested.
Lakey, who has white hair and bushy white eyebrows, is a Quaker, and brings a cheerful, Sunday-school-style delivery to lessons about overthrowing authoritarian regimes. He began with the work of the political scientist Stephen Zunes, who has studied occasions when the citizens of a country managed to rise up and defeat a coup: Bolivia, in 1978; the Soviet Union, in 1991; Thailand, in 1992; and Burkina Faso, in 2015. According to Zunes, these movements had several things in common: they were nonviolent, and they drew from a broad cross-section of society. And they refused to compromise. So, Lakey emphasized, there could be no cutting a deal with Trump. “That is reeeeally important,” he said, citing a demand from the Choose Democracy pledge: “Every vote must be counted. And we refuse to accept the authority of someone who is practicing something different.” Another takeaway, for activists, is to focus “on the center of the political spectrum,” Lakey said. “We’re looking to influence them to tip the outcome of the struggle in our direction.” Will they side with the protesters or with Trump?
To illustrate, he told the story of the Kapp Putsch, in the Weimar Republic. In 1920, a group of soldiers, veterans, and civilians tried to seize control of Berlin, under the right-wing leadership of Wolfgang Kapp. The legitimate government fled, and Kapp proclaimed himself the country’s leader. “He walked into the capitol building ready to run the country,” Lakey said. “However, he found that the government workers had all gone on strike. There was nobody in the building except him.” He wanted to issue a proclamation that he was running the country, Lakey added, “But he didn’t know how to type. So, the next day, he had to bring his daughter to type out the manifesto.” The coup collapsed within days. Lakey said, “The magic in that situation was the rapid alliance that was built, over a weekend, between the left”—trade unions, Communists—“and the center. It could overcome the right wing, even though they had the Army.”
He said that his listeners should start to build similar alliances. “Go beyond the usual suspects: the progressives, the left.” One woman asked in the chat, “Who is the Center in the US these days? Dems? Church? Libertarians? Moderate Republicans? Ha. How to trust them?” Lakey assured his audience that, while the US may feel extremely polarized, “the truth is we’re not nearly as polarized as we may become.” He said that centrists could be found everywhere from the business world to the medical establishment. “Bank presidents. People who manage schools or colleges. . . you name it, if it’s some kind of institution that expects to have a future.”
There were questions about tactics. “What does refusal to recognize illegitimate authority look like?” one participant wrote. Mass protests? Lakey warned that, while marches may be useful, “in my opinion they are wayyyy overrated.” (It is hard to imagine a Trumpist regime being swayed by a mob of citizens in pussy hats.) Instead, he encouraged his audience to think strategically. He pulled up a slide titled “Pillars of Power,” which showed a classical edifice. The roof was labelled “Regime/Status Quo.” The pillars were labelled with the words Business, Politicians, Military, Media, Judiciary, Police, and Bureaucracies. “Obviously, the Trump family is not going to be able to run the government by itself,” he said. They’ll need institutional support. “The question is how do we, as activists, go after these pillars in such a way as to encourage them to buckle, and allow the Trump regime, or his attempted regime, to fall?” Participants in the chat then came up with politicians they might approach:
“State officials in PA will be critical!!!”
“Retired politicians can be powerful and are less constrained by their funders.
Last, Lakey clicked to a slide that said, “What about Violence?” This topic had been hovering over the proceedings. Zunes, the political scientist, had said in a recent interview, “The thing that scares me the most is, unlike all these other countries I’ve studied, this country has millions of people who have guns—and not just guns but semi-automatic weapons—that are loyal Trump supporters, and whom he can call out to suppress such a nonviolent uprising.” Several attendees had expressed concerns in the chat about groups like the Proud Boys and right-wing militias, writing things like, “I have never been in a demonstration where some people are likely to have automatic weapons.”
Lakey acknowledged, “There are a lot of alarming things going on already in this country with regard to what I call Trump’s ‘irregulars.’ ” He said that protesters should plan their rallies for places where it would be difficult for violence to break out: in the lobby of an office building or in a car caravan. He told participants to imagine that they were Proud Boys looking to “rumble.” “Ask, ‘What would they welcome?’ And then not do that!” he said. One tip, from the civil-rights movement: “When in doubt, sit down. It’s counterintuitive. But it has been used in multiple cultures, and it works.” (Except with tear gas. Then, he said, “walking slowly would be best.”)
