La commedia no è finita
June 10, 2025
My letter to the editor in today’s Times-Union:
Angela Calcagno’s 5/26 commentary is headed, “Democrats need to jazz up their messaging.” Not that what they’re saying is wrong — they can’t get voters to listen. Republicans being more adept at exploiting media.
Trump is “charismatic,” she writes, chronicling his oh-so-watchable TV and movie hijinks. And “what America is truly searching for, beyond the next policy or platform, is someone they can connect with.”
A crass billionaire and convicted felon, who tried to overthrow the government? Seriously?
But Calcagno ends by saying “Democrats need to start asking the real question [her emphasis]: Are you not entertained?”
Okay, I get it. I myself like being entertained. But here’s the thing: entertainment and public affairs are two separate realms. Or should be.
Entertainment value is no proper criterion for electing people to positions of responsibility, or what policies are enacted. We used to (mostly) approach such matters with appropriate seriousness. Perhaps Trump’s worst impact is hollowing out that civic culture, plunging it in the toilet.
I’m haunted by the 2006 comedy film “Idiocracy,” set in a future where generations of dumber people over-procreating has resulted in a national culture of mindless superciliousness. Trump not only undermines our democracy — he’s making us an idiocracy.
* * *
In October 2016 I wrote a blog post titled “La commedia è finita.” Naively thinking “grab them by the pussy” must surely end the Trump farce. Not realizing how far our civic culture had sunk.
It hasn’t yet reached bottom.
Recently Trump disparaged the Ukraine war as like two silly children fighting in a schoolyard. As if dispensing Olympian wisdom.
No. The global stakes could not be higher. Russia criminally attacked Ukraine, which courageously defends itself. The immature stupidity is Trump’s, for suggesting moral equivalence. The very idea of morality eludes him. Thinking that’s for losers.
But Trump’s playground fight metaphor, so inappropriate for Ukraine, uncannily prefigured his own blow-up with Musk, exactly that kind of jejune fisticuffs. Wholly predictable given the difficulty of determining which of the two is the bigger asshole.
While Trump prattles about making other countries respect us, he’s turning America into a pathetic joke. All those foreign leaders sucking up to him in public, knowing his lust for flattery, laugh at him behind his back. The fool doesn’t know it. While the clueless idiocy of his Ukraine words; the sorry insult-laden spectacle with Musk; on top of all the rest, all the shambolic policy travesties, so needlessly antagonizing all our former global friends; it all makes the world look at America like a dear old relation who’s sunk into dementia.
Yet it’s really worse. Dementia happens outside people’s control. Whereas we voted for this.
As commentator Thomas Friedman has said, for many decades we lived not in an American world but one of America — where this country, its role, what it stood for and meant, was a salient reality. A shining city on a hill, as Reagan quoted. Attracting people from all over. Immigrants, tourists, students, businesses. Now we’re turning them all off, even shooing them away.
“La commedia è finita” told an opera audience the show was over. But we Americans, blinded to reality, will stagger onward, like brain-dead zombies.