Being the continuation of InstaPunk and InstaPunk Rules
The Fat Elvis Gambit
Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps
A little bit of a thought piece. Just a little bit. I know nobody’s up to much thought these days. But I’m a huge fan of Canadian philosopher/rockstar/poet Leonard Cohen, who assures me, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
Found a crack. At a site called Raw Story. Written by Sarah Burris. Went like this:
FTA: <<That's mean to Elvis!' MSNBC panelists laugh at comment that Trump's in 'fat Elvis' phase…
MSNBC panelists couldn't help but chuckle Monday afternoon after The Bulwark's Charlie Sykes identified former President Donald Trump as being in the "fat Elvis stage of his career."
Former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) praised Sykes's comment on Monday morning, which started the network off.
"I've got to give a shout-out to my friend Charlie Sykes," McCaskill said at the top of Nicolle Wallace's show. "I spit coffee over the weekend when I saw how he referred to Trump, that Trump is in the fat Elvis stage of his career."
"I feel like that's mean to Elvis!" shouted Wallace.
"I mean, I love that. I love that," McCaskill continued. "And, by the way, fat Elvis is worried, and so is the weirdo he picked as his running mate."
McCaskill pointed out that the Democratic field "is pretty damn good," and Vice President Kamala Harris “doesn't have any bad choices.”
Sykes explained that the rally over the weekend was revealing.
"We can talk about, you know, what his strategy was and what he intended to do, but I also think, you know, the other thing was the complete lack of impulse control," explained Sykes Monday morning."You know, as Mike Barnicle says, this is a deeply damaged man who is really sort of, you know, once again in the fat Elvis stage of his career. I thought it was very revealing that ... he's going back to when he came down the golden elevator back in 2015.">>
So I thought about their insightful comments. Here’s what I thought.
**********
I kind of like the ‘Fat Elvis’ meme. Sorry to disappoint anyone who thinks it’s a putdown.
He kind of is…
I actually had to widen this pic to make the face look ‘Elvis’ fatter…
Keep listening. It gets harder to. He was in his forties. Trump is not.
Elvis. But in our dying American culture he might as well be. He’s a man, larger than life, self-made from his conspicuously dyed hair to his uniquely American identity and compulsive need to own every stage he mounted, simultaneously belovèd and mocked and charismatic. A worldbeater, conspicuous consumer, always a star if never praised as an actor, and always the center of attention among common people who didn’t begrudge him the Cadillacs and mansions and cheesy appetites and outrageous costumery.
Only America produces/produced this kind of fantastic icon, part hero, part genius, part show biz, part poseur and villain depending, and all man and always star of the show. George Washington. Andrew Jackson. Grant and Sherman. Abraham Lincoln. Theodore Roosevelt. Paul Robeson. Jack Johnson. John Wayne. Muhammed Ali. Clint Eastwood. Ronald Reagan. Donald Trump. Men who live completely in public and rivet the world, regardless of their occasional sins and failures and astonishing triumphs over the Lilliputian snipers who eternally seek to bring them down. The company of the ineffable among Americans.
What else about them? They tend to wear their heart on their sleeve. What better target and bullseye could you ask for?
Fat Elvis? Yeah, I’ll take it…
Oh. That other thing. A sense of humor.
Youcan always tell the evil ones. They have no sense of humor. Something dark inside them rubs it out. Every word to them becomes literal and mean spirited. Ali was always laughing with his rhymes.John Wayne had his all-purpose rebuttal “That’ll be the day.” Clint Eastwood debated an empty chair at a Republican Convention. J. D. Vance identified a cat lady demographic absolutely everybody knows exists. Trump saw the new Harris-Walz ticket and predicted Biden would try to reclaim his nomination. He was joking (with a clever point as a punchline) but they have never understood that the Orange Man has a keenly developed sense of humor. You’d have to have a sense of humor of your own to respond accordingly. So they mocked him. Mocking a man for a joke he’s made at your expense is kind of a lead balloon.
