“SNL50” and the Gulf of America
The celebration of “S.N.L.” should remind us of the good we’ve had for so long, and what a pluralistic United States can bring to the world
Not to be a Debbie Downer, but I can’t help but think of the “Saturday Night Live” 50th anniversary special (which, perhaps appropriately, fell on the eve of Presidents’ Day) as a farewell to a number of the essential things that have made our country strong — the ability to speak freely and to critique our elected leaders; the unique creative chemistry found in a pluralistic society that comes by mixing diverse minds and sensibilities; merit- (not loyalty) based hiring; a tradition of honoring those who produce humor and art and music; fellow feeling for those that society pushes down; solidarity with our historic allies; the separation of church (ladies) and state.
Celebrating what “S.N.L.” has represented for the past half-century should remind us of the good we’ve had for so long and what the traditional melting-pot United States can bring to us and the world. (The melting pot for all but 5 years of the various SNL eras depended on who a certain Canadian impresario made part of the cast; the list of now-famous performers who didn’t make the show over the decades is amazing.)
“S.N.L.” has always satirized the foibles of our national politicians, but that’s what comedians do: punch up, not down. Even as “S.N.L.” has punched up, as much as the right has objected, it has been fairly gentle stuff. With authoritarianism coming to America, and Trump’s political hacks working hard to export it to Europe, we enter a new era where there will be little but the ultra-rich doing a whole lot of punching down — on the poor, on independent (a k a “nasty”) women, on federal workers and other working-class folks, and those “woke” historians, comedians, poets, and journalists.
There’s always a list of undesirables for your average despot, and you can make that list by just being reasonably educated.
Just listen to the choppin’ broccoli word salad falling from the mouths of every single member of Trump’s cabinet. Listen to his uncharismatic, combative vice president or his absurdly unqualified defense minister bloviating about “the enemy within” to European leaders, throwing down the gantlet for fascism (er, “illiberal democracy”) there. Like their boss, they sound like children — the ones not well brought up. President Trump’s childish insistence on his ahistoric “Gulf of America” can carry two meanings: a large inlet from an ocean onto a landmass, like the Gulf of Mexico, its name dating back to the sixteenth century, or an abyss. When I see or hear “Gulf of America,” I can’t help but think of the abyss.
“S.N.L.” sketches could often fall flat, but that’s the nature of creativity, especially in the context of a weekly live program built around a host who typically has little experience with comedy or improv. But the show has maintained a decent batting average, with a hall-of-fame number of home runs. And it has exemplified for us, and much of the world, that the United States was strong enough to handle a little self-criticism and satire and maybe even laugh along or at least laugh it off. Back when I was a young man, President Gerald Ford seemingly enjoyed Chevy Chase’s impersonation of his sometimes klutzy behavior and had the good humor to play along.
Chase’s take on Ford set the standard for all the great presidential impersonations to follow — from Dan Ackroyd’s know-it-all Jimmy Carter “talking down” a teen who has taken acid, to Dana Carvey’s increasingly addled-sounding George H. W. Bush, to Phil Hartman’s personable Bill Clinton finding ways to eat at McDonald’s while out jogging to lose weight, to Will Ferrell’s impeccable George W. Bush (he would take that one to Broadway, in his “You’re Welcome America”).
Mild as the satire has been, only one president has complained — yeah, that guy.
Our higher-rated presidents took the ribbing in stride, which is the American way. Carvey and the elder Bush even famously became fast friends. I’ll go out on a pretty sturdy limb here and say that nearly every citizen misses those more civil times.
It should be noted that civility in politics was purposely put to an end by Republicans, who were taught by radio shock jock Rush Limbaugh and his admirer House Speaker Newt Gingrich to speak about Democrats as being “sick” and “the enemy.” His 1990 memo was, tellingly, entitled “Language: A Key Element of Control.” Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels would have been proud as putsch of that memo.
Americans have always been all about speaking up and sticking it to the man, often in satirical terms. From Mark Twain and Charles Dudley’s take on the Gilded Age (some technocratic, but equally heartless, version of which we are being pushed to return to by Musk/Trump), to The Smothers Brothers taking on the war in Vietnam, American artists of all genres have felt free to speak out against policies and elected leaders they find fault in.
