Commentary

BRUMMETT ONLINE: Missing the point, again

Actress Meryl Streep accepted a lifetime achievement award Sunday evening from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association at the Golden Globe Awards. She used the occasion to lament the mean-spiritedness of the nation’s looming dark cloud of a president whom she never named.

Naturally, Donald Trump supporters and right-wingers railed against the very nerve of a mere actress abusing such a nationally televised moment to become overtly political. They said Streep provided prima facie evidence of modern liberalism’s ineptitude in that she was a rich celebrity wholly out of touch with flyover America.

These Trump devotees simply denied the plain truth of the clear video evidence that was the heart of her lament. It was that, at a rally during the campaign, Trump had publicly answered unfavorable reporting from the New York Times by mimicking the arm-afflicted disability of the offending reporter.

He was merely making fun of the reporter as a groveler, and he makes fun of grovelers like that all the time, Trump disciples said.

They were saying our next president publicly ridicules a lot of people by fashioning the manner of a disability.

That’s presumably much better, one supposes.

Alas, Trump’s apologists and Streep’s assailants missed only the point, the relevance and the context.

Streep was talking to her artist peers as their worthy and respected honoree, one who had earned by her work the right to do so, to deliver an artistic call to arms.

She was explaining that the name of the awarding organization encompassed references to three groups widely disparaged in the raging national political climate — Hollywood show-business people, foreigners and the press. She was defending the contributions and importance, indeed the humanity, of all three. She was saying that what artists historically have done on such occasions is rise in the face of political disdain — if not oppression, which is as yet an overstatement in the contemporary American case — to produce great art.

Conservatives were chortling that Streep revealed the very detachment of rich entertainment-industry attitudes. They called her behavior a certain and continued political loser for the left.

But Streep wasn’t seeking to win an election. She dared instead to lampoon the currently prevailing American cultures of football and pro wrestling. She said that’s all that would be left on television if we got rid of actors, foreign-born talents and the press.

Artists don’t win elections or try. They make art. They express themselves. They tell stories. They fashion images.

They merely imply the morals of their stories. Beholders are invited to get and accept and apply those morals if they choose or can.

A movie like last year’s Oscar-winning Spotlight, by telling the story of one newspaper in one town and the poisoned local culture it exposed, did more to pump up struggling print journalism than a thousand hand-wringing panel discussions by editors at conferences.

Anyway, the irony screams: Here we had political followers of a blustery reality television-show host they’d elected president dismissing the worth, indeed the practice, of political expression by mere entertainers.

Streep’s political argument was an implication left to the inference of her listeners.

I rather confidently inferred that she was saying that Trump was an unfit presidency by temperament, and that it was frightful that so many in the country had embraced his destructive essence.

Within a couple of hours, Trump was on Twitter reinforcing my inference.

He was leading with the cheek he was too immature and egomaniacal to turn. He was applying the behavior of the child’s playground where he spends the fantasy that is his existence.

He tweeted to say that Streep was the one thing she most certainly is not — an overrated actress — and call her a “Hillary flunky.”

Challenged to rise above, our looming presidential cloud always sinks below.

I dread this presidency, but can’t wait for the movie.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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