Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Must-Not See TV

Given my nocturnal habits and complete lack of interest in the C-SPAN version of reality TV, I’m not going to watch the SOTU tonight, and you can’t make me.

To be fair, I have a tough time watching it no matter who’s delivering it.  I could barely make it through President Obama’s speeches, and I liked them.  It’s not just the late hour — 9 p.m. usually has me turning out the light — it’s that what he was proposing was pearls before swine.  The GOP-led Congress wasn’t going to pass anything he proposed, and his well-written rhetoric was wasted on those clowns.  The post-game analysis by the punditry is an exercise in epigrams, and the only thing worth waiting for is to see if Chris Matthews makes a complete sugared-up fool of himself.  On that he rarely disappoints.

So the TV will be off and I’ll be reading.  The book on my Kindle now is Philip Roth’s excellent “The Plot Against America,” his 2004 alternative look at history as if FDR lost the 1940 election to a nativist isolationist who appealed to the worst instincts of a right-wing racist political base.  It’s not so alternative after all.

2 barks and woofs on “Must-Not See TV

  1. I’ll probably be watching a couple more episodes of London Spy on Netflix. Ben Whishaw is infinitely more appealing than Trump, and the story, as surreal as it is, is more coherent than anything that comes out of Trump’s mouth.

  2. Michelle Goldberg has a take on the “speech”, if reading a teleprompter falls under that description. She notes that if Trump makes it through in one piece without interjecting an insult to RBG or the Democrats all the talking heads taking his measure will marvel at how dignified he seems. How PRESIDENTIAL! That was the near universal reaction after his last address to Congress. The bar is so low even I could seem Presidential.

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