You might recall that the odious character of Biff Tannen in the “Back to the Future” series was at least partially based on a certain smarmy real-estate “mogul” in New York. Sometime after “The Donald” became infamous for being a self-promoting hack and then lost his father’s fortune and received his deserved comeuppance for all his “birther” nonsense by President Barak Obama at the White House Correspondence dinner, he set his sights on becoming America’s Mussolini. Around that time he started to jut his jaw just like the Italian fascist. The mug shot he earned by trying to bully Georgia officials into changing the 2020 vote there has become the Mussolini-ish model for his official portrait.
This would all be laughable, except it isn’t in the least funny to the natural authoritarian who is back in power and has surrounded himself with religious and ideological zealots who are busy dismantling our democracy and the world order. The “S.N.L.” writers were deft after the election, having the cast satirically declare their long allegiance to Trump, while saying things like “I keep waking up in the middle of the night, screaming. With joy, of course!”
It’s hard to believe now (well, it even was then) but Trump was invited to host “S.N.L.” twice, in 2004 and 2015, so you’d think he might be more gracious. But The Donald’s early unquenchable need for attention and affirmation twisted when he was handed power into an unceasing demand for loyalty. He didn’t get a lot of love in his public life from the society Manhattanites or Hollywood and music icons he wanted to impress, or, more recently, from multiple state and federal prosecutors — and now he intends to use the near-total immunity the ideologically corrupt Supreme Court granted him to get his revenge.
Trump, Musk, Vance, and cabinet members like Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio are hellbent on making the world safe for mediocre (er, “competent”) white males. Guys just like them. Feeling enabled by Fed Soc–approved Supreme Court members, they are going all out to burn the country, and our historic alliances, down to get just that. Given what Trump’s “merit-based hires” had to say to our EU allies this past week, the president may not be in the business of nation-building but is clearly deep in Vladimir Putin’s business of exporting authoritarian white nationalism.
Authoritarians cannot stand free people mocking them. What is the future of America without the freedom of speech and thought that allows for creative satire about our elected leaders like we have seen for so long in The Onion or in The Borowitz Report or in The New Yorker or delivered nightly on our comedic talk shows or on “S.N.L.”?
Are we saying goodbye (I should say, buh-bye) to all of that?
We are if we refuse to fight to preserve the Constitutional rights and hard-won victories that provided economic and environmental security to all — federal workers, corporate workers, line workers, health care workers, teachers, not to mention women and people of color and those in the LGBTQ+ community.
It would be easy to imagine the Debby Downer trombone, but we must stay strong. As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte writes, defiance matters more than ever now.
In Musk and Trump, we are being led by two soulless narcissists who love only power and money and who cry like the meme baby if they’re told no or even slightly criticized. As others have pointed out, we must recognize that none of this is about policy, or else the Republican-controlled Congress would be creating bills to pass. It’s about undoing the critical checks and balances created by the founders so they can rule like Putin and Xe or assign all of us to labor in one of their Dark Enlightenment feudalist states, the fever dream of the anti-democratic blogger-philosopher of the far right, Curtis Yarvin, the kind of bizarre extremist most Americans would do their very best to avoid.
This undoing of our proud republic and the NATO alliance that, as Greg Olear writes in his newsletter PREVAIL, has given us the historical anomaly of a peaceful Europe for eighty years, is being done when, as historian Heather Cox Richardson notes, Americans essentially want the same things, the rights most Western Europeans enjoy. It’s being done because the oligarchs know we want those things. As Musk promises, there will be pain and hardships. But no one should buy the Musk/Trump line about some glorious future because all fascists say that.
There is never a glorious future under an authoritarian. Only suffering. Much suffering.
While Musk and Trump are serving Putin’s every desire, Republicans in Congress are refusing to live up to their oath of office to protect the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic.
So, it is now up to all of us.
Fight them in whatever way you can that exemplifies the First Amendment and the rule of law. Protest and call your representatives in Congress. And continue to live your best, most honest life, as an American who cares about all citizens.
And to the cast of “S.N.L.” (and Kimmel, Colbert, Meyers, et al.), please keep punching up.
