Wednesday
Today’s post has been inspired by a couple of Blue Sky posts involving sports. Actor Conor Ryan, upon seeing the shrubbery walk in for Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, tweeted, “The Ents showing up to take down Isengaard.” Given that I have upon occasion found parallels between Saruman and Trump (for instance, here and here), I applauded the reference.
While most of the 143 million+ who watched the performance thrilled to Bad Bunny’s exuberant celebration of Latino culture and his message that love is more powerful than hate—only the current administration would see this as a political statement—Trump predictably threw a temper tantrum. Sounding like a cranky old geezer, he tweeted,
The Super Bowl Halftime Show is absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER! It makes no sense, is an affront to the Greatness of America, and doesn’t represent our standards of Success, Creativity, or Excellence. Nobody understands a word this guy is saying, and the dancing is disgusting, especially for young children that are watching from throughout the U.S.A., and all over the World.”
One of my favorite counter-responses was satirist Andy Borowitz, who after imagining Trump as having won “the gold medal in the downhill presidency” (“Trump set a new speed record for driving the world’s strongest economy into a ditch”), concluded, “Despite his victory, he remained bitter about the Super Bowl halftime show, telling reporters that ‘Bad Bunny took a job away from an American bunny.’”
We could use the Ents in America right now. When King Theoden and his warriors, along with Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas, appear about to succumb to the waves of Saruman’s orcs, the walking and talking trees show up, panicking the invaders. Just as the Super Bowl playing field suddenly became a forest of trees, so do the plains beyond Helm’s Deep, the site of the battle:
The land had changed. Where before the green dale had lain, its grassy slopes lapping the ever-mounting hills, there now a forest loomed. Great trees, bare and silent, stood, rank on rank, with tangled bough and hoary head; their twisted roots were buried in the long green grass. Darkness was under them. Between the Dike and the eaves of that nameless wood only two open furlongs lay. There now cowered the proud hosts of Saruman, in terror of the king and in terror of the trees.
It makes sense that Trump, one of our most openly anti-environmental presidents ever, would cower before Bad Bunny’s trees. Merry and Pippin give us a report on how they move:
‘There is a great power in them, and they seem able to wrap themselves in shadow: it is difficult to see them moving. But they do. They can move very quickly, if they are angry. You stand still looking at the weather, maybe, or listening to the rustling of the wind, and then suddenly you find that you are in the middle of a wood with great groping trees all around you.
Next thing you know, Trump’s cultural hegemony is reeling from the onslaught.
The other sports item I owe to my son, who tweeted on Bluesky,
Every Olympic broadcast should be assigned one (1) statistician and one (1) poet to give us different ways to understand the mind-boggling displays of athleticism.
To make clear what he had in mind, he employed a short Oscar Wilde lyric:
Statistician: oof! Tough crash there; skiers go up to 50 mph on the giant slalom
Poet: Never regret thy fall,
O Icarus of the fearless flight
For the greatest tragedy of them all
Is never to feel the burning light.
Enjoy the Olympics.
