Glamour Note:
Sans French and Stench
7 February 2018
¶ Hats off to Jennifer Finney Boylan for her Pepé le Pew piece, the most amusing assessment of the President that I’ve ever seen.
It is fair to say these cartoons have not aged well (not a rare quality; see also Disney’s “Song of the South”). But in the #MeToo era, Pepé Le Pew’s antics make you want to cover your face with your paws. Virtually his whole oeuvre is a series of jokes about males who — no matter how clearly the point is made — cannot possibly comprehend the magnitude of their own disgustingness.
Which leads us back to the president, who is kind of like Pepé Le Pew with neither French nor stench.
Boylan strikes a more somber note toward the end, after describing the famous Bugs Bunny-Daffy Duck competittion which climaxes with Daffy’s explosion.
Is there a better metaphor for the election of 2016? There we were, mouths agape, as the most craven soul ever to aim at the White House ran, and won. Ratings went through the roof as everything we ever thought we knew about our country’s decency exploded.
Televisions don’t destroy minds; people watching television destroy minds.
¶ Kathleen was on television today, some Yahoo business show at lunchtime. When she came home, she said, “I’ve got my war paint on.” If she hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t have noticed, not then, but later, while she was sitting in the lamplight reading the Times, I saw that she was looking pretty special, and yet there wasn’t anything that I could point to, except, finally, her eyebrows, which, she acknowledged, had been darkened. She told me that it took the makeup artist about twenty minutes to work this magic, which didn’t look like war paint at all, even if it did put some color in Kathleen’s face, and take out some fatigue. Aside from a very occasional dab of blush, and more regular use of light lipsticks, Kathleen doesn’t do the makeup thing at all, and I’m pretty sure that she doesn’t have the patience (even if she has the knowledge) to put on the “layers” of whatever it was that were so sparingly but effectively applied.