17 Dec That’s Entertainment!
Some of you, I’d guess, are fortunate to be blissfully unaware that the most recent addition to the United States Supreme Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, is not just the greatest legal mind on the Left these days, but is also an up-and-coming Broadway superstar. NPR tells the story:
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made her Broadway debut this weekend. She also made history as the first member of the nation’s highest court to grace its storied stage, according to the production that invited her.
Jackson appeared in a one-night-only walk-on role on Saturday night in the Tony-nominated romantic comedy musical & Juliet, a modern take on Shakespeare’s tragedy that imagines what would have happened if the female protagonist survived and took control of her own life.
Now, if you think that description of the play sounds awful, you have no idea. It’s actually much, much worse, as Matt Taibbi documents:
OH MY GOD. If Pol Pot spoofed Jesus Christ Superstar it wouldn’t reach this universe of unintentional comedy. & Juliet is the ultimate in woke art: a campy satire where the cast spends two and a half hours leaping in costumed joy while they retroactively cancel that infamous heteronormative icon, William Shakespeare.
Future audiences will either cherish this musical or be baffled by it, maybe both, but Brown Jackson just did humanity a great service by giving it a chance at immortality.
As Taibbi notes, the musical, which concludes with Juliet professing her love for herself, is a tribute to “self-aggrandizement.” Given this, I can’t help but think that it was the perfect vehicle for Justice Brown Jackson’s Broadway debut. Now, I’m sure the justice is a lovely and decent woman. I have little doubt about this. Nevertheless, she seems to embody the contemporary political Left in ways that are truly important, if oft-ignored.
In response to the NPR story on the justice and her debut, some wag on Twitter/X posted a chart showing that Justice Jackson spoke more words in her first term on the Court than all of the male justices spoke during their first terms combined. By way of comparison, Justice Brown Jackson spoke more than 15,000 words in her first term, while Justice Clarence Thomas spoke fewer than 100. He was there to listen, while she was there to…well…to talk. And talk. And talk,
Again, I’m sure she’s a lovely and likable person. Still, one might be forgiven for wondering if she’s in the legal-political game for the reasons one would hope she is. In short, is she in it so that she may “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and… faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon [her]… under the Constitution and laws of the United States,” or if she is in it instead to entertain and be entertained?
That may seem a bit of a harsh question, but in light of the last three-plus decades of Democratic/progressive behavior in this country, it’s not necessarily unwarranted. Consider, for example, the other big news out of Washington this week:
ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million toward Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll.
As part of the settlement made public Saturday, ABC News posted an editor’s note to its website expressing regret over Stephanopoulos’ statements during a March 10 segment on his “This Week” program. The network will also pay $1 million in legal fees to the law firm of Trump’s attorney, Alejandro Brito.
In the wake of the settlement, countless journalists and others on the Left have whined incessantly that this is terrible “for journalism,” that it sends a “chilling” message to others, and that it constitutes a shameful attack on Stephanopoulos’s “profession.”
On the one hand, I get why journalists would be upset about something like this, fearing that they too might be accused of defamation. On the other hand, there are a couple of things worth remembering here. First, you won’t have to settle a defamation suit if you don’t defame anyone. And second, George Stephanopoulos’s profession isn’t “journalist.” It’s “entertainer.” The guy doesn’t have a journalistic bone in his body. He’s on ABC for two reasons: he’s a seasoned and telegenic entertainment/messaging professional, and he’s plugged into Democratic Party politics. Honestly, for a number of years in the 1990s, George’s “profession” was “butt-boy” – a Washington term used to describe the presidential aide who is always at the president’s side, just slightly to his rear. I’ve bored all of you too often with my thoughts on journalism as a “profession,” but George can’t even pretend to be that. He’s a guy who was close to the Clintons when being close to the Clintons was an advantage. That’s it.
And speaking of his time with the Clintons, it’s fair, I think, to say that Stephanopoulos learned the political-entertainment business at the feet of one of the masters. It’s weird. Two of the most successful Republican presidents in recent memory were former entertainers. One was a former actor, and the other a former reality show star. However, each arrived at the White House with a plan, an idea of what he wanted to do for the nation and how he wanted to do it. Granted, one of these plans was notably less well-developed and constructed than the other, but both still had plans. The two most popular recent Democrats, by contrast, came to Washington with the sole intention of allowing the nation (and the world, really) to bask in their greatness for eight years. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were entertainers, first and foremost. And George learned everything he knows from the former of the two
I will concede that I am not a doctor and that I don’t even play one on TV. That said, I think the entire Democratic establishment these days – from the Obamas to the Clintons, from Gavin Newsom to AOC, from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to George Stephanopoulos – suffers from a collective version of “main character syndrome,” which is defined as “the perception that your life is a story or a movie where you’re the central character.”
The good news is that main character syndrome is not an official mental health diagnosis and those who suffer from it are not generally considered a danger to themselves. The bad news is that their delusions can be a danger to other people – in some cases billions of people. Stephanopoulos’s $15 million outburst came in an interview with a rape survivor, Congresswoman Nancy Mace (R, SC). George, obviously, saw himself as the hero in the exchange, repeatedly pressuring a Trump supporter to explain why she would support a man with his lurid past. The rest of the world, though, saw him as a bully badgering a rape survivor for supporting a politician he didn’t like. That’s truly ugly.
Of course, in George’s personal movie, he doesn’t owe his entire career to his (much more profound) support for a different president, one who was credibly accused of rape and was disbarred for lying about a sexual liaison with an employee half his age.
So…George’s movie is fiction, in other words – as are the rest of them. Sadly, they’ll never acknowledge as much
