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

Restraining The Inner Man

[I]n Otero County, New Mexico, County Commissioner, Couy Griffin—recently sentenced to 14 days in jail for participating in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol—refused a state Supreme Court order to certify his state’s June 7 primary results. Reached by phone Griffin told reporters: “My vote to remain a no isn’t based on any evidence, it’s not based on any facts, it’s only based on my gut feeling and my own intuition, and that’s all I need.”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/trump-plan-jan-six-lady-ruby-freeman.html

*

Going back to the 1950s and 60s and the struggle for civil rights and against segregation, I recall a great deal of noise was produced about “hearts and minds.” There were those, for example, who suggested that black people should not push too hard for equal rights but should bide their time until the Earth spins around a few times and segregationists will have changed their hearts and minds; then all will be well. These people did not reckon with the likes of Alabama governor George Wallace, who proclaimed in 1963:

“I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

Somehow the idea that the exercise of their fundamental rights by American citizens depended upon the innards of their fellow countrymen always struck me as more than faintly absurd.

“Yes, sir, you may vote, but only when my spleen, kidney, and bladder say you may.”

*

“If I get ‘em by the short and curlies, the hearts and minds will follow.”

Lyndon Johnson*

“The short and curlies” is the law. While legislation may or may not change hearts and minds, it changes people’s actions. They want to stay on the side of the law. I may in my heart and mind believe that it’s my God-given right to drive 100 miles an hour on the NJ Turnpike; however, I recognize that if I do so, I will have a super trooper on my tail very soon, and there will be consequences due to my breaking the speeding law. 

*

Linda C. McClain: 

New Jersey Senator Harrison A. Williams, Jr. stated: As Martin Luther King said: “Morality cannot be legislated; but behavior can be regulated. The law may not change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless.” We have seen this in so many areas where we know we can’t change the heart of man, the mind of man, but we can regulate his behavior.**

Whether or not positive legislation changes people’s innards, the important thing is that it forces change in their external actions. Whitey in Mississippi may not have liked having a black man sitting at the next restaurant table, but if he wanted to eat, he had to swallow his prejudice.

***

*I always thought it was Richard Nixon who said it.

**THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964 AND “LEGISLATING MORALITY”: ON CONSCIENCE, PREJUDICE, AND WHETHER “STATEWAYS” CAN CHANGE “FOLKWAYS,” LINDA C. MCCLAIN

https://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2015/05/MCCLAIN.pdf

  

The Best Laid Plans . . .

Once in a while one comes up with a great idea. 

When I was chairman of the English department, I recognized a problem that I thought needed correction. It happened that every time a faculty member suffered an unfortunate event (e.g., a bereavement or a hospitalization) or experienced a joyous one (e.g., a marriage or a birth) someone immediately took up a collection. At times there might be three or four passings-around of hats going on simultaneously. What confusion.

How about, I thought, if we taxed the faculty at the start of the school year—say, twenty dollars—and built up a pot that could be dipped into as need arose. In satiric homage to Richard Nixon I called it a Slush Fund. Lo and behold, when I submitted my proposal to the department, they jumped at it—only disappointingly choosing wimpily to call the result the Sunshine Fund. 

Then I got what I believed was an even greater idea. 

How about if at the end of each semester, the department selected the most outstanding English major and awarded her a prize? Someone noted that the college’s publicity office could arrange for a photograph to be taken of the presentation and that local newspapers could be given a press release. It was, to my mind, a multiple win-win situation; the college would get some free publicity, the English department would receive some free print, the selected student and her family could swell with pride, and—maybe best of all—the student would have the opportunity to add “English Department Award—Outstanding Major” (or some such title) to her c.v. She could even read the book we would award her (after all, we were a literature department). And, since the department had the money already collected in the Slush Fund, there would be no need to scrounge around to pay for the present.

Brilliant!

What could go wrong?

*

The English department could.

I presented the brainstorm at a department meeting and immediately got hit in the face with questions, objections, elaborations, etc. For example: 

A) How would we select the candidate? (Come on; how simple would it be to poll the faculty?) 

B) What if a rejected student decided to sue us? (Jeez, we’ll put a lawyer on retainer; would that satisfy you?) 

C) It’s a great idea, but why only the English department? All the departments should do it. Let’s bring it up at the College Senate. (At this point I threw up my hands, withdrew the proposal—and decided to do the whole thing myself—creating a Chairman’s Award. No Slush Fund; I’d dig into my own pocket to buy the gift book.)

So for the next two semesters I chose the best English major and handed her the prize. One semester it was a highly-acclaimed new translation of Dante’s Inferno; the next it was The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. Unfortunately, there was no publicity—no photographs, no newspaper write-ups. What a waste!

One English department member—who was ordinarily a pinchpenny Yankee—offered to chip in to help me defray the cost of the books. I politely turned him down. Although thinking back after all these years, since he had stiffed me on some photographs I had taken of him, I should have taken the money. 

Mensch

In the September 26, 1964 issue of The New Yorker, readers were introduced to Arthur Ashe, who was described as “the tall, pleasant Negro boy from U.C.L.A.” A year later, in the October 9, 1965 issue of the magazine, Ashe, described as “a twenty-two-year-old U.C.L.A. senior who came on very fast,” was acknowledged as the only American tennis player to have distinguished himself in “the big championships.”

Ashe, a native of Richmond, Virginia, learned to play tennis at a segregated park. It  took a while, but eventually he was able to compete against white boys, and his game grew good enough that he won a tennis scholarship to U.C.L.A. And good enough to become a factor on the men’s tournament circuit. 

*

Arthur Ashe’s name was evoked yesterday in a New York Times article by sports columnist Kurt Streeter entitled “Where Have You Gone, Arthur Ashe? LIV Tour Golfers Need You.”* 

The LIV golf tour is a multi-million-dollar project funded by Saudi Arabian interests that is attempting to lure prominent golfers to its tournaments. While some club-swingers have been seduced by the big bucks being thrown around, most of the top names in the sport have turned their backs on LIV. 

Why are Saudis in this game? The consensus is that it is one of several recent attempts at sportswashing; that is, a diversionary tactic to deflect the eyes of the world away from the brutal policies of the Saudi government. (They have also recently purchased Newcastle United Football Club and are throwing their gelt around the English northeast.) 

The golfers who are taking the Saudi bucks have been challenged to respond to the actions of their benefactors. “Don’t hold your breath,” Streeter declares. 

None of the golfers who signed on to the LIV tour in exchange for staggering sums will speak up. They are too spineless and too compromised, working as they do for a tour funded by a government that tramples human rights.

It is here that Streeter brings up Arthur Ashe, who despite criticism from some quarters chose to visit apartheid South Africa in the 1970s, but then, as Streeter puts it,

used his celebrity and gravitas to shame the racist regime while playing the South African Open.

*

In his tennis-playing career, Arthur Ashe won 76 singles titles. But I best remember him for a singles match that he lost: the 1973 World Championship Tennis final in Dallas, Texas. The event was the culmination of the men’s professional circuit and was viewed as prestigious as the four major tournaments (Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open). 

Ashe, as I said above, did not win; he lost to fellow American Stan Smith in four sets. Interviewed after the match, Ashe was asked about a crucial point in the match when Smith went for a ball that had bounced either once (was “up”) or twice (was “not up”). Ashe replied (I’m paraphrasing here): Stan said it was up, and that’s good enough for me.

 ***

* https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/13/sports/golf/golf-liv-pga-saudi.html