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Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Meryl Streep’s Truth to Power

January 9, 2017 by Jan Herman

See the video (below), courtesy of The Washington Post.

Her remarks ran for four minutes, 55 seconds. At two minutes in, she said this:

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 . . .

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Filed Under: Art, main, Media, Movies, political culture

Jan Herman

When not listening to Bach or Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, or dancing to salsa, I like to play jazz piano -- but only in the privacy of my own mind.
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