Into the Woods

First, a hat tip to Ken, who alerted me that this movie is a must-watch. Ken also wrote about it on his blog.

I’m not as critical as Ken on the quality of Don’t Look Up. If there are flaws, I didn’t mind, other than that the movie is about 20 minutes longer than it needed to be. It’s laugh-out-loud funny. It’s surgically accurate. And I rejoice because at last we’re heaping ridicule on Trump, Trumpism, and the millions of gullible and deplorable people who can’t see through Trump and who were willing to kill for Trump in the trenches of Trumpism. (Images from the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol are my evidence that I’m not exaggerating.)

A major — and overlooked — marker in deplorable people’s eagerness to deify Trump was when John Stewart left The Daily Show in 2015. Trevor Noah said that Stewart told him this about why he left The Daily Show:

“He said ‘I’m leaving because I’m tired.’ And he said, ‘I’m tired of being angry.’ And he said, ‘I’m angry all the time. I don’t find any of this funny. I do not know how to make it funny right now, and I don’t think the host of the show, I don’t think the show deserves a host who does not feel that it is funny.'”

It was in 2015 that we lost public ridicule as a defense against the rise of Trumpism. Finally, at the end of 2021, ridicule returns in Don’t Look Up. Stewart is right. There was nothing funny about Trump’s occupation of the White House. We were all angry, too angry to employ ridicule. Hand-wringers on the left told us that we should “reach out” to Trumpists and “try to understand them.” Wrong. We should have relentlessly ridiculed them.

I was curious about how the right-wing propagandists who feed Trumpism to the Trumpists would respond to Don’t Look Up. I think I found the answer in a review in The Washington Examiner, which boils down to, “Nothing to see here. Move along. Everyone knows it’s really the libs who are ridiculous.”

It is definitely not from the Democratic Party that the ridicule must come. President Biden and the Democrats in Congress understand that. The Democratic Party must stay focused on governing and working for the good of the American people. The ridicule is more a cultural than a political responsibility. Thank you, Hollywood. Television, where are you? More, please.

Two very good essays in the New York Times this morning are reminders that, though Trumpists eagerly embrace their own deception, the rest of us understand quite well what’s going on. The first is by Rebecca Solnit, “Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies.” Solnit focuses on gullibility. The second is by Francis Fukuyama, who focuses on the world’s horror at what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

But understanding what happened is not enough to pull the American Democracy back from the brink. Those who broke the law to follow Trump must be brought to justice. And those who followed Trump but didn’t break the law must face public ridicule and public contempt so severe that they would be embarrassed to show their faces among decent people again for the rest of their lives.