Binge-watching Jan. 6 hearings
Trump has always seemed like one of those French kings who ascend at the age of 5 and send ministers to the guillotine for losing His Highness’s favorite plastic dinosaur.
The best show on television right now is either “The Old Man” on Hulu or the Jan. 6 hearings on many news channels not named Fox.
There are similarities, starting with the fact that one title could have worked for either show.
The Jan. 6 hearings need a snappier title. Russell Baker once published a collection titled “So This Is Depravity.” That’s more like it.
“So This Is Depravity” (let’s keep calling it that) is starting to have the feel of a four-season, 40-episode prestige-TV dramedy.
Or to put it another way, there’s a thought experiment called the Simulation Hypothesis: the idea that none of us is real and that we inhabit a hologrammatic reality in which our thoughts, feelings and actions are all written and programmed by some higher intelligence.
If that’s the case, someone out there is doing great writing. I really like the way the story arc of the attempted coup, in which Ginni Thomas plays a key role, and the story arc of the Supreme Court’s 6-person current anti-democracy blitzkrieg, in which Clarence Thomas plays a key role, are bending toward one another.
“So This Is Depravity” has made a series of very smart television calculations. They keep the episodes compact. They space them out to create anticipation. They mix media, throwing to video or audio to break the monotony. They limit the questioning to one or two members.
“So This Is Depravity” has been aided by an enormous, unforced error by Republican House members and their leader Kevin McCarthy, who decided to boycott the hearings after Speaker Nancy Pelosi told him he couldn’t put Reps. Jim Jordan and Jim Banks on the committee.
Jordan is extraordinarily good at gumming up the works (and not at much else). For McCarthy, it’s like having Ozzie Smith sitting in the dugout pounding his glove while there’s a big blank space a shortstop.
But McCarthy could have tried to stack the lineup with Greene, Boebert, Gosar, Gaetz and Cawthorn as a kind of Suicide Squad, one of those units in which deranged supermax inmates take on a mission in return for reduced sentences.
We cannot entirely discount the possibility that McCarthy — still smarting from that terrible day when he asked Donald Trump to put out the fire and watched him instead squirt lighter fluid — is quietly happy to let “So This Is Depravity” construct a murder wall of post-its, pictures, stickpins and strings, a series of concentric coronas around The Big Orange.
What a show. The Cassidy Hutchinson episode was a corker, although you may count me among the TV critics who was not surprised by the plate-tossing and ketchup-dribbling. That did not shatter my image of Trump. It is my image of Trump.
Trump has always seemed like one of those French kings who ascend at the age of 5 and send ministers to the guillotine for losing His Highness’s favorite plastic dinosaur.
In 1997, the New Yorker writer Mark Singer described riding along with Trump and his retinue on their private jet. Trump had planned to watch the movie “Michael,” a comedy in which John Travolta plays an angel. (Not Nora Ephron’s best work but also not without its charms.) He couldn’t concentrate on it, and, after 20 minutes, demanded that it be replaced by “Bloodsport,” a Jean Claude Van Damme kickboxing epic. His son Eric was charged with fastforwarding through anything not a fight scene. This is the only time in history when Van Damme has been accused of too much dialogue and exposition.
What did surprise me was a revelation by Stephanie Grisham, former Trump press secretary, who published a tell-all book titled “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,” despite never having held a press briefing during her more than nine-month tenure.
No one should be surprised that Trump called Grisham from Air Force One to object to the way his penis was described in a book by Stormy Daniels.
But Grisham also claimed that, due to Trump’s frequent infantile rages, methods of soothing his savagery were kept at the ready. This included having nearby an aide known as “the Music Man,” who was able to calm the president by playing show tunes, especially “Memory,” from “Cats.” That doesn’t fit at all.
Hmmm, the lyrics include “I must wait for the sunrise / I must think of a new life / And I mustn’t give in.” Could the coup attempt on Jan. 6 be the fault of Andrew Lloyd Webber? Many things are.
Depravity is not a uniquely Trumpian or Republican trait. If we agree to believe women who say they have been harassed or raped, Bill Clinton is a depraved and perhaps even horrible man. I was not happy in 2016 with the offer of North American Peronism from a couple who originally ran as “two for the price of one.” Ugh
But I held my nose and voted for Clinton that year because there were two bad candidates, only one of whom seemed capable of actually being president.
I voted unenthusiastically for Biden on the same basis.
This is where we wound up. So when is the Ginni episode? Has the moon lost her memory? Pass the remote.