The Raw Story stars? Sooo funny…. Peter Sykes writes for “The Bulwark,” the maniacal anti-Trump publication started by Jonah Goldberg I helped start some years ago with a helpful shove off the cliff. God, they’re all so old and bitter now…
Peter Sykes
(aka the post-career Rick Moranis years)
Claire McCaskill
(aka the post-career Trump scatter-shooter)
She’s still trying to get away with this pic at Wiki.
Hmm. I’ll go with that. I was never even an Elvis fan. But the night he died, I stayed up all night listening to the radio. I know an American hero when I hear one. How about you?
On the other hand, I’m not fat. They want to kill him. They still mean to. I fall asleep at night. What do I dream? Sorry. Unlike most of you, I’m a guy. When I was a consultant I wore charcoal gray and silver. Now I just wear black sweats and a black hat. Which is more dangerous you think?
Happy Independence Day No. 250! I’m planning to do my part for the year-long celebration of the still remarkable birth of the United States of America. Just starting to realize that the number of us who remember the last big anniversary in 1976 is getting smaller every day. Why I have some special ideas about focusing on the moment of transition, that is the tick of the clock last night when the 249th year became the 250th. A kind of time capsule that may be buried now but dug up later to see who were way back when you were still as young as you think you are now. My credentials for the job. Quite a few actually, but the most important one today is that I was a working participant in the official Bicentennial celebrations back when I was still young. I wrote a post about it almost 10 years ago, ancient history in today’s 24/7 chronometer dial. In honor of the ones no longer with us from that time, I dug up the old post from the Wayback Machine and put it back together here a...
The last group photo I’m a part of that’s still in my possession. My sister’s wedding in the late1990’s, with me and my mother in attendance, here in Salem. I don’t get out much anymore. Haven’t for a long time. If I didn’t take pictures of myself, nobody would, or could, anymore. I don’t give them the chance. Why in recent years I’ve made a point of doing an official birthday selfie, to keep track of the wear and tear of the years and see if the falling apart process is gaining speed. This year was not a good year for hair. That much I’ll tell you. But here’s the Official 74th Birthday Selfie I took on Friday. Not as young as I used to be. I hadn’t really shown this pic to anyone, but imagine my surprise when I received a gift yesterday by parcel delivery from a young lady I helped raise who will always be close to my heart. She and I hadn’t spoken about the Rolling Stones in years, but somehow she must have divined I’d been thinking of them, because here’s what she ordered sent ...
This is what I call an omnibus post. That is, it will contain many links to what I have published here and elsewhere previously. Not going to apologize for that. I don’t mind asking you to read a variety of approaches to the same gigantic topic. It’s a tooic so big we’ve all become accustomed (or trained ourselves) to deal with it only in pieces. But the pieces are all part of a larger whole that has grave consequences for the cukture as a whole. A great many people aren’t going to like what I have to say here, but it’s time it was said. I won’t be mincing words. If you feel like contending with specific points I am making, you’re well advised to read what’s at the links before you cut yourself the easy break of dismissing this post as irrational or wrongheaded or over-generalized. It isn’t. It just won’t be popular. A word about the word ‘general’ as it used in vernacular expressions like ”in general” or “generally speaking.” We all do generalize, mostly without acknowledging that whe...
If you’ve never seen an Asylum production of their “Saving the World from Imminent Destruction” series, you’re excused from this post. The rest of us already know the basics. A once prominent, now disgraced scientist (often Sam Baldwin, but not always) is minding his own business making a living income and trying to mend his struggling family life when he notices that something is seriously amiss in the cosmos. Gravity isn’t working quite right. Or all the birds seem to be migrating at the same time. Or some local pond suddenly ejaculates a pillar of lava. You know. The warning knell of an extinction-level catastrophe. Meanwhile, where are the kids? They were supposed to be home by now. He calls his ex-wife. She doesn’t know where they are. He calls an old colleague at the agency in DC where nobody else will take his calls anymore. In a whisper, the colleague tells him the experts in charge haven’t noticed anything to worry about cosmologically speaking. This far in, we already know wh...
