A Potpourri of Pols
Dick Cavett
NYT blog
I can’t figure out what it is that keeps me watching the current star search for our next president.
It’s not all that compelling or entertaining. Or at any rate it certainly doesn’t rank anywhere near the three riveting television events of my lifetime: the Army-McCarthy hearings, Watergate and the O. J. Simpson trial. Things that, day after day, held you enthralled, afraid to look away for more than a moment for fear of missing the next bombshell.
And yet I dutifully watch Keith and Chris and Wolf and those Sunday morning talk shows Calvin Trillin has labeled “The Sabbath Gasbags.”
Admittedly, it’s all important stuff. But what is missing? We can surely agree there are damn few laughs (see Twain, below). Even inadvertent nastiness (when it is inadvertent) gets quickly apologized for. (Of course, by the time you read this there may have been out-of-control carnage.) Perhaps it’s that inexcusable thing I said in an acting class years ago, after a slight teenage girl had done a speech of King Lear’s: “For me, it lacked majesty.” The laugh it got still pains me.
Maybe it’s just that it is not indubitably and overwhelmingly obvious that a large number of the candidates, arrayed across the stage in bas-relief, are qualified to fill The Hardest Job in the World.
(Continued here.)
NYT blog
I can’t figure out what it is that keeps me watching the current star search for our next president.
It’s not all that compelling or entertaining. Or at any rate it certainly doesn’t rank anywhere near the three riveting television events of my lifetime: the Army-McCarthy hearings, Watergate and the O. J. Simpson trial. Things that, day after day, held you enthralled, afraid to look away for more than a moment for fear of missing the next bombshell.
And yet I dutifully watch Keith and Chris and Wolf and those Sunday morning talk shows Calvin Trillin has labeled “The Sabbath Gasbags.”
Admittedly, it’s all important stuff. But what is missing? We can surely agree there are damn few laughs (see Twain, below). Even inadvertent nastiness (when it is inadvertent) gets quickly apologized for. (Of course, by the time you read this there may have been out-of-control carnage.) Perhaps it’s that inexcusable thing I said in an acting class years ago, after a slight teenage girl had done a speech of King Lear’s: “For me, it lacked majesty.” The laugh it got still pains me.
Maybe it’s just that it is not indubitably and overwhelmingly obvious that a large number of the candidates, arrayed across the stage in bas-relief, are qualified to fill The Hardest Job in the World.
(Continued here.)
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