If things do get ugly, he noted, it could be useful for the cause. “Get your smartphone and expose what happened. Offer yourself for interviews,” he said. The key is to draw a contrast between the violent regime and the peaceful protesters. That’s what happened during Thailand’s military coup, in 1992, when soldiers shot into a crowd of nonviolent demonstrators. The public was horrified. “It brought a surge of people into the struggle that overthrew the coup plotters,” Lakey said. “What we’re teaching tonight is evidence-based. It’s how baseball is played.”
Frances Brokaw, a retired physician and Quaker in Hanover, New Hampshire, attended the Zoom training and came away feeling better about the coming weeks. “I found it helpful and hopeful,” she said. She’d written to New Hampshire’s secretary of state, a Democrat, and its governor, a Republican, asking them not certify the election results until all absentee ballots have been counted. The secretary of state’s office had responded affirmatively. “I haven’t heard back from the governor,” she said. But she plans to keep writing. And she will join in street protests if necessary, despite the spectre of election-related violence and the threat of the Coronavirus. “If need be, I’m ready,” she said. “If we’re talking about the well-being and safety of millions of people in this country from this President—who is totally off the rails from what I’ve seen—yes, I’ll put myself on the line for that. I have a grandson who’s five months old, and I want the world to be safe for him.” ###
[Lizzie Widdicombe is a "Talk of the Town" editor at The New Yorker, where she has been on staff since 2006 writing for the print magazine and for The New Yorker.com. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, she was on staff at the Crimson, the Lampoon and Harvard Magazine. Widdicombe received a BA (history and literature) from Harvard University (MA).]
Sacha Baron Cohen introduced Borat, a fictitious Kazakh journalist who travels through the United States to make a documentary in 2006. Sacha Cohen is a genius at guerrilla TV and films that feature an seeming boob (Borat or Ali G) who delivers comedy with hidden teeth. The release of "Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm" on October 23, 2020, is a true October Surprise. If this is (fair & balanced) admiration of political morality, so be it.
PS: The source of this blog's noms de stylo serpent reference to the three women on the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed staff began with this 2001 essay by The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) who's been joined by her distaff colleagues: The Krait (Gail Collins), and — most recently — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg). [x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x NY Fishwrap]
Sacha Baron Cohen: This Time He’s Serious
By The Cobra (Maureen Dowd)
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
Borat uses the flower bed in front of the Trump hotel at Columbus Circle as a men’s room.
Sacha Baron Cohen plays the cello and is planning to take some Zoom classes from the masters.
Borat keeps his teenage daughter in a cage. (“Is it nicer than Melania’s cage?” she wonders.) And when he takes her clothes shopping, he asks the saleswoman to direct them to the “No means Yes section.”
Sacha Baron Cohen, who once dreamed of being a chef, loves to cook for his family.
Borat buys a chocolate cake and asks the woman behind the counter to write on top, “Jews will not replace us” in icing — with a smiley face.
Sacha Baron Cohen is an observant Jew who speaks Hebrew and works with the Anti-Defamation League on “Stop Hate for Profit,” a campaign to stem the bile on social media.
Borat sings a ditty about the Wuhan flu and chopping up journalists “like the Saudis do.”
Sacha Baron Cohen is Zooming in for an interview, sporting a black baseball cap, black T-shirt and a Covid-o’clock shadow.
If you thought the comedian could never do anything wilder than getting Dick Cheney to sign a waterboarding kit for him in his 2018 Showtime series, “Who Is America?” you would be wrong. There’s a scene with a top Trump adviser in “Borat Subsequent Movie Film: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” (premiering on October 23 on Amazon) that will leave you gobsmacked.
They say Donald Trump has destroyed satire. But Mr. Baron Cohen proves that’s not so.
