In a world of bike-riding turtles and a president who’s never been introduced to telling the truth, a sharp-tongued comedian seems perfectly at home.
Beau Elliot
Imagine a tortoise trying to ride a mountain bike.
Yeah, I know. It’s a ludicrous notion. But the image sticks in your mind, ridiculously. You don’t know whether to shake your head and walk away, laugh and run away, or rush in where angels fear to tread to save the turtle and, maybe more importantly, the mountain bike. (I mean, who wants to be knows as a turtle-hugger?)
Chaos ensues, of course, because it turns out that chaos rushes in where angels fear to etc. There’s a magnificent crash, full of great CGI-generated special effects, and the turtle is destroyed. As is, more importantly, the mountain bike.
(No turtles were harmed in the making of this image. Or mountains. You can’t hurt mountains, you say, they’re big and made of solid rock. Yeah. Tell that to the mountains in Appalachia after the coal companies have had their way.)
These are the thoughts you think as the Trumpster ushers us into the Age of Untruth, or the Age of Post-Truth. Or the Age of Forgetting the Useless Past So We Don’t Have to Face the Future. As if millions were playing a turtle trying to imitate an ostrich, sand, head, and all.
So many forget (or initially ignored) that on the campaign trail, the Trumpster heaped scorn by the metric shovelful (though, like all good Americans, he didn’t realize the shovels were metric) on aides to Hillary Clinton for taking the Fifth in the Clinton email investigation. “If you’re innocent, why take the Fifth?” was his mantra (though like all good Americans, he didn’t call it a mantra).
So pretty much naturally, recently, Michael Cohen, the Trumpster’s personal attorney, announced he would take the Fifth in the Stormy Daniels investigation. (No Perfect Stormy jokes, please, even though they might pertain.)
No word yet on whether the Trumpster’s mantra applies to Cohen.
And it’s why an annual White House Correspondents Dinner turned into the cause de jour. (You throw some French in to make the ordinary seem more important. Restaurants have been using this for decades. It’s why soup of the day, tomato, is $3 and soup de jour, tomato, is $6. Or why roast beef in beef drippings never appears on the menu, but roast beef au jus is $15. You can try it out when you attmempt to sell that mangled mountain bike sans tortoise. Just call it mountain bike composé.)
The White House press shindig is usually a sort of respite from the everyday, full of stuff au jus and pointed jokes about the president, the administration, and, yes, journalists. You should tread carefully here; journalists just hate it when somebody is funnier than they are.
Into the shindig rushed comedian Michelle Wolf, who told jokes about the president, the administration, and, ignoring the cautionary note about journalists, jokes about journalists.
And the Twitter-verse blew up. Most of the rest of the universe blew up, too, from the looks of it.
It turns out that conservatives are extraordinarily sensitive. Who knew? Just going by their policies.
Now, a fair number of Wolf’s jokes were funny, some weren’t, but they were all quite pointed (about the Cabinet, she said words to the effect that she had a passel of jokes about Cabinet members, but they all got fired). And somehow she wound up as the bête noire. Even the head of the Columbia Journalism Review criticized her. And the president of the White House press association took issue with Wolf’s lack of civility.
Excuse me? Civility and comedians went out with Lenny Bruce. And that was 60 years ago.
Besides, who are we talking about here? The Trumpster. Hard to be civil about a man who has never had even a brushing acquaintanceship with civility.
Ah, well. Meanwhile, I thought I heard an IPR announcer say Trump warns Iran not to ramp up its root-beer program. It might not be truth de jour, but it sounds like a better world.