Thursday, January 12, 2017

No People Like Show People

I was one of those bleeding-heart snowflakes who was captivated by Meryl Streep's speech at the Golden Globes last Sunday. She was there to accept a lifetime achievement award from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and she started by talking about the work done by her fellow actors over the past year. "But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It, it sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good. It was -- there was nothing good about it. But it was effective, and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back. It -- it kind of broke my heart when I saw it. And I still can't get it out of my head because it wasn't in a movie. It was real life."
Ms. Streep was referring to a rally in November 2015, when our Twit In Chief launched into an impression of Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter who suffers from arthrogryposis, a congenital joint condition, after Kovaleski pushed back against Trump’s use of a 2001 article he wrote as proof of the candidate’s false assertion that “thousands and thousands of people” in Muslim neighborhoods in New Jersey were cheering in the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11. And what do you suppose the soon-to-be most powerful man in the Free World did? 
You bet he did. He tweeted: "Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn't know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes. She is a…..Hillary flunky who lost big. For the 100th time, I never "mocked" a disabled reporter (would never do that) but simply showed him……."groveling" when he totally changed a 16 year old story that he had written in order to make me look bad. Just more very dishonest media!"
Dishonest media? Does that include social media like Twitter? Let's take the assertion that Ms. Streep is one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood. That measure seems somewhat subjective, but it's kind of hard to argue with nineteen Academy Award nominations and three wins, Thirty Golden Globe nominations and eight wins with a the aforementioned Lifetime Achievement Award topping that list off, not to mention a Presidential Medal of Freedom and a great many other honors including a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. An honor she shares with The Head Twit
The rest of Ms. Streep's speech concluded with a call for empathy. Something we may have to stockpile over the next four years.

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