The Geist Of The Zeit
By Mitch Berg
I haven’t paid a lot of attention to Anderson Cooper’s New Years Eve broadcasts from Times Square since Kathy Griffin was still an A-lister – or, maybe, starting her descent toward the Z-list.
But perhaps the biggest story of this past year, along with and tied to Trump’s re-election, is the change in the culture over the past few months.
Suddenly, it’s…well, not “safe”, per se, to attack our narratives’ sacred cattle. But people are starting to play around with the idea.
Which brings us to Whitney Cummings – a comedian about whom I’ve never felt any compulsion to comment at all [1].
Can anyone imagine a comic, other than Dave Chapelle or Ricky Gervains, riffing on mainstream TV like this, even a year ago?
The good news is, it feels like the cultural pendulum is swinging.
The other news, neither good nor bad but definitely worth paying attention to: these swings need to be solidified. Talk about Trump ushering in permanent change is only not premature if we make it stick.
[1] That’s not entirely true. Cummings briefly had a TV series, “Whitney“. I saw about ten minutes of it, and it was pretty dreadful, but somehow it eked out two seasons.
Anyway – Ed Morrissey walked into the studio and said “I just heard, Whitney’s dead”. I responded. “Thank God. It’s about time”.
Ed looked at me, a little horrified. “The TV show?”, I asked?
“No. Whitney Houston.”
January 1st, 2025 at 1:40 pm
First, Happy New Year, Mitch.
I believe that you are correct in the pendulum swinging the other way. Yet another elected Democrat, has switched her party affiliation to GOP. Florida representative Hillary Cassel, a Jew, was appalled at the Democratic Party’s stance on Israel. She was basically to to sit down and shut up.
Like many Jews, the Democrat response to October 7, woke her up. A significant number of these disaffected constituents, voted GOP for the first time in their voting lives.