Reader Enrico alerted me to last night’s “Real Time” with Bill Maher, whose guests were t.v. producer and writer Sam Levinson, California Democratic congressman Ro Khanna, and political journalist Jonathan Martin. Maher’s two-minute opening monologue, below, deals with the abject failure of the U.S. to achieve any of Trump’s aims in our war with Iran. As he says, “I just hope we play Iran in the World Cup so we can beat them at something.”
Below is the big (9-minute) monologue, this time celebrating America’s 250th birthday (“America is Ours”). His theme is that while Trump will try to make the anniversary about himself, we should resist it. Maher: “He [Trump] isn’t America—he’s the temporary caretaker of America—America’s employee.” He concludes, “For all of Trump’s nonsense, America is still here: Still incredibly prosperous by world standards, still the place where people want to get to, still free enough to let me put the word ‘nonsense’ next to the President’s name.” (Yay for free speech!)
Maher then lists some of Trump’s failures (court losses, no big changes in the budget, no name on the Kennedy Canter), and declares, “America may right now be the country Donald Trump is President of, but America is everything that keeps Trump from being the king he wishes he were.”
It’s a paean to American democratic principles. As Maher says, “The message that most threatens authoritarians isn’t ‘America sucks’: it’s ‘America is ours too’.” There’s a litany of progress that’s been made since America’s 200th anniversary in 1976, as if Steve Pinker became a comedian.
The upshot is that, as Maher maintains, there’s nothing embarrassing about being a patriot if you’re an American, and we should go out and celebrate on July 4. It’s not Trump we’re celebrating, but America, flawed but still the destination of many immigrants.
Premature.
ISTM the acid test will be the post-Trump rebound. Post-Nixon there was the realisation that yes, the constitutional rule-of-law system had prevailed, but this was a near miss and some serious changes were needed to limit executive power. So there were the Church Committee hearings and resulting reforms.
This time it’s different. The political zeitgeist isn’t reform but resentment and revenge. I expect the next Democrat administration to be little if any better in this regard than Trump’s one. IMO it’s implausible that they will seriously limit their executive power to exact revenge on their political enemies, however “joyfully” they spin this. So we’ll have another turn of the widening gyre.
We shall soon see.
Damn but your prediction is depressingly compelling.
FWIW, I used to be an optimist.
Very heartening. Good reminder.
I don’t get the quip about Stephen Pinker?
I took it to mean that Maher’s message of gradual improvement over time was similar to Pinker’s, only funnier.
I guess maybe that makes sense, although Pinker actually is pretty funny in person. I saw him lecture in Toronto once.
A friend offered me a free ticket to go and see him recently, but it would have been a two-hour drive to get there and I had a lot of things going on at the time. Really I should have made the effort though, regret not going now!
He was a very engaging speaker. This was maybe 20 years ago?? Where would you have seen him?
Nothing funded by taxpayers should have any living politician’s name on it.