We the people, our power embodied by members of the new House of Representatives who swore to uphold the Constitution on Thursday, need to dig deep and investigate. We need to expose the crooks, incompetents and traitors selling out their country in a White House of grifters.
We need to call out the moral crimes: the adults financed by taxpayers who let children die in their care. The secretary of state who gives a pass to a kingdom that cuts up a journalist with a bone saw. The press office that covers for a president who can rarely go a single hour without telling a lie.
We need to restrain a toddler-in-chief who forces 800,000 federal workers to go without paychecks, many of them now missing house payments. We need to remind people that a temper tantrum from President Donald Trump means garbage is overflowing and poop is backing up at our national parks.
But also, we need to laugh.
There has never been a more darkly comic person to occupy the White House. Who tells a 7-year-old on Christmas Eve that this whole Santa Claus thing may be bogus? Who rings in the new year with a siren tweet in all CAPITAL LETTERS urging people to calm down? What kind of president puts a poster of himself on a table during a Cabinet meeting?
Who else but the Stable Genius, Tariff Man, the A-plus President. Trump has inspired more laughter in the past year, by one calculation, than any politician in history. At the United Nations, the whole world laughed at him.
People, this our best weapon! Take it from Mark Twain: "Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand