Images of Protest on Television

Yesterday in the Times, James Poniewozik, one of their television critics, published an article worth reading. Being a television critic, he, naturally, focused on how the protests over George Floyd's death have appeared on the small screen. The whole article is worth reading. But here is one good clip describing Trump's use of the Bible in front of St. John's Episcopal Church:

As the Rev. Al Sharpton would say later in the week: “I’ve been preaching since I was a little boy. I’ve never seen anyone hold the Bible like that.”

I’m not sure I’ve even seen anyone hold a book like that. Mr. Trump glowered and hefted the Holy Writ as if he meant to swat a fly with it. With the attention of a pandemic-, unemployment- and unrest-plagued country, he delivered the visual message, “This is what a Bible looks like.”

The surreal dissonance of the gesture was summed up when a reporter asked the president if the book was his Bible. “It’s a Bible,” he responded.

Poniewozik goes on to point out that people have been looking for expressions of empathy from the White House, however, they are not seeing any on their screens:

But it wasn’t only politicians who were looking at America and seeing an empathy desert. That message came, of all places, from the Instagram feed of the wrestler-turned-Hollywood-star Dwayne Johnson, also known as the Rock.

In his video, Mr. Johnson is somber, yet as pained and vulnerable as a man-mountain in a muscles-bulging T-shirt can be. “Where is our leader?” he asks, in an extended, sometimes halting monologue that never mentions Mr. Trump by name but addresses only a conspicuous “You.”

“You would be surprised,” he says, “how people in pain would respond when you say to them, ‘I care about you.’”

Do read the article, it is worth your time.

In addition to the great article, I would also recommend Poniewozik's recent book, Audience of One. Before dismissing it as yet another Trump book, let me say that it is a highly readable book that focuses on the strange relationship between Trump and television.

Gary Shteyngart had a positive review of the book that givcs a good idea of what to like about the book:

If TV execs were asked to classify James Poniewozik’s illuminating new book, “Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America,” they might use the term “dramedy.” Poniewozik is a funny, acerbic and observant writer. He calls Melania “the most Trump-like of Trump’s wives, with a model’s glower that matches his own,” and remarks of Trump’s relationship with cable news, “He pushed the drug, and he got high on it.”

But Poniewozik, the chief television critic of this newspaper, uses his ample comedic gifts in the service of describing a slow-boil tragedy. If humor is the rocket of his ICBM, the last three years of our lives are the destructive payload. Along with the TV critic Emily Nussbaum’s spot-on observation of Trump’s connection to the humor of, in her words, the “dark and angry” borscht belt comics, and the cultural and political critic Frank Rich’s unsparing account of the role New York’s liberal establishment played in Trump’s rise, Poniewozik brings a new microscope with which to analyze the drug-resistant bacterium that is our president. And while there is certainly room to examine collusion and Russian interference and the outdated institution that Homer Simpson once referred to as the “Electrical College,” this book is really about the role played by all of us, the faithful citizens of TV Nation. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of “Audience of One” is that it makes Trump’s presidency seem almost inevitable. Of course he won. This is the United States we’re talking about. The same way Boris Johnson tapped into Britain’s inner erudite buffoon, so Trump tapped into our inner core, which all too often turns out to have comprised midnight cheeseburgers and hormonal TV childhoods.