If the thing you care about most in the world is the opinion of others (especially celebrity others), I don’t know what could be worse than having a really smart, witty writer — who knows you — whip up on your ass. Graydon Carter in Vanity Fair:
“This ramshackle campaign, following a ramshackle business career, has exposed his flaws and failures to the world and, more importantly, to the people he will brush up against for the rest of his life. To them he is now officially a joke. I suspect he knows this. And if his thin skin on minor matters is any indication, he will be lashing out with even more vitriol. He is a mad jumble of a man, with a slapdash of a campaign and talking points dredged from the dark corners at the bottom of the Internet. I don’t think he will get to the White House, but just the fact that his carny act has gotten so far along the road will leave the path with a permanent orange stain. Trump, more than even the most craven politicians or entertainers, is a bottomless reservoir of need and desire for attention. He lives off crowd approval. And at a certain point that will dim, as it always does to people like him, and the cameras will turn to some other American novelty. When that attention wanes, he will be left with his press clippings, his dyed hair, his fake tan, and those tiny, tiny fingers.”
“A permanent orange stain.” Ouch. Not sure what this next bit says but it says… something.
“At one point we sent checks for $1.11 out to 58 of the “well-known” and “well-heeled” to see who would take the time to endorse and deposit the checks from a firm we called the National Refund Clearinghouse. The ones who deposited the $1.11 checks were sent 64-cent checks, and the ones who deposited those were sent checks for 13 cents. This being in the days before electronic deposits and such, the exercise took the better part of a year. At the end, only two 13-cent checks were signed—and we couldn’t believe our good fortune. One was signed by arms trader Adnan Khashoggi. The other was deposited by Donald Trump.”
And could there be a sadder, more depressing summary of the last fifteen years?
“It can reasonably be argued that the presidency of George W. Bush was an eight-year warm-up act for the final stage of a dumbed-down America: a Trump presidency. You can draw a relatively straight line from the Florida recount of 2000, which took Bush into office, right through to the shambolic Trump campaign. The election of Bush led to the invasion of Iraq, which led to the de-stabilization in the Middle East (Libya, Egypt, Syria), which led to the migrant crisis, which led to European nationalism, Brexit, and, at the tail end of all these disasters, Trump.”
I enjoyed this hour-long stand-up/one-man-show. I’ve seen several of Mr. Moore’s documentaries and liked some better than others. But none of them prepared me for this. If I had to pick one word to describe this… (I really don’t know what to call it. It didn’t feel like a documentary) I guess I go with “personal.” It felt like he was trying to speak “from the heart” as the expression goes to everyone in America. And to Hillary Clinton. Fuck it, there’s no way to describe this and I’d say just watch it but I’m guessing most folks have made up their mind about Michael Moore just as they have everything else (myself included).