I’ve been following his work, and pestering him for an interview, ever since he first hit America, masquerading as Ali G, a wannabe British rapper, and scamming unsuspecting dignitaries into interviews.
He quizzed a puzzled James Baker about why he used a system of carrots and sticks in international diplomacy. What if a country didn’t like carrots? What if its inhabitants preferred a different vegetable?
Ali G pitched Donald Trump about investing in an ice cream glove that would prevent your hand from getting sticky.
Mr. Baron Cohen, who turned 49 this past week, said, “Obviously, I’ve realized that I’ve had a longstanding distaste for the president. That was why I wanted to interview him as Ali G.”
He added, “His brilliance was to commandeer the very term that was being used against him, ‘fake news,’ and use it against every journalist that had journalistic integrity.”
The prankster has no problem sprinting out of a luxury hotel in New York and running down the street in lacy pink lingerie. But out of character, he’s very private, even a bit shy.
He refused for many years to give interviews as himself. He would occasionally speak as his characters. He tended to let critiques pass without rebuttal, as when journalists wondered if Ali G was in the tradition of Al Jolson and when Abe Foxman, the former director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), criticized Borat, fearing the character could incite anti-Semitism because some people might miss the irony.
After the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., an appalled Mr. Baron Cohen reached out to Jonathan Greenblatt, the director of the ADL, who persuaded the star to give the keynote at last year’s ADL summit, Never Is Now.
“I was just so impressed by his intelligence,’’ Mr. Greenblatt said. “These issues are at the heart of his motive for his unique style of art. More than anyone in public life today, he exposes bias — whether it’s anti-Semitism, homophobia or rank racism — for what it is, shameful and wrenching and ignorant.” (In fact, Mr. Baron Cohen used Hebrew and some Polish as a stand-in for the Kazakh language in Borat.)
The actor started his speech by saying that, to be clear, “when I say ‘racism, hate and bigotry,’ I’m not referring to the names of Stephen Miller’s Labradoodles.” Later he noted that while his stunts could be “juvenile” and “puerile,” at least some are aimed at getting people to reveal what they actually believe, as “when Borat was able to get an entire bar in Arizona to sing ‘Throw the Jew down the well,’ it did reveal people’s indifference to anti-Semitism.”
Scorching the lords of the cloud, he said that Facebook would run and micro-target any “political” ad anyone wants, even if it’s a lie. “If Facebook were around in the 1930s,’’ he said, “it would have allowed Hitler to post 30-second ads on his ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem.’”
The speech catalyzed the “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign, with a coalition of civil rights groups and Mr. Baron Cohen wrangling celebrities. Doing the speech was “completely out of my comfort zone,” he said, because “I’ve always been reluctant to be a celebrity and I’ve always been wary of using my fame to push any political views, really.”
He added that “it was the first time I’d ever given a major speech in my own voice but I felt like I had to ring the alarm bell and say that democracy is in peril this year. I felt, even if it was going to destroy my career and people are going to come at me and say, ‘Just shut up, the last thing we need is another celebrity telling us what to do’ — I fully understand people who do that — I felt I needed to do that to live with myself.”
Mr. Baron Cohen actually started studying anti-Semitism at Cambridge University, when he wrote his thesis on “the Black-Jewish alliance” and identity politics in the Civil Rights movement. So he was primed to play the puckish Abbie Hoffman.
“Essentially, he was trying to be a stand-up comedian,” Mr. Baron Cohen said of the man who co-founded the Yippies and preached flower power. “He was very influenced by Lenny Bruce and he realized that if he could make people laugh, he could get them engaged in the cause.”
While he calls himself “this comedian who’s dabbled in a bit of acting over the years,” Mr. Baron Cohen is actually, like all great clowns — yes, he went to clown school, L’Ecole Philippe Gaulier — able to switch easily from light to dark.
Mr. Sorkin, who wrote and directed the Chicago 7 film, said that the day Mr. Baron Cohen shot his scene on the witness stand reminded him of the day Jack Nicholson shot his courtroom scene in “A Few Good Men,” noting, “Everyone wanted to watch; 120 extras didn’t care that the camera wasn’t on them, they stayed to watch.”
