Eags (Timothy Egan) has been relegated to every other Friday, by the brain trust that runs the NY Fishwrap. Today, essay demonstrates why a semi-monthly Eags is better than day-after-day punditry.This blogger is affronted by letters to the editor of the local fishwrap that proclaim that the Horse's A$$ in the Oval Office should be respected because of his occupation of the Oval Office. Not so fast, Fastidious Writers To The Editor, respect for the presidency goes two ways — It don't work unless the occupant of the Oval Office respects the institution of the presidency. If the occupant of the Oval Office DISrespects the office of the POTUS, that occupant DEserves all of the calumny and opprobrium that is possible to utter or express. If this is (fair & balanced) civic engagement, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap]
We Need To Keep Laughing
By Eags (Timothy Egan)
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
We the people, our power embodied by members of the new House of Representatives who swore to uphold the Constitution on Thursday, need to dig deep and investigate. We need to expose the crooks, incompetents and traitors selling out their country in a White House of grifters.
We need to call out the moral crimes: the adults financed by taxpayers who let children die in their care. The secretary of state who gives a pass to a kingdom that cuts up a journalist with a bone saw. The press office that covers for a president who can rarely go a single hour without telling a lie.
We need to restrain a toddler-in-chief who forces 800,000 federal workers to go without paychecks, many of them now missing house payments. We need to remind people that a temper tantrum from President Trump means garbage is overflowing and poop is backing up at our national parks — a fitting image of what this cipher of a man has done to the land.
But also, we need to laugh.
There has never been a more darkly comic person to occupy the White House. Who tells a 7-year-old on Christmas Eve that this whole Santa Claus thing may be bogus? Who rings in the new year with a siren tweet in all CAPITAL LETTERS urging people to calm down? What kind of president puts a poster of himself on a table during a cabinet meeting?
Who else but the Stable Genius, Tariff Man, the A-plus President. Mr. Trump has inspired more laughter in the past year, by one calculation, than any politician in history. At the United Nations, the whole world laughed at him.
People, this our best weapon! Take it from Mark Twain: “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” Take it from the Scottish, who greeted Trump last year with a 20-foot inflatable orange baby in diapers, holding a cellphone. A Scot called Mr. Trump a “tiny-fingered, Cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing… gibbon.”
Or take it from the Finns. When the president suggested that wildfires could be prevented by raking our forests, as he imagined the Finns did, these people showed that their reputation for humorlessness is wrong. Among the best pictures tweeted out by the Finns was that of a woman taking a vacuum to the forest floor.
Mr. Trump hates this stuff. More than anything, he fears ridicule. It’s the necklace of garlic against the vampire. When Bill Maher compared him to an orangutan, Mr. Trump sued. The court threw out the case because jokes about pompous, hypersensitive, orangutan-looking public figures are protected free speech. It was news to no one but Mr. Trump.
The mockery gets to him because deep down, he knows he’s a fraud. “The Art of the Deal” was the invention of its ghostwriter. “The Apprentice” was complete fiction. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies,” Bill Pruitt, a producer on the show, recently told The New Yorker. “But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester king.”
The jesters are having their day. What was the best venting of Trump frustration in 2018? Hands down, it was Matt Damon doing the brewski-loving, head-steaming, boy-calendar-obsessed Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Nobody can order a beer without thinking of the skit.
The best comedy makes fun of the powerful and the ridiculous. Oddly, the White House Correspondents’ Association has decided this is not a year to be funny. The grim-faced hosts of the nerd prom will have a fine historian, Ron Chernow, as their speaker at the annual dinner, but no laughs, please — they’re serious journalists, after all.
In the same dour cast, colleges are no longer a source of good political satire. Lenny Bruce, now getting a revival in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” was a god with students. Today’s campus environment is a humor desert. The kids are too fragile. Mr. Bruce, who was criminally prosecuted for telling a joke about Eleanor Roosevelt’s breasts, would surely be banned.
Good politicians can tell jokes on themselves. Abraham Lincoln, when accused of being two-faced, replied, “Honestly, if I had two faces, would I be showing you this one?” Barack Obama lamented his diminishment. “I look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m not the strapping young Muslim socialist I used to be.’”
Comedians are truth tellers. The journalistic fact checkers, God bless ’em, can reach only so many people. The antidote to a long day of White House lies is a long late night of comedy.
So it’s encouraging, at the dawn of divided government, to see nonprofessionals get into the act. Take the wall — please, it’s the source of our government shutdown. It’s not big, or beautiful, or made of concrete or steel slats. It’s nothing, at this point. “To be honest, it’s not a wall,” as Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, said.
Nancy Pelosi, the new — and this time around, well-fortified — speaker of the House, had the best line on the wall. “He’s now down to, I think, a beaded curtain or something.” Not bad. Keep it up. ###
[Timothy Egan writes now writes a semi-monthly column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a BA ( journalism), and was awarded a doctorate of humane letters (honoris causa) by Whitman College (WA) in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan's most recent book is The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero (2016). See all other books by Eags here.]
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