Yesterday I watched the President and Mrs. Obama enter a room in the White House, she took a seat, looked as intelligently beautiful as ever, he went to the stage and presented the Medal of Freedom to a group of talented Americans, including DeNiro, Bill Gates, Ellen DeGeneres, Frank Gehry, Maya Lin and so many others. As dignified and as moving as these presentations were I could only think What Would Donald Do. Does he even know these people? Who’s going to write the words he’d have to say to come off sounding informed? Will he not even participate in this yearly tradition? Would the immigrant put on extra makeup and sit in the audience and ask herself “who are these people?”
@bonvivant I don’t think I’ve seen anything as unfunny as this. You didn’t originate if of course, but some asshat who thinks it’s funny did. No need to repeat it.
Can’t wait for his State of the Union speech if he wings it. There will be betting pools for how many rimes he uses amazing, terrific, believe me, etc.
I called my dad yesterday while he was watching that. I think the memory of the Obama years will be a comfort and hope to us going forward. They’re an expression of this country at its best. Graceful, confident, hopeful, inheritors of an Enlightenment tradition of belief in rationality and progress.
I’m going to print out what he told his daughters after the election. Maybe even put it on a Christmas tree ornament.
“What I say to them is that people are complicated,” Obama told me. “Societies and cultures are really complicated … This is not mathematics; this is biology and chemistry. These are living organisms, and it’s messy. And your job as a citizen and as a decent human being is to constantly affirm and lift up and fight for treating people with kindness and respect and understanding. And you should anticipate that at any given moment there’s going to be flare-ups of bigotry that you may have to confront, or may be inside you and you have to vanquish. And it doesn’t stop … You don’t get into a fetal position about it. You don’t start worrying about apocalypse. You say, O.K., where are the places where I can push to keep it moving forward.”
I feel that way myself sometimes. Other times I say, well, this is our time to do the struggle. Turns out it wasn’t a war in some jungle somewhere. It’s at home, with friends and neighbors, explaining why greed and xenophobia and fear and short-sightedness about everything isn’t the way forward. Give up and it’s gone. Keep carrying the torch, and it might be saved. Gotta try, because if we don’t who will? See above. Obama knows how to look at it. That’s why we elected him.
It’s not meant to be funny and I doubt anyone finds it so. It does drive home a point, in a very effective way, the terrible consequences of a Trump presidency.
Look at Trump’s convention, all the fourth-raters featured at that. And that was before a lot of the most scurrilous, hideous stuff. It’s really hard to imagine any serious achiever in any realm agreeing to do anything like that. Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yo-Yo Ma? No haps.