The Real Reality Show Star
As Donald Trump proved once again during a press conference that lasted over an hour, the man doesn’t need a roomful of fawning would-be apprentices in order to captivate an audience. What he managed to do for all those years heading up a TV reality show was just an out-of-town rehearsal for the real thing.
As Donald Trump proved once again during a press conference that lasted over an hour, the man doesn’t need a roomful of fawning would-be apprentices in order to captivate an audience. What he managed to do for all those years heading up a TV reality show was just an out-of-town rehearsal for the real thing.
Whether he was listing his first month’s achievements, pledging to ferret out the bureaucratic leakers looking to destroy his administration or confronting individual reporters over their lies, it was compelling theater, sometimes dramatic, sometimes funny, and, best of all, it was live and compelling.
For eight years, in an effort to be fair and non-partisan, I tried to find something good to say about Obama, his presidential edicts and his administration. And for eight years, I struggled and failed. So far, I’ve spent the last month attempting to find negative things to say about Trump’s roll-out. And the best I could do was suggest he might have had his people spend a little extra time working on the wording of his temporary ban on immigration from seven terrorist hot spots, so that the net didn’t also gather up a handful of green-carded students and professors.
But that sort of nitpicking is the best I can do, and if the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals wasn’t home to a rat’s nest of left-wing wackos, I wouldn’t have had to bother.
When the person editing my upcoming book, the hilarious “Angels On Tap,” (which served as the basis for the upcoming hilarious movie of the same name) informed me that I’d be receiving my copy on February 28th, I let him know I’d be counting the hours, which at the time amounted to 312. I added that when I was in junior high, as we approached summer vacation, I would devote entire pages in my notebook to scratching off the days, then the hours and finally the minutes, until I’d be released from bondage.
He let me know that his mother had been a school teacher, and that she and her colleagues felt much the same way.
It had never occurred to me before, but I had to admit it made perfect sense.
Speaking of teachers, I received a photo of the new Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, along with data that compared us to the other industrialized nations. It seems that American high school students currently rank 35th in Math, 23rd in Reading and 24th in Science.
The caption read: “If you think this woman is a threat to the "success” of American education…you must belong to a teachers’ union.“
To me, the biggest surprise is that after eight years of Barack Obama and the power-mad bureaucrats at the EPA doing everything in their considerable power to destroy not only individual businesses, but entire industries, such as coal and oil, and to chase factories offshore with his loony tax policies, the United States is still included in the list of industrialized nations.
A reader the other day asked me when it was that I became so political. At first, the question threw me. After all, I had never run for political office. The closest I ever came was when I twice ran for and was twice elected to the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild, and once ran for the presidency of the Guild and was smooshed. The fact is, I didn’t really want the job. I just knew that re-electing the incumbent would be disastrous. He won, and I was right.
But after giving my reader’s question a little more thought, I arrived at the conclusion that politics must have been in my genes the way that music must have been in little Mozart’s.
I clearly recall being very interested in the 1948 election, in which incumbent Harry Truman, Democrat, faced off with Thomas Dewey, Republican; Henry Wallace, Progressive (aka Communist); and Strom Thurmond Dixiecrat (aka Segregationist). At the time, I was eight years old.
But my favorite early political memory came four years later, when my least favorite uncle kept insisting that Robert Taft would be the Republican nominee, and I bet him $5 that he would lose out to Dwight Eisenhower. There’s no happier moment in a young person’s life then when he can walk up to an unlikeable relative in front of other family members, announce you had won a political bet fair and square, and demand payment.
Speaking of indications of something or other at a very young age, I found myself capable of spotting punchlines very early on. It was more a curse than a blessing because I would sometimes find myself laughing at the often-ludicrous set-ups and then being stony-faced by the time the jokester finally reached the finish line. The problem was that I had gotten there first.
I was reminded of this when a reader sent me the following joke: "A Polish immigrant went to the DMV to apply for a driver’s license. First, of course, he had to take an eyesight test. The clerk showed him a card containing the letters CZWIXNOSTACZ.
"Can you read this?” “Read it?!,” the Polish guy replied. “I know the guy.”
The question isn’t whether you thought it was funny or not, but whether you knew the punchline as soon as you heard that a Polish guy had gone to apply for a driver’s license.
Take my word for it, it’s not easy being me.
So often when we hear about those jobs that most Americans refuse to do, we’re supposed to think of picking grapes or harvesting lettuce. I tend to picture marrying people like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters or one of the Clintons.
I recently wrote a letter to Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, suggesting he not waste any time changing his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. For one thing, he has already shown indications that he’s not in lockstep behind Minority Senate leader Chuck Schumer by actually voting to confirm a few of Trump’s Cabinet secretaries. For another, the GOP has a 52-48 majority in the Senate, but it’s precarious because Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska are a pair of dipsticks who can’t be counted on.
What’s more, John McCain and Lindsey Graham are nearly as undependable. The two have been playing footsies for so long that word has finally gotten out, which would explain why actor Ashton Kutcher, who was addressing a Senate committee on the scourge of human trafficking, blew McCain a kiss after McCain gushed that Kutcher was even handsomer in person than on screen.
Although the GOP majority will likely grow after the 2018 election, when 23 Democrats and only nine Republicans will be defending their Senate seats, providing Mitch McConnell with a 53-47 margin today could earn Manchin a great many brownie points and a few choice committee chairmanships. It would also enhance his chances of being re-elected in a state that went for Trump by over 300,000 votes, 489,000 to Clinton’s 188,000.
Finally, I’d like to share with you Hofstadter’s Law, formulated by Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of cognitive science, which states: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
Because I have been aware of that fact for so many years, it should by all rights be known as Prelutsky’s Law. It just took me longer than I expected to write it down.
