The political leanings of the NBC stalwart Saturday Night Live cannot be a secret to anyone with eyes to see. In 2008, the show all but ruined Sarah Palin with independents. A well-educated woman of my immediate acquaintance was absolutely convinced that Palin actually said, “I can see Russia from my house!” when, in fact, that was SNL comedienne Tina Fey’s pithy summation of the Alaska governor’s experience of policing our maritime border with Russia.
But even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then. Whether by design or by accident the writers at 30 Rockefeller have summed up our peculiar political dynamic that has been at play for at least the previous four years in two recurring popular characters from SNL’s “Weekend Update” mock news segment: Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party, and Drunk Uncle.
The Girl, played by Cecily Strong, is the modern Democratic Party incarnate: young, cosmopolitan, self-assured, independent yet vapid, uninformed, boring, insipid and utterly convinced of her own importance. In her we find Social Justice Warriors given form – constantly tilting at racist windmills and looking for new dragons of oppression to slay. She often peppers the hosts of the Weekend Update segment with faux profundity and virtue signaling, one time asking the host what his birthday wish was just so that she could tell him that hers was “an end to genocide.” Via Twitter, no doubt.
This brings us to the modern GOP as embodied by Drunk Uncle, played by Bobby Moynihan. It is fair to say this character gives voice to those rallying behind a billionaire prep schooler who can speak his mind without fear of donor retribution. Drunk Uncle’s persona hews toward tradition, a civilizational confidence in our past, and a gallows humor that makes most of us crack a wry smile. He may sometimes be bitter, mean-spirited, emotionally incontinent and too flirtatious with many specters from our past, but his nostalgia for the past and longing for a common culture which bound the nation together is admirable and it is indeed prescriptive for a country currently experiencing an identity crisis.
Suffice it to say we’ve devolved a long way from the Lincoln-Douglas debates to the point where one party is deciding between an avowed socialist (saying out loud what the Democratic party believes) and a felon whose claim to fame is that she was married to a guy who was president – and, oh yeah, she has ovaries.
Faced with this dynamic, the time for choosing is at hand. The simple fact is that the Drunk Uncles of America built this country – as they have with most praiseworthy nations the world over. Party Girl lives off the accumulated wealth and social capital of the Drunk Uncles that came before her. There is no wealth to redistribute without wealth creation.
If there are those who are worried about Drunk Uncle’s excesses and peccadilloes coming to the fore in national office, they can take comfort in the fact that most of the other levers of society – media, the arts, academia, K-12 education and the large foundations – are firmly under the control of Girls You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party, no matter their age.
"Michael Dansen" is the nom de plume for a Washington, DC-based political media professional.
Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party, and Drunk Uncle.
The political leanings of the NBC stalwart Saturday Night Live cannot be a secret to anyone with eyes to see. In 2008, the show all but ruined Sarah Palin with independents. A well-educated woman of my immediate acquaintance was absolutely convinced that Palin actually said, “I can see Russia from my house!” when, in fact, that was SNL comedienne Tina Fey’s pithy summation of the Alaska governor’s experience of policing our maritime border with Russia.
But even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then. Whether by design or by accident the writers at 30 Rockefeller have summed up our peculiar political dynamic that has been at play for at least the previous four years in two recurring popular characters from SNL’s “Weekend Update” mock news segment: Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party, and Drunk Uncle.
The Girl, played by Cecily Strong, is the modern Democratic Party incarnate: young, cosmopolitan, self-assured, independent yet vapid, uninformed, boring, insipid and utterly convinced of her own importance. In her we find Social Justice Warriors given form – constantly tilting at racist windmills and looking for new dragons of oppression to slay. She often peppers the hosts of the Weekend Update segment with faux profundity and virtue signaling, one time asking the host what his birthday wish was just so that she could tell him that hers was “an end to genocide.” Via Twitter, no doubt.
This brings us to the modern GOP as embodied by Drunk Uncle, played by Bobby Moynihan. It is fair to say this character gives voice to those rallying behind a billionaire prep schooler who can speak his mind without fear of donor retribution. Drunk Uncle’s persona hews toward tradition, a civilizational confidence in our past, and a gallows humor that makes most of us crack a wry smile. He may sometimes be bitter, mean-spirited, emotionally incontinent and too flirtatious with many specters from our past, but his nostalgia for the past and longing for a common culture which bound the nation together is admirable and it is indeed prescriptive for a country currently experiencing an identity crisis.
Suffice it to say we’ve devolved a long way from the Lincoln-Douglas debates to the point where one party is deciding between an avowed socialist (saying out loud what the Democratic party believes) and a felon whose claim to fame is that she was married to a guy who was president – and, oh yeah, she has ovaries.
Faced with this dynamic, the time for choosing is at hand. The simple fact is that the Drunk Uncles of America built this country – as they have with most praiseworthy nations the world over. Party Girl lives off the accumulated wealth and social capital of the Drunk Uncles that came before her. There is no wealth to redistribute without wealth creation.
If there are those who are worried about Drunk Uncle’s excesses and peccadilloes coming to the fore in national office, they can take comfort in the fact that most of the other levers of society – media, the arts, academia, K-12 education and the large foundations – are firmly under the control of Girls You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party, no matter their age.
"Michael Dansen" is the nom de plume for a Washington, DC-based political media professional.
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