Reality used to bite, but now it just gums along.
Beau Elliot
So I see that, out there in the “real world,” the hot take du jour is some somebody getting herself 86’d from a restaurant.
Really, I said. Cain’t get much more real than that, affecting a North Carolina accent for no particular reason.
I mean, after “reality TV,” which was about as real as the tooth fairy, only without the coins under your pillow, reality was dead. And we were faced with swimming through post-reality (most seemed to prefer the crawl), which appeared to be populated with black holes, cartoons, cartoons of cartoons, even more cartoon figures, and something called the Higgs Field.
That some somebody turned out to be somebody, in the way things shake out these days. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House flak-catcher. Catching some flak while off-duty.
Her father, Mike Huckabee, ran for president (well, the GOP nomination) a couple times, apparently not realizing that we had already had a former governor of Arkansas as president and that was quite enough for the next 100 years. So his daughter should have been forearmed. (Yes, comedians, I’m pretty sure she has forearms.)
So what happened to Sanders at a Virginia restaurant, so far as we can tell, is that the owner politely asked Sanders to vacate the premises, and Sanders politely did so. Politeness is so rare these days that you should hang on to this moment. Maybe stick it in amber.
That would have been that, except of course, nothing works out that way these days. There was an immediate firestorm of criticism from the right-wing corner of the universe contending that Sanders had been expelled because of her political beliefs and that’s illegal discrimination. And there was the expected rebuttal from the more liberal corner of the universe, pointing out that Sanders is the point person for the administration’s abhorrent policies. If you get the point.
Now, it’s true that Sanders, in her public guise, lies, misstates the truth, twists the truth, explodes (with apparent glee) any notion of context, lies, prevaricates, obfuscates, equivocates, lies (did I mention that yet?), and generally sails full fib ahead.
On the other hand, I spent more years than I’ll admit waiting tables and bartending, and I never had a problem waiting on people whose beliefs originated in the lower depths of scumdom.
On the other other hand, Sanders is part of the right wing that cheered lustily when the Supreme Court ruled that a Colorado baker could refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. What’s good for the gander is good for the moose.
Besides, right wing, that restaurant can’t be the only restaurant in the greater D.C. area.
Meanwhile, in the leftovers from the Korean Summit (totally forgotten now, what with the Trumpster’s Border Blunder), there was Ivanka Trump — you know, the first daughter, used to be a fashion guru (don’t know why she wasn’t invited to the IC Fashion Circus, she’d fit right in, in a Dada sort of way) — cheering on her father at the Singapore Summit, and providing a measure of her support by tweeting an old Chinese proverb (is there any other kind?):
“Those who say it can’t be done should not interrupt those doing it.”
Nice words, can’t argue (too much) with the sentiment. Could point out that you shouldn’t interrupt anyone anytime, but then we wouldn’t have sports talk radio.
There is one tiny problem with Ivanka’s Chinese proverb: It doesn’t seem to exist outside of Ivanka Land.
According to NPR and other media outlets, many people, including millions of Chinese, have scoured Chinese texts and have found nothing — not a folk saying, not a scrap of paper with a grocery list and some philosophical musings — remotely similar to Ivanka’s “proverb.”
There’s probably an adage or something about proverbs and the proverbial life, but even after an arduous search, I couldn’t find one. I did, however, discover another Ivanka proverb, in the Trumpster family vault buried deep in the limestone muck under Mar-a-Lager, which will soon return to residing as a sea bed.
“If you want to stand around and be pretty all day, have Daddy get you a government job.”
— Ivanka Trump, citing an ancient Chinese proverb
And this tidbit: a recent Gallup Poll found that 75 percent of Americans believe immigration is good for the country, 19 percent say it is not.
