Top of the Tree By Hook or Crook

Really, there was no reason to be surprised at the revelation that Donald Trump wanted to award himself the Congressional Medal of Honor.

“As president, I wanted to give myself the Congressional Medal of Honor, but they wouldn’t let me do it…they said that would be inappropriate.”* 

After all, we always knew that he thought himself to be top of the tree—and would do anything to boost himself up there.

Consider his golf game. He claims to have won 20 championships.** That’s a lie, of course. What is true is that he proclaimed himself winner of 20 championships.

Rick Reilly explained Trump’s method:

Whenever he opens a new golf course, because he owns 14 and operates another five, he plays the first club champion by himself and declares that the club championship and puts his name on the wall.

But it’s usually just him and Melania in the cart and nobody else. He just makes it up.

Jack Holmes added:

Imagine owning numerous golf clubs with your name plastered all over them and still needing to have your name up on the championship plaque, even though you know it's meaningless.

But fraudulent golf championship plaques aren’t the only fakery on the walls of Trump properties. There’s also the matter of the bogus Time magazine covers.

Although Donald Trump has repeatedly appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in the last year, the company is asking that a framed cover image of Trump be taken down from the walls of several golf clubs.

That's because the cover hanging in several Trump Organization clubs is a phony, a Time spokesperson confirmed to NBC News.

The March 1, 2009, cover was first identified as fake by The Washington Post . . .*** 

(Time didn’t publish on March 1, 2009.)

*

Trump’s ego-fed self-elevation to (undeserved) top-ranking that his neediness seems to demand reminds me of an important event in European history: Napoleon’s self-crowning as Emperor in December 2, 1804 at the Cathedral of  Notre-Dame in Paris.

No, I do not equate Trump and Napoleon. One conquered most of Europe through armored might, while the other conquers golf championships by cheating and fakery.

(He once stole another golfer’s ball, claiming that the ball on the green was his, instead of the one he had shot into a water hazard.)

One was the Little Corsican; the other a little coarse man.  

***

*  https://www.thewrap.com/trump-peeved-couldnt-give-himself-medal-of-honor/

**  https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a27431421/donald-trump-golf-cheat-club-champion-child-ball-water/

*** https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/time-asks-donald-trump-s-golf-clubs-remove-phony-magazine-n777546

Nuts and Lightning Bolts

Although you may not know it, good satire is an exceedingly rare commodity. More than ever, the creation of the ridiculous is almost impossible because of the competition it receives from reality. In the old days, if the satirist was artful, he obtained his greatest effects by exaggerating the norm in such a way that the reader became aware of its abnormality. Today the extreme is so commonplace there is little left for the satirist to do.

Robert A. Baker (1963)

“Introduction,” A Stress Analysis of A Strapless Evening Gown (And Other Essays For A Scientific Age)

*

Irony, as was pointed out in an earlier post, involves at least two separate states of awareness. The ironist—who is always insincere—has one state of awareness; he knows that his presentation is deliberately overstating what he doesn’t believe, or understating that which he does believe. The former—the overstatement—is the mode of sarcasm. The satirist, after putting forward (seemingly approvingly) the position of his opponent, then attempts to undermine it by setting it down a path of ever-increasingly absurd propositions. Hopefully, at some point, the penny drops and the opponent can no longer cling on to his belief. Reason and logic have abandoned him. Only foolishness remains. And only a fool remains with it.

*

Jovan Pulitzer is either one of the world’s greatest satirists—or a complete nut. He was identified by slate.com as either the originator or popularizer of the claim that one reason the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from Donald Trump was that Chinese thermostats controlled US voting machines, changing Trump votes secretly into Biden ones.*

I stand in awe of such a pronouncement. It has all the earmarks of a brilliant satirical invention—specifically, a sarcastic thrust against Trumpian believers of a massive conspiracy that put the Democratic candidate into the White House.

Consider:

The statement posits a voting machine conspiracy by which Trump votes were sabotaged (which is the Trumpian position).

 

It then identifies the most outrageous possible instrument as having been used to achieve the transfer of votes—a thermostat, the device that regulates the temperature level of your house. 

Crazy enough for you? Wait!

They weren’t just any ignoble thermostats—they were CHINESE thermostats. 

Bad enough that the Chinese have been inundating the US with plastic doodads to fill the shelves of your neighborhood Dollar General emporium; now they’ve gone hightech.

Sure, the sarcasm would work if the Chinese were left out—or if, say the Germans or the Israelis were the alleged culprits. But adding the Yellow Peril—that just puts the satire over the top.

But was it satire—or was it nuttiness? As Robert Baker is quoted, at the top of the page, in 1963 “the extreme is so commonplace.” Is today any different?

*

Another vote conspiracy allegation, supposedly promulgated by a group called Nations in Action, claimed (again according to slate.com) that “an Italian defense contractor uploaded software to a satellite to switch votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.” 

Examining this claim, we find similarities to the thermostat mishegas:

Here, too, outrageously inappropriate technology is being used. 

Instead of the Chinese we  have the ITALIANS. The land that has given the world Michaelangelo, Sophia Loren, and linguini aglio e olio, is not, I believe, world-renowned for its satellite technology. 

The conspiracy theory is stretched to the breaking point. 

But, apparently, there’s no attempt at satire here; we’re mired in true conspiracy swampland. Nations in Action claims its goal to be “the exposure of the ‘shadow government’ that controls the world.”

(If you think all of the above is too crazy for words, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows had several government agencies investigate the thermostat and satellite claims.)

*

At which point, what should a sane person think? 

J. B. S. Haldane, the polymath scientist, said:

"My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

I would suggest that the United States today “is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” 

***

* https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/jan-6-roe-gas-prices-congress-skewed-priorities.html

A Different Drum

What in my eyes made the December 2, 1967 issue of The New Yorker worthy of note?

Of the 213 covers drawn by Arthur Getz for the magazine, the December 2 one was not particularly distinguished. 

The Table of Contents didn't offer much:

The movies reviewed by Brendan Gill in “The Current Cinema”—“The Fearless Vampire Killers,” “Tender Scoundrel,” and “Lemonade Joe”—were disasters.

What caused my affection for the issue were two advertisements—one for a wristwatch and the other for a brand of Scotch whisky.

With the successful conclusion of World War II, the watch industry, freed of its obligation to supply the military, began to produce, once again, timepieces for the general public. But what selling point did the watch manufacturers emphasize to lure customers to their particular product? Thinness. For the next several decades, one could hardly escape a watch advertisement that did not extoll the timepiece’s thinness, even to the point of many manufacturers claiming the title of the thinnest.  

It was, therefore, with great pleasure that I found on page 85 the following ad for a Movado chronograph:

“The Fat Watch”! Ten dimes high! How wonderfully refreshing! 

*

The second advertisement that caught my eye was for a brand of Scotch that I had never heard of before: Hankey Bannister. Unlike the full-page Movado endeavor, the Hankey ad on page 104 occupied less than half a page. “HANKEY the bold one!” it proclaimed and added satirically, “The Scotch that makes others pale by comparison.”

What Hankey was doing was placing itself in opposition to the lemming-like procession of other distillers exhorting the public to down their “light” liquids.

Here’s Vat 69:

And King William IV:

And Ambassador (claiming to be the lightest):

And then there’s Chivas Regal, which changed its bottle color from green to clear glass five years earlier (look at us—we’re really light):

*

“There is nothing new under the sun,” according to Ecclesiastes. Well, maybe there is. But as far as advertising goes, it takes a long walk in the park before one comes across a product that eschews the clichés of the herd and marches to its own drum. And in the cases of Scotch whisky and wristwatches, if the searches for lightness and thinness were carried to their ultimate conclusions, the products would disappear altogether. 

***

Notes:

‡ Chivas earlier this year announced changes to its bottle’s shape:

Chivas has unveiled a new look for its flagship blended Scotch whisky. It is the 'biggest' redesign in Chivas’ 112-year history. Chivas 12 has undergone a redesign of its bottle, label and pack. . . .The redesign is aimed to see the Chivas 12 bottle reshaped and elongated to stand taller and prouder, while still retaining its recognisable rounded shoulders.

https://www.afaqs.com/design-digest/chivas-12-undergoes-first-big-packaging-redesign-in-112-years

‡ I Googled Hankey Bannister to see if that brand is still in existence. It is. But, alas, on its website it says,

Messrs Hankey and Bannister present their Original blend of fine and rare Scotch whiskies.  Hand selected for quality and crafted with care to create a smooth, light and perfectly balanced blend renowned in society for over 250 Years.

I guess it’s too much to ask for a brand to hold out against a tide for over half a century. 

Authentically Fake

Who is Sophie Loren?

Is she the Arabian mistress of an Arabian oil millionaire?

Or is she a Jewish spy?

In 1966, she appeared in two movies, “Arabesque,” in which she was the Arabian, and “Judith,” in which she was the Jewess. (1)

And in the following year, Signorina Loren ascended to the Russian nobility in “A Countess from Hong Kong.”

Back to 1966. In early January, the following advertisement appeared in The New Yorker:

The English theatrical knight Sir Laurence Olivier was to be the Black Moor leader of the Venetian military. Despite some achingly bad reviews (2), Sir Laurence was nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards (he didn’t win).

*

Fast forward to the present.

According to the BBC,

The days of "cripping up" - a term disabled actors regularly use to describe those with no physical impairment playing disabled characters - appear numbered now. (3)

This in a report that a disabled actor will take on the role of Richard III in a production of Shakespeare’s play at the Royal Shakespeare Company. The actor selected to play the 15th Century villain, Arthur Hughes, said,

I think a lot of disabled actors will think playing Richard is their birthright.

*

Should homosexual actors think that playing gay characters is their birthright? 

Recently, in the New York Times, Tom Hanks addressed the question “could a straight man do what I did in ‘Philadelphia’ now?” His answer was “No, and rightly so.” He went on to explain:

I don’t think people would accept the inauthenticity of a straight guy playing a gay guy. It’s not a crime, it’s not boohoo, that someone would say we are going to demand more of a movie in the modern realm of authenticity. (4)

But as The New Yorker recently pointed out, “Last year . . . introduced an octogenarian Hamlet: Sir Ian McKellen.” (5) 

Now, if in the name of “authenticity,” a gay actor—rather than Hanks—should play the part of Andrew Beckett, what “authenticity” are we looking at when it’s acceptable for English gay octogenarian McKellen to play a young heterosexual Dane? Or, as the same New Yorker article pointed out, 

The casting of a female Hamlet . . . is now conventional enough not to raise eyebrows. 

*

Somehow lost in all these “authenticity” debates about casting is the fact that the theater is not about “authenticity”; in its very essence, the the theater is about fakery—the show is all pretense. The actors are not the characters—and the characters are not real. 

The world of the theater is a corrective to the world of life; characters are shot, immolated, poisoned, etc.—and yet everybody lives to take a curtain call. 

In turn, real life is better than the world of art. We feel, we love, we change. We can be “authentic.”

*

Mulling over the problem of “authenticity” in the realm of the the performing arts, we here at drnormalvision have come to the conclusion that the only way to achieve “authenticity” is to have everyone play him/herself. That would place performance beyond the bounds of criticism. The only problem is a major one, however. What we would be left with is a landscape filled with reality shows.

Imagine a world of Kardashian-lites.  

***

(1)  And in “Judith,” Peter Finch plays the head of a kibbutz!

(2)  In The New Yorker, Brendan Gill’s “chief complaint” about the movie was “Sir Laurence’s utterly daft reading of the title role.” (Feb . 19, 1966) 

What Bosley Crowther, in the New York Times, found “most distressing” was “Sir Laurence’s allowing himself to look like a white actor made up in blackface for a minstrel show.” (March 6, 1966)

(3)  https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-61549419

(4)  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/06/13/magazine/tom-hanks-interview.html?partner=slack&smid=sl-share

(5)  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/13/a-hamlet-for-our-time