Invocation of Nemesis by the Summoners Click on Rosie. Thought I’d get this part out of the way right up front. I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s famous quip about the upper class British sport of fox hunting: “The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.” As it happens, I’m working on two different posts at the same time this morning. This one and another one about the sad PR plight by the unfortunate middle child of the three worst First Ladies in American history. . What the posts have in common is that the dominating element of both stories is a function of female psychology and can only be understood in those terms. There’s also the irony that Wilde’s jibe can be applied with some justice to both predator and prey in the two posts. Because I’m going to admit at the outset what most of the MAGA faithful won’t. You are right that Donald Trump is responsible for much of the imminent danger we are facing as a nation. Without his arrival on the political scene 11 years ago, the...
The Valley of the Jerseyikes When you’ve decided to your own satisfaction that life doesn’t end with physical death, what have you got to worry about? That probably depends on where you come down on the age-old questions about ghosts. Do they exist? Are they a possible fate of troubled souls after they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil or been yanked out of it too suddenly? What if you expire peacefully and find yourself waking up in the attic of your own house, somehow tethered to it with no watch you can trust to keep track of time? I know I’ve stopped wearing a watch at all, like almost all of you out there. Are we taking some kind of risk that we’ll miss the departure signal for the trip to the other side? One side effect of getting old and not liking most of what’s on teevee is that you wind up watching too many paranormal shows, which have the virtue of no politics, no gratuitous sex scenes, and extended stretches of restful watching with almost nothing happening on screen. ...
Minimalism has been a periodic ideal of modern and post-modern esthetics. Purely arbitrary, of course, though not without possibilities and even infinities of its own. For example, there are those who regard Haiku as a sort of supreme test of the poet, since poetry is commonly defined as the best words in the best order. This leaves the door open for imagining that there is an absolute minimum definable for capturing profound truth in the fewest of the best words in the least of the best order. In Haiku there must be 17 syllables, some reference to a season (ensuring universality I guess), and a prohibition against rhyme to prevent cheating (another guess). What if this definition of the minimum is wrong? What if there’s some way to reach great truths in less than 17 syllables? In less than a single word even? And, gasp, in less than a single letter on the page? Impossible? Well, why the hell not? I propose that the graphic above is a poem, subject to meaningful exploration, inte...
You see. What they don’t see. The atheist view. The Dawkins view. He is not responsible for explaining how parameciums got here, only how parameciums became the Vatican. Except he doesn’t put it that way. His job is the childishly simple task of explaining how the Law of Entropy (all things fall apart, the only law any scientist accepts) somehow gives us Shakespeare, Blake, and Tilden, the author of the King James Bible. Evolutionists think they’re not responsible for how life came to be. Did you know that? Whole different question to them. Not their job. All that sky out there? Billions of stars. Irrelevant. Galapagos Island. Moths with changing wings. That’s the job of the Blind Watchmaker. Why he is smarter than God and a critic of his work. Well, I’m asking you all to forget the partitioning off of the heavens. And everything else you have to forget to believe there’s no meaning in life. Life. To me, the funniest thing about the evolutionary spiels is how they always argue fo...
…and a weird dose of nostalgia, as for something half remembered. What did you do for your Memorial Day remembrances? We watched the laying of the wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns and the President’s speech. The audience was large, and the people there looked amazingly normal. Attentive and respectful. The way our parents taught us to be at solemn events. We heard the fireworks begin after dark and put the Thundershirt on our terrier Tommy, who isn’t entirely sure that fireworks aren’t an approaching thunderstorm. All we needed of that timeless ritual, since we’ve both been to many such occasions, including the field a mile away where the Salem event is always held. It was only at bedtime that I tried something new. In my constant search for background sounds that facilitate the hours of sleep I get before the inevitable wee hours summons to the keyboard, I try different things, usually intended to be monotonous and therefore soporific. British crime documentary series are...
Comments