All I know is my gut says “Maybe.”
This year will be remembered for its toxic fluff. Provocateurs and dime-store Howard Beales such as Seth Meyers, John Oliver, Lena Dunham and Andy Richter have demonstrated zero political efficacy. If anything, we’ll never know how much their smugness ostracized potential allies and inflamed the opposition’s base. No one — even the undereducated and marginalized — enjoys being condescended to. And yet, part of the Democratic strategy was to talk down to the citizens of America or to shame them into not voting for Trump. This sort of satire was arguably successful earlier in Jon Stewart’s run on The Daily Show, but it was fresh at the time. It had teeth and seemed to matter. But that formula has been rinsed.
The approach needs to change because it no longer works. It wasn’t clever enough and it underestimated the opposition. Even after taking a gut-wrenching loss on Nov. 8, many outlets and rogue social media celebrities have doubled down on their coverage of pop culture/reality crossover content, whimsical post mortems and open letters.
The most damning of these unintentionally hilarious postelection missives is the Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter obituary of HRC’s political career, in which Hillary is described as an infallible deity and no mere corporeal form but, instead, “light itself.” That’s not all. The first graph ends with, “She will be the finest world leader our galaxy has ever seen.” But this isn’t Clickhole. It’s the marrow of liberal confusion and hysteria.
The fictional Leslie Knope of Parks and Recreation wrote a bewildering open letter (is there any other kind) the day after the election in which she pulled out some PG invective, calling Trump “a giant fart monster.” That’s a perfect example of the type of doughy, undercooked humor Parks and Rec coasted on for more than half a decade.
Has Chelsea Handler moved to Spain as-promised?
Has any A-list Liberal celebrity actually moved to Canada? B-list? …C-list?
Ernesto “Che” Guevera’s alleged last words were “Shoot, coward, you’re only going to kill a man.”
An another thread I fantasized about establishing an organization that would actually help and prod whiny celebrities to follow through on their promise to move to [wherever]. Well, there’s actually a WWW site that purports to track the exodus of the disgusted. (Unfortunately I have no clue what the address is at the moment.) Last I heard the list of the departed or at least soon-to-be was still at zero.
On my Twitter timeline in the past day there was a post from The Hill on a post-election story with a still of Hillary from one of her campaign speeches (with standard public appearance makeup). It was, IMHO, a standard HRC pic—no better no worse than any other.
Another user responded by chiding the poster for using such an “unflattering” photograph when she is a “beautiful woman”.
When you have that level of idolatry about someone who is in running for the leader of one of the most powerful nations on Planet Earth and are in a position to articulate that to the rest of the world, it should be no surprise that those who disagree with the presumption behind the idolatry revolt and reject the premise. It’s the cognitive dissonance between their rather distorted viewpoint and the rest of the world’s rejection of that viewpoint which is causing them so much pain at the moment.
The first graph ends with, “She will be the finest world leader our galaxy has ever seen.”
Can’t set up a base on Mars fast enough.