As a speechwriting goon, my favorite Saturday Night Live skit is the one in which a 19th-century “critic” named Jedidiah Atkinson pans the great speeches of history.
He shits on the Gettysburg Address—Abe laid a real “Lincoln log”—and then, successively, Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” (“death, please!”), JFK’s inaugural, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the Sermon on the Mount and FDR’s “boring ass” Pearl Harbor speech. After each review and before launching into his next takedown, Atkinson yells, “Next!”
Well after all the professional and amateur pregame and postgame punditry around the presidential debate last week, I’m in a Jebidiah Atkinson mood my own self.
For instance, I’m not bamboozled by a Facebook post that begins, “I don’t always agree with [so-and-so] but she’s got it right on this Harris/Trump debate …” Really? You think you can buy credibility this way? So if you, personally, don’t always agree with this person … and you, personally, happen agree with them now … then I, personally, should agree with them now, too. A little narcissistic, don’t you think? NEXT!
“I’ve been trying not to post much about politics lately, but …” See above. NEXT!
“I don’t know who needs to see this, but …” NEXT!
“I’ll just leave this right here …” NEXT!
There are leftists online. There are right-wingers. But there’s a third, and just as dishonest way to get attention you don’t deserve: to be consistently, provocatively, incorrigibly centrist. Yes, Trump talked of people of color eating pets, but Harris seemed a little nervous in the beginning. NEXT!
And finally: This one goes out to everyone on pretty much every side—and especially these insufferably vain, perpetually “open-minded,” chin-scratching, obtuse “undecided” swing voters who always still need just a little more information to decide whether they like the Cubs or the White Sox (or whether they hate all baseball teams, after all). NEXT!
Leave a Reply