Meryl Streep’s speech, as entertaining as it was, amounts to howling in the dark, for all the effect it will have on those who don’t already agree with her.
I applaud her, but I don’t think it amounts to anything.
What is interesting, and remains interesting, is that Donald Trump remains compelled to judge the talent level of the celebrated by whether they criticize him, or not. If they appeared on his show or on some stage supporting him, they are “great, great stars.” But… let even the same people ever say anything negative about him, and they become “overrated” and “untalented,” as if the state is binary and the only means of measurement is whether they ever said anything bad about him, personally.
This is the same tactic I have personally experienced from Trumpian minds throughout the political spectrum, whenever I say something they don’t like. The response is a simple declaration that I’m a shitty writer and everybody knows it. I don’t need to concede that people have had negative reactions to my work before and that I am capable of being hurt by that — but I must say that when somebody says so for this reason, it lands with a gnat’s impact because I always know in context that they have read precisely zero of my output. It is simply something to say, to fling in the face of the bad man. “You’re untalented anyway!” Um, okay. Thank you.
It’s a transparent tactic when used on someone marginal, like me.
It becomes more and more ludicrous, though, the more profoundly celebrated the artist.
Say this about President Obama: criticized and even libeled by the likes of James Woods and Stephen Baldwin, not to mention Ted Nugent, he said precisely nothing. He never saw the need to tweet nonsense about James Woods’s significant talent level, or Ted Nugent’s crappier achievements. It would never have occurred to him that this would be a thing to do. He had class. He was above that shit.
Whereas, I promise you, if William Shakespeare came back from the dead tomorrow and composed a brilliant couplet about Trump — just long enough for a tweet, come to think of it — Trump would waste no time telling us all that Shakespeare was never any good, that people don’t go to Shakespeare plays anymore, and that “everybody knows” the man was never more than an untalented hack.
He can’t help himself.
Comment By: Jeff Strand
January 9th, 2017 at 7:19 pm
We need to fool Trump into thinking a NASCAR superstar said something negative about him. It’ll all be over.