Title : "Trump Is a Bad President. He’s an Even Worse Entertainer" — NYT headline for an op-ed by the actor John Lithgow.
link : "Trump Is a Bad President. He’s an Even Worse Entertainer" — NYT headline for an op-ed by the actor John Lithgow.
"Trump Is a Bad President. He’s an Even Worse Entertainer" — NYT headline for an op-ed by the actor John Lithgow.
The piece includes a drawing of Trump by Lithgow. Trump is dressed like a Shakespearean actor playing one of the king roles. A bad actor presumably. That invites us to opine that Lithgow is a bad artist, but it's not worth it, because it's cartoon style and an illustration, not something that got hung in a high-quality museum. But the illustration critiques Trump's entertainment skill by holding him to the standard of the most lofty and serious actors. So it's tempting!From the text:
Think of Mr. Trump preening at his beauty contests, body-slamming Vince McMahon at W.W.F. events or holding rallies that resemble the arena gigs of an insult comic. These are the antics of a showman, not a statesman...."Hopped-up claque" sounds like an unfair insult, but if you look up the words you'll see the words are precisely right.
He reads scripted lines like a panic-stricken schoolboy at a middle school assembly. He mangles every attempt at irony, self-mockery or, God forbid, an actual joke. He cravenly fills the hall for every rally with a hopped-up claque drawn from his hard-core base....
It is dispiriting to watch the wretched excesses of Mr. Trump’s slapstick presidency and the rabid audience he commands. But there may be an upside to his crude performance art. His relentless lies, impulsive acts and gassy pronouncements have emboldened American journalists and quickened their senses.I've got to say this prose strikes me as pretty good. I went over to Lithgow's Wikipedia page to see where he got his education:
Lithgow is descended from Mayflower passenger and colonial governor William Bradford. Because of his father's job [as a theater director], the family moved frequently during Lithgow's childhood; he spent his childhood years in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where activist Coretta Scott King babysat him and his siblings... Lithgow graduated from Princeton High School in Princeton. He attended Harvard College, and graduated with an A.B. magna cum laude in 1967, in history and literature.... After graduation, Lithgow won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art....Impressively elite! And Coretta Scott King is in the story.
Back to the NYT op-ed:
Everyone loves a good villain onscreen and onstage. Shakespeare himself must have especially relished writing lines for Macbeth, Iago and Richard III. But coldhearted monsters in movies and plays are the stuff of fantasy. When we’re sitting in the audience, some part of us is reassured knowing that we are watching fiction.Here's another difference between a play and real life. In a play, everyone in the audience can tell who the villain is. There's a playwright, and he wrote the villain into existence. But the real world is not so easy. Is Trump a villain? Some people think it's obvious, but plenty of people think he's a hero. You can put them in an imaginary basket labeled "hopped-up claque," but that's the sort of thinking that got him elected. If you want to rein him in, you'll need to put in a better performance. You have to reach those people. But you're playing to the crowd that's reading the NYT and that already loathes Trump. What have you got for the groundlings?
Reality is a lot less entertaining and a lot more frightening. There has to be a way to rein in real-life villainy in public life....
Thus articles "Trump Is a Bad President. He’s an Even Worse Entertainer" — NYT headline for an op-ed by the actor John Lithgow.
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