Saturday, June 11, 2016

IS DONALD TRUMP BECOMING LENNY BRUCE? - JUNE 8, 2016

He’s gone bananas over the Trump University affair. Enough.

Published: Wednesday, June 08, 2016 1:18 PM

This voter refuses to waver. I will vote for Trump, but with less enthusiasm ever since he’s gone bananas over the Trump University affair.


Now it’s round the clock with him about the trial and the judge and everything else about it that makes it so boring.


From a man so smart, enough maybe? I’d have expected him to cut off any question on the matter with a curt, “We’ll see what happens.”


To be followed by, “Next question, but only about how I intend to make America great again.” (Tuesday night’s speech was more like it!)


Instead he prattles on with nearly every detail about a case that maybe fascinates the gotcha press but makes the rest of us start snoring.


We are not interested in this megillah of something over nothing. Shut up and give us your steps to save the nation, or else you will lose us.


That’s how it ended for Lenny Bruce, America’s foremost social satirist of a generation ago when he could not stop setting the record straight about his arrest and trial for obscenity (yes that’s how it was in the 1960’s). Government spooks were in the audience, back there in 1964 at the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, when during his stand-up routine he uttered his famous Seven Forbidden Words.


The Law tracked him everywhere he went, often at the urgings of “legions of decency” – whom he ridiculed for their hypocrisy.  (Ditto Trump.)


Lenny was the most outrageous comedian of the day – if comedian is the right word. Lenny was the king of hip – if hip is the right word.



Spare us waking up every morning facing that shrew Hillary Clinton.
He was the cultural outcast as Trump is the political outsider.


He talked about anything that came to mind, most of it about social injustice, much of it vulgar, and plenty of it funny. He had them roaring in the cafes and the dives from San Francisco to New York where along the way he got himself imprisoned for drug possession, mostly that, but most dramatically for humor that veered into the obscene and beyond.


In private he tended to be shy and studious, and once confided that he saw himself as a modern-day Jeremiah lamenting against doomsday.


As Allen Ginsberg took his “Howl” to the page, Lenny Bruce took it to the stage.


The biggest stars from Hollywood came to watch him perform. His totally irreverent avant-garde style of wit made him a hero to the Beats and to the weekend hipsters. When he made it uptown to nationwide TV, mainly the Steve Allen Show, he had to be monitored and censored, just as across the street on Ed Sullivan, Elvis Presley was shown only from the waist up.


I was there that day when he was handcuffed after his performance at the Café Au Go Go. I wrote about the entire 1960s scene in the novel “The Days of the Bitter End,” and this is a clip from that Greenwich Village routine that I remember most: “Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on who killed Christ? Okay, we did it, yes we did, my family. I found a note in my basement. ‘We killed him – signed, Morty.’”


But it was the Seven Forbidden Words that got him arrested and that led to a six-month trial for obscenity.


(Can you imagine that these days, when nearly everyone talks dirty?)


The trial made headlines, and the ordeal took the starch out of Lenny Bruce. Now he came back to the same places where he made people laugh, only now we groaned. He stopped being funny and he stopped being interesting because he talked about nothing else except the trial.


He read transcripts from the proceedings, going on word for word, until he lost us. He died two years later, in 1966, but 1964 was the end of Lenny Bruce.

Take heed, Donald. Spare us waking up every morning facing that shrew Hillary Clinton.

(Today’s announcement that he’ll be dropping the Trump U. subject is a move in the right direction, though much damage has been done.)

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