For the last couple of days I’ve mulled over what this post might be about, and found, perhaps with a bit of chagrin, that I wasn’t all that full of piss and vinegar. The well of righteous outrage had run momentarily dry.
It’s been a week or two filled with e-mails and spreadsheets and I figured I would settle into something about the importance of planning trips you’ll never take. About how it keeps you fresh, and that simply panning across a globe has a way of shocking us away from our tendency to craft a universe on the scale of streets, blocks, and bars.
That the magic of a vacation is so often in the anticipation of a faraway place and strange food, and that the National Geographic photographs never quite capture the smell of burning garbage and street-vendor salmonella. Sometimes, in the throes of the banal, simply planning a trip is enough.
It was going to be a fine post, and still may be someday.
But then before I got to brass tacks I clicked around on the internet for a while and sipped on a cup of coffee and finally got around to watching that Michelle Wolf thing. You know the one. Hot damn.
If you haven’t watched this yet, take the time.
To be clear – I am not going to say anything here that hasn’t already been said, better, by smarter people. If you’ve followed this quirk of political americana over the past several days (years?), you will have read about the outrage over the speech.
You will have heard the dismay over crude language, and too-cutting jokes, and a media shocked, SHOCKED, that a person with the floor would mock a powerful woman’s looks. If you watched the speech you will probably have felt uncomfortable, if only for a moment. You will have felt, I hope, that it was perfect.
This year’s address at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner had everything, and exists now in perpetuity as a nineteen minute collage of the state of politics, news media, and discourse in 2018. The speech and its fallout has illustrated in an unprecedented way the essential problem with blurring the lines between the naturally antagonistic divide between politicians and the press, and the rapport required there to report the news in any relevant way.
At the center of the outrage is Wolf’s treatment of the WH Press Secretary. Sarah Huckabee Sanders stands daily and defends the actions of an autocrat with willing disregard for the truth, which is why it is so fitting that the controversy surrounding her roast is entirely manufactured. While we argue whether or not Michelle Wolf attacked Huckabee Sanders’s looks and journalists (commentators, etc) throng to the Secretary’s support, we ignore the the fact that she obviously, verifiably did not do that. And so therefore we ignore the power dynamics that underpin the relationship between the press corps and the office. Those journalists cannot do their jobs without daily access to the Secretary, can they be unbiased in their public response to a personal attack, when their livelihoods depend on rapport?
And of course critics of the critiques have not missed the comically scaled whirlwind of hypocrisy, disinformation, and partisan outrage surrounding Wolf’s roast. That she, as a female comedian, was excoriated for poking fun at the taboo, as though the actual pedophilia, the actual threats to jail journalists, the actual assault on the very notion of truth by white men in powerful positions is somehow sanctimonious.
Against the backdrop of conduct that is now commonplace nothing that Michelle Wolf said is remotely shocking. What shocked the room was her gall to say these things baldly, in public, to the faces of those who are accustomed to controlling the narrative and smirking away dissent. All this at an event ostensibly committed to the defense and celebration of the first amendment, and still the outrage.
We will miss speeches like this one if the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is culled; we will miss it more if the evening is further appropriated by the administration as our President has suggested. But we should not be shocked, or outraged at a truth to power sermon. We should be outraged that it is attacked by the establishment it has apparently replaced.
Oh Yeah I Forgot
When the doorbell rang at Brent Booker’s third story studio apartment he was not wearing pants. He was crumpled in a second hand recliner, scrolling ... Read more
Luck is Good
Their evenings go something like she broils hamburger patties in the oven and serves them with toast and green beans from a bag. The countertops ... Read more