Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump appeared together at the Al Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner. This charity event has, for reasons best left unexplained, deterioriated into a roast. This sad state of affairs brings to mind my earlier post "Against Roasts: Never Give Them, Never Attend Them, the Case of Ann Coulter." The Clinton-Trump exchange was, if anything, even worse than Coulter's situation.
Roasts pretend to be good fun, but they tend to deteriorate into lose-lose situations. Speakers at a roast target the roastee, but the speaker also appears rude and shallow. In this case, most (although not all) pundits think that Trump was much cruder than Clinton, but what's the point of that? I'd prefer that neither would speak crudely.
Here's how someone like Hillary Clinton could handle a situation like this: Trump spoke first. He was rude and obnoxious. He insulted his supporters, his enemies, and his ever-so-loyal wife in good measure. Clinton's response should have been automatic. She should have tossed her prepared speech into basket #13 and responded instead with a polite, gracious speech praising Al Smith (who was, after all, a Democrat). She could have devoted the speech to the Al Smith Foundation's good work. Instead, she gave a speech that, although much funnier than Trump's, contained altogether too many nasty barbs.
If you want to prove that you are better than other people, it's important to act better than other people.
So, to repeat my advice: never roast anyone, and never allow yourself to be roasted.
Q. E. D.
No comments:
Post a Comment