Mr. Baron Cohen has been compared to a raunchy Tocqueville and he said he did see a huge change in American society from the time he first went out to shoot “Borat” 15 years ago to the time he made the sequel.
“In 2005, you needed a character like Borat who was misogynist, racist, anti-Semitic to get people to reveal their inner prejudices,” he said. “Now those inner prejudices are overt. Racists are proud of being racists.’’ When the president is “an overt racist, an overt fascist,’’ he said, “it allows the rest of society to change their dialogue, too.
“My aim here was not to expose racism and anti-Semitism,” he said of the sequel. “The aim is to make people laugh, but we reveal the dangerous slide to authoritarianism.”
He pondered if America, under a second Trump term, would “become a democracy in name only, similar to a Turkish democracy or a Russian democracy?”
He said he moved in with two conspiracy theorists for a few days for the new “Borat” to show “that they’re ordinary folks who are good people, who have just been fed this diet of lies. They’re completely different to the politicians who are motivated by their own power, who realized that they can create fear by spreading these lies through the most effective propaganda machine in history”: social media platforms.
I had thought that the satirist’s most challenging moment was when he fell asleep as Ali G, after drinking in Mississippi with two old Southern gents, and somehow, to the amazement of his terrified director, woke up in character.
But in the new “Borat,’’ filmed in part during the pandemic, he said “the hardest thing I had to do was, I lived in character for five days in this lockdown house. I was waking up, having breakfast, lunch, dinner, going to sleep as Borat when I lived in a house with these two conspiracy theorists. You can’t have a moment out of character.”
Also a high degree of difficulty: a scene where he sneaked into a Mike Pence speech at a Conservative Political Action Conference this year. He was costumed as President Trump and carrying on his shoulder the actress playing his daughter as a gift from Kazakhstan for “Vice Premier” Mike Pence.
“Obviously, I’m wearing a fat suit,” the comedian said. “How do I get in and how do I get out?” Security was there to “check everyone’s bodies going through. Bear in mind, I spent five hours in makeup that morning with the prosthetic team changing my face into Trump’s face. This fat suit is huge. It’s a 56-inch fat suit to turn my waist into Trump’s because we had estimated that was the most realistic.” When a security guard’s wand began beeping, Mr. Baron Cohen improvised that it was because of his defibrillator.
“Then I ended up hiding in the bathroom, listening to conservative men go to the toilet for five hours until I broke into the room. We were surrounded by Secret Service and police and internal security.”
He said that when he was presenting “Borat” to streaming services, several were concerned by the political content and the idea of running it before the election.
But the comedian was determined to get it on before Election Day because “we wanted it to be a reminder to women of who they’re voting for — or who they’re not voting for. If you’re a woman and you don’t vote against this guy, then know what you’re doing for your gender.”
The B-Listers
I wonder if, with all the scenes of his near escapes from armed crazies, diving into trapdoors and vans, carrying a clipboard in case he needed to ward off bullets, his wife ever tells him that his job is too dangerous.
“If there’s anything dangerous that I’m going to do, I just don’t tell her until it’s over,” he said. “I made a mistake with her. She once came on set just for fun. On set means coming to the minivan, which carried me around when we were shooting ‘Bruno.’ And there ended up being a police chase. I was in a separate car and the police were trying to find me. She found the whole thing so upsetting, and she never came back on set again.”
He had an early preview of Mr. Trump’s penchant for vengeance. Playing a prank at the 2012 Oscars, dressed up as his character in the movie “The Dictator,” he dumped the cremation “ashes” of Kim Jong-il — really just flour — on Ryan Seacrest’s tuxedo. Mr. Trump, who used to spend an inordinate amount of time gossiping about celebrities, went nuts, tweeting and making a YouTube video about how rude the stunt was.
The real estate dealer said that Mr. Seacrest’s security guard should have “pummeled” and “punched” Mr. Baron Cohen “in the face so many times, he wouldn’t have known what happened.” He said the comedian should have ended up in the hospital.
