IN READING ONE thing and another, I encounter lines well worth remembering. Indeed, see “The Best of Lines” and “I Wish I Said That (First)”, both here at SimanaitisSays.
As Oscar Wilde remarked, “I wish I had said that,” to which James McNeill Whistler responded, “You will, Oscar, you will.”
The best of lines are worth more than remembering; they’re worth repeating. Here are several.
A Great Burni Line. Frank Burni has appeared here at SimanaitisSays with political zingers in “Great Acerbic Lines.”
In “We’ve Heard Quite Enough From Donald Trump,” The New York Times, October 23, 2020, Bruni shares that “several prominent Republicans noted that Trump had a model for how to behave: Mike Pence, who was alternatively zealous and Zen [remember the fly] in his vice-presidential debate with Kamala Harris.”
“But,” Bruni writes, “Trump lacks the humility to take cues from anyone. And nudging the nutty monarch of Mar-a-Loco to emulate the Hoosier snoozer is like asking a honey badger to morph into a three-toed sloth.”
On Christian Authenticity. “How many pictures make a 1st-century Jew in Judea look like a tourist from Sweden?”
Jaeger describes that anthropologist Richard Neave “developed an image of the Christian figure that is pretty far removed from the face we’re used to.” Neave specializes in forensic facial reconstruction. He took three skulls from Israeli archeological sites near where Jesus is believed to have been born and applied computerized x-ray and ultrasound techniques to construct a model of Jesus’s face.
Related to this, of course, is how some people manage to devise “us versus others” mentalities in the oddest of places. For example, Jaeger cites “Fox News” host Megyn Kelly assuring her viewers in December 12, 2013, that “Jesus was a white man too. It’s like we have, he’s a historical figure that’s a verifiable fact, as is Santa; I just wanted kids to know that.”
Other Analyses of Trump. Maureen Dowd discusses Trumpian character in her “King Kong Trump, Losing His Grip,” The New York Times, October 24, 2020.
Dowd writes, “Donald Trump does have a gift for symmetry, though, you must admit. He began his presidency with an epic tantrum about pictures showing that his Crowd Size could not compare with Obama’s.”
And now,” she continues, “he could be ending his presidency with another epic tantrum about crowd size. After Lesley Stahl trolled him during a ’60 Minutes’ taping, saying, ‘You used to have bigger rallies,’ you could almost see steam pouring out of the president’s ears. He stormed out of the interview a short while later.”
About Trump’s behavior in the second TV debate, Dowd quotes Obama Senior Advisor David Axelrod: “Republicans were relieved that he was eating with a knife and fork. But it was still the same meal.”
Dowd has another good keeper line too: “Biden is an empath, Trump a sociopath.” ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2020