I finally got around to watching Michelle Wolf’s stand-up routine at the Correspondent’s Dinner. I had been wondering what she might have said to prompt the group that hired her to issue an apology for her performance.
What I found was interesting, because what she said was so unexpected. After all, we are only 16 months in to this national mess, and our Press core has already been trained to speak in careful euphemisms.
As a reporter covering our nation’s politics, you are not actually allowed to notice that the job of Sarah Huckabee Sanders is to cover for a boss who is a serial liar, that our president is a pussy grabbing (literally!) racist misogynist and unapologetically xenophobic bully.
If, as a journalist, you point out the plain facts that we all witness every day, you can get banned from the White House. You can simply be cut out of the loop, and denied the basic access you need to do your job at all.
But Michelle Wolf is a comedian, which means her job is, quite literally, to truthfully point out to us the absurdity of these strange days. That is her mandate, however nutty said truth may be — and right now, it is pretty darned nutty.
So mostly I was startled, at a time when so many journalists are in a defensive crouch and practically cowering in fear, simply to hear somebody point out clearly and unambiguously to a room full of journalists just how crazy things have gotten on their watch.
Of course she was promptly denounced, and her words were twisted and misconstrued to suggest “hidden meanings” at odds with what she actually said. That’s how you shut people up in this day and age when they have the effrontery to speak truth to power.
Fortunately, power doesn’t always succeed in shutting up inconvenient truth. I suppose we should be grateful for little things.