Recalling the bizarre incident, Mr. Baron Cohen said, “I remember my late father watching Trump on the campaign trail in 2016. I said, ‘What do you think of him?’ He said, ‘Two things. He’s extremely entertaining. Far more entertaining than Hillary. Two, he’s a fascist.’ My dad was born in 1932. He’d seen fascists on the streets, Mosley’s Blackshirts beating up Jews. And he knew what fascism was.”
Sacha’s Jewish grandmother Liesel, a ballerina, fled Germany in 1936. She lived in Israel and worked as a fitness instructor. Mr. Baron Cohen filmed her lessons for a video — “Exercise for the Over 60’s” — and would send her a bouquet of flowers every week until she died. His mother also worked in fitness.
He said that his father, a native of Wales who was an editor on Fleet Street for a periodical called New Middle East, before he went into the clothing business, sat with him at the kitchen table, when he was still living at home, to edit his first Ali G script.
“He goes, ‘This is really funny, Sach,’” the son recalled, lighting up as he talks about his father. “He was a great supporter and a brave, courageous, hysterically funny man. I’m sure he would have preferred to be doing what I’m doing rather than sitting in as an accountant for a very small gentleman’s men’s wear business.”
The business, Mr. Baron Cohen said, laughing, “was so unfashionable that many of the brands actually pulled their clothes out of my dad’s shop when they wanted to become fashionable again.”
Gerald Baron Cohen lived to see the son’s success. I met the parents at a Vanity Fair Oscar party once and they were the most blissful people at that party, where stars often wander about looking bored or resigned. The father had on a jaunty hat and glowed with pride when I asked about his son.
“That’s hilarious,’’ Mr. Baron Cohen said, when I remind him about the encounter. “You can only do this stuff if you feel loved and secure and you don’t feel judged. They loved me being naughty, being funny and potentially embarrassing them amongst their friends.”
He said that his father grew up in poverty, but his parents worked hard to get Sacha and his two older brothers into a good high school and Sacha did well enough on his tests and in his Cambridge interview to get a coveted slot to study history.
When he was unemployed, the lissome 6-foot-3 Mr. Baron Cohen briefly worked as a model. “Believe it or not,” he said, sounding a bit sheepish, “I did a tiny bit of work during a time where they didn’t want models who looked like models.”
He also tried to be a chef. “I finished high school and there was a chef called Raymond Blanc who got a Michelin star. I went over to his restaurant, called Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, and I asked to work there and he declined. He said I was too tall to work in the kitchen, and then I gave up my dream of becoming a chef.
“Recently, I was lucky enough to work in the kitchen at Le Bernardin in New York. I bumped into Eric Ripert and I told him I want to be a chef and he goes, ‘Come over.’ It was amazing, because me and my brother spent three hours in the kitchen during their dinner service. It’s incredibly tiring and then we’re in the way. I felt very bad about it.”
Ms. Fisher, a modern Carole Lombard who converted to Judaism for Mr. Baron Cohen, has said that it’s difficult to embarrass her husband.
“Listen, I do get embarrassed,” he said, but “when I go into character, I get fully immersed in it to the degree that I’m almost locked into the character.”
Mr. Baron Cohen believes, as Abbie Hoffman said, that “Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger.”
In “Who Is America?,” he satirized the left with a character who is a professor of gender and women’s studies at Reed College. The professor believes that “the world’s most dangerous chemical weapon is testosterone” and refers to “President Hillary Clinton.” He cycles and wears an NPR T-shirt and a pink pussy hat and says things like, “In our yurt, we try to challenge the gender stereotypes. My son, Harvey Milk, is not allowed to urinate standing up. And our daughter, Malala, is obliged to urinate standing up.”
Mr. Baron Cohen explained that his aim was “to challenge and mock the absurdity of the extreme left, too,” faulting “the ineffectiveness of extremists on the left who are unable to ask a simple question because there’s so many qualifications before every sentence so that they don’t offend anyone.”
Other comedians speak of his work with awe, particularly the sketches mocking the left that surely hurt his award prospects in Hollywood.
If you wrote down a list of what constitutes excellence, said Bill Maher, it would be epitomized by Mr. Baron Cohen.
