As we ate our liberal elitist Thai food at our neighborhood Thai watering hole Sunday night, we watched as Viola Davis presented the Cecil B. Demille award to Meryl Streep, America’s greatest living actress, on the Golden Globes. Streep had lost her voice, but she made a speech anyway, and instead of thanking her agent and her hamster and Jesus, she decided to talk about the Hollywood Foreign Press, the “Hollywood” part and the “Foreign” part, and the “Press” part. And she utterly defenestrated, eviscerated, and fucked right up that grotesque orange asshole a solid minority of Americans voted to elect in November, without even once saying his name.
As we watched, we said to ourselves, “Oh, I DARE A MOFO to get on Twitter and call Meryl Effing Streep OVER-RATED.” And because Donald Trump is a thin-skinned man-baby who takes dares Wonkette says in our brain, he delivered:
We don’t need to paste the rest of Trump’s tweets, because fuck him.
If you were not currently a homosexual American on Sunday night, you might not have seen this speech in real time, but that is OK because you are going to watch the video, YES JUST THIS TIME YOU WILL OBEY OUR INSTRUCTIONS AND WATCH THE VIDEO.
At tonight’s #GoldenGlobes we honor Hollywood legend Meryl Streep with the prestigious Cecil B. Demille Award. pic.twitter.com/dxpeCDNXY6
How To Fix: Crepey Skin
Beverly Hills surgeon explains at home fix for crepey skin around the arms, legs, and stomach.— Golden Globe Awards (@goldenglobes) January 9, 2017
Streep began by asking, “What is Hollywood, anyway?” She described how she and Viola Davis and Sarah Paulson and others are all people who came from other places, some American, some Canadian, and Dev Patel was “born in Kenya, raised in London,” and “is here for playing an Indian raised in Tasmania.” She concluded, “If we kick them all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.” That was the subtle part of her speech.
Then she described the one performance this year that “stunned” her:
An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that — breathtaking, compassionate work. There was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good. There was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it. I still can’t get it out of my head because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life.
And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.
Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.
OH SHIT, SHOTS FIRED.
Streep concluded her speech by calling on the press to be courageous, for the rich people in that room to stand up and support the Committee to Protect Journalists, because “we’re going to need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.”
Oh, and she teared up as she quoted her friend, “the dear departed Princess Leia,” who once told her to “take your broken heart, make it into art.”
Remember how we told you to watch the speech RIGHT NOW? Watch it. Right now.
We know wingnuts are already crying about this, saying they should just keep politics out of nice things like awards shows, but you know what? First of all, we don’t even care about finding wingnut reactions for you, because you know how predictable they are. SPOILER ALERT: Misspelled words, unironic ALL CAPS, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and so on. The other thing is that wingnut Trump supporters have cried and cried for years about how everybody mocks them and how the “liberal elites” are against them, but oh wow holy shit, they are about to find out what it’s like for the ENTIRE CULTURE to turn against them, overtly and repeatedly. And they are not going to like it. Just like Bill O’Reilly cried about how the artistic community is doing “Reverse McCarthyism” to poor Donald Trump, simply because there’s nary a talented, kind, beautiful person in America who would sink to the level of performing for his inauguration, these Trump troglodytes are about to experience a solid few years (however long it takes to impeach Trump) of Straight. Up. Shunning.
And that is a beautiful thing.
(ALSO HI MERYL STREEP WONKETTE LOVES YOU AND WANTS TO BE ADOPTED BY YOU, SO IF YOU HAVE BEEN WANTING TO BE THE MOMMY TO A DICK-JOKING MOMMYBLOG THAT TALKS ABOUT POLITICS SOMETIMES, WE ARE AVAILABLE.)
