More about GHWB. I've argued for a while that not only does satire have no effect on the actions of the powerful, it shouldn't. You don't want a President caring about what somebody like me might say about her when making important decisions.
Thanks to a great talk by @jeffreyaengel, I learned about a real life situation which proved my point. To grossly oversimplify, as the Berlin Wall fell, the nations of Europe were on the edge of violent chaos. If anybody overstepped or provoked, war could break out.
So Pres. Bush got on the phone to leaders, East and West, and said: Do nothing. Don't provoke. Don't react. We promise not to interfere. And then got up in front of the press and basically said that. "We're being careful. Gonna monitor. Keep a close watch," etc. In other words:
"Gonna be prudent." The very thing that he had been mocked for a million times. He leaned into his own comic stereotype. It'd would be like Gerald Ford intentionally tripping over something, or Clinton dropping his pants.
If he had felt the need to prove the satirists wrong, if he was afraid of the SNL sketch to come, he might have acted more rashly, and unwisely, and who knows what might have happened. Instead, he did what he felt wise and was proved right.
Not only that, of course, but he embraced the man who did the most to mock him. washingtonpost.com/news/retropoli…
Thus, one sign of a mature, wise, trustworthy leader is to simply not to care about what satirists might say about her.
This is a subtweet.
This is a subtweet.