“Originality, courage, degree of difficulty, laugh-out-loud funny,” Mr. Maher said. “What he gets people to reveal about themselves, and in so doing, the country, is astonishing. He’s a genius in a league of his own.”
I ask Mr. Baron Cohen how two A-list stars, who have three children, make it work.
“Luckily, we’re not A-list,” he said. “I remember once in Hollywood, I was trying to avoid being photographed by paparazzi. I think I put something in front of my face when exiting a restaurant and this photographer shouted, ‘You’re only a B-lister!’ And I said to Isla, ‘Oh, my God, we’re B-listers! We made it! We’re B-listers.’”
He mused that “it seems bizarre that we’re still married in Hollywood after so many years.’’
They met in Sydney, Australia, circa 2000. Was he ensorcelled at first sight?
“She was hilarious,” he said. “We were at a very pretentious party, and me and her bonded over taking the mick out of the other people in the party. I knew instantly. I don’t know if she did.” He chuckled. “It’s taken her about 20 years to know.”
So what is he doing now that he can take a breath as his two movies open?
“Well,” said Mr. Baron Cohen, “I might try exercising again because I haven’t done that for seven months.”
Unless you count fleeing crazed Americans.
Confirm or Deny [Questions italicized]
Maureen Dowd: You made your dad pose as a famous chef at your wedding?
Sacha Baron Cohen: Correct. We had a secret wedding in Paris. And the ruse was that it was my father’s 70th birthday and that he was a famous chef in England. That was how we avoided having photographers at the wedding. I trained him up to be in character. He said that his favorite dish that he created was L’oeuf Scrambled.
You gave a Zoom toast at Larry David’s wedding to Ashley Underwood, who was a producer on “Who Is America?”
Me and my wife introduced him to her at my birthday party. Together, we have set up three weddings.
Your favorite Adam Sandler movie is “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.”
Listen, I actually tried to get that movie, to rewrite it, to appear in it.
In character as Ali G in 2000, you played a limo driver in the video for Madonna’s “Music.”
Yes, that’s right.
If Steve Mnuchin wasn’t Treasury secretary, you think he would have produced the new “Borat.”
No. I think he was one of the financiers of the first “Borat.”
You got into day trading on Robinhood during the lockdown.
I wish. Actually, I’ve lost a lot of money. I’m very bad at financial stuff.
Most nights you spend doomscrolling on Twitter while watching “The Great British Baking Show” on Netflix.
While I do occasionally tweet, I do not have access to Twitter. I think I’d be too infuriated with stuff and I wouldn’t be able to control myself. When I write a tweet, I don’t have access to my account, so I need to send it to someone for them to actually put it up.
You stayed at the home of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston while making "Ali G."
Correct.
You are still friends with Pamela Anderson, who did a cameo in the first “Borat.”
I was never friends with her. “Borat" was the reason she got divorced. She wrote that down on her divorce papers: “Reason to divorce: ‘Borat.’” She showed the movie at Ron Meyer’s house with Kid Rock. She hadn’t told him that she was in it. She texted me after the movie and I said, “How did it go down?” And she goes, “Great, though I’m getting divorced.” I thought it was a joke, but it was actually true.
Your brother, Erran, a composer who wrote the music for "Ali G" and wrote a new national anthem for Kazakhstan for the first “Borat” and did the music for the new one, also made the single greatest Hanukkah record ever made: “Songs in the Key of Hanukkah,” featuring everyone from Chrissie Hynde to rapper Y-Love.
Confirm.
You play the cello.
Correct. In fact, my first ever TV appearance was playing cello in a program called “Fanfare for Young Musicians.”
You can’t believe that Tom Hayden got Jane Fonda.
Yes, I can’t. ###
[Maureen Dowd received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, with the Pulitzer committee particularly citing her columns on the impeachment of Bill Clinton after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Dowd joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1983, after writing for Time magazine and the now-defunct Washington Star. At The Times, Dowd was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, then became a columnist for the paper's editorial page in 1995. Dowd's first book was a collection of columns entitled Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004). Most recently Dowd has written The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics(2017). See all of Dowd's books here. She received a BA (English) from Catholic University (DC).]
