Waiting for *Le Pivot*

Stephen Colbert and Patrick Stewart did a lovely thing last week with "Waiting for Godot's Obamacare Replacement", above, but then the Obamacare Replacement actually showed up, and, like even the worst fart, seems to be already dissipating. What really corresponds to the hopelessness of absent meaning in Samuel Beckett's great play is the fantasy of the Trumpian pivot, the moment where our president begins displaying a capacity to hold a political office beyond the ability to read aloud in public for an hour without taking his pants off or barking like a seal, for which our Washington press has been hankering, miraculously without hanging themselves yet, for a year or more.

And it works better in French (En Attendant le Pivot).

Monsignor Ross Douthat, who I once cast as Estragon in a production of Godot (former New York Times columnist David Brooks was the ebullient Vladimir), is still gaming it out ("Why Republicans Can't Do Health Care"):

Existential Obama

Not really snark.

From Low Lai Chow, "Samuel Beckett's Motivational Quotes"

What are bad writers for? (addendum)

While I was preparing my effusions on the literary efforts of James Poulos, I was not alone. Hordes of bloggists leapt at Poulos's text like hounds on the umbles (actually, no; the hounds get random bits of flesh, which might be a better metaphor anyway, while the umbles are reserved for the servants, baked into umble pie; but I digress); in addition to the links given in the earlier post I should mention TBogg, SEK, Betty Cracker, and Rich Yeselson. But the most startling approach is undoubtedly that of Doctor Habilitatissimus Michael Bérubé, who laid down a claim that Poulos's writing is not merely not bad but actually in some sense—well, extraordinary; "modern," he says, "perhaps on the very cusp of the post-modern," citing as evidence the following text:

to the growing discomfort of many, that framework hasn’t come anywhere close to answering even the most basic questions about what women are for — despite pretty much universal recognition across the political spectrum that a civilization of men, for men, and by men is no civilization at all, a monstrously barbaric, bloody, and brutal enterprise. Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua [jump]