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cab67

(3,311 posts)
Fri Apr 4, 2025, 02:57 PM Apr 4

He is not an American Original

This shouldn't be an issue to consider, but I consider it anyway -

In the future, biographies will be written about Twinklesphincter. They will probably also make a movie based on one of them.

My fear is that he'll be portrayed as an American Original. This is sometimes done when biopics are made of Americans who did great things in spite of being deeply flawed humans in some way. Think Theodore Roosevelt, LBJ, PT Barnum, or George S. Patton. Sometimes, the flaws are only hinted at; other times, the figure is credited for having accomplished great things both in spite of and because of these flaws. People like that could only be great in America! Only in America could people like this find their true potential for greatness! Only in America could someone so flawed and unimportant step up to the call of history! They were American Originals!

There was a miniseries about George Washington when I was in high school back in the early 1980's. There was a scene I remember very clearly - Washington stepped out of Mount Vernon to find one of his footmen - an enslaved Black man - weeping. He asked someone what was going on and was told that his wife and children had just been sold. Washington was shown them being loaded onto a wagon.

He immediately dashed off for the wagon. His tricorn hat flew off. "Stop! Stop!" he yelled. When he got to the wagon, he shouted to the white man standing there that "we don't break up families! Ever!"

He then ran back to where he was and told the first person he spoke to the same thing - we don't break up families!

I have no idea if this actually happened, but it had the desired effect - at least one naive viewer (me) thought, "OK, he was a slaveholder - but, like, he wasn't a mean one." Whoever produced the biopic didn't want to ignore the basic flaw in Washington's biography - that he owned human beings as slaves - but wanted to put a smiley face on it by depicting him as a "nice" one.

As a more mature person, I now understand what was done. Washington was the Father of our Country, but the kind of hagiography that might have been made before 1960 was no longer acceptable. The civil rights movement had happened, and it was no longer OK to pretend many the founding fathers, who came up with an ingenious (if flawed) constitution and led the US to independence, owned slaves - something that, by then, was seen as inherently evil. So slavery was acknowledged, even if only with a wink and nod.

(As George Carlin once put it, there's a fundamental hypocrisy in the history of the United States - the country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free.)

We cannot let this be done with Rusty McCombover.

To begin with, he's not an original. There have been scam artists and hucksters throughout history. There have always been people who know how to appeal to basic instincts with simplified and deceptive language. He happens to be very successful at these, but there's nothing fundamentally original about him in this regard.

And this isn't the same kind of great-thing, flawed-man situation. He hasn't done great things, unless you count convincing a whole lot of people that he should be President of the United States as somehow great. (Impressive, maybe - but not in any positive way.) When he speaks, he only utters flawed words. He lies. He pretends to understand things he doesn't. He's a failed businessman who seems to think he's a great success, and he seems to think the world owes him something. And he's doing what he is because he wants to get back at people he thinks attacked him. He's a selfish, bigoted, spiteful small man with a big megaphone, and nothing more.

If there's a biopic, it can't be allowed to depict him as the great-but-flawed American Original. It has to show things honestly, and that means a film of little more than flaws.

I realize this isn't a big issue, and I'm not actually dwelling on it, but it crosses my mind from time to time.

I also hope that the Turd Who Walks as a Man Does' replacement puts the portraits of Barack Obama and Joe Biden in the Oval Office, where they can be seen every time he speaks to the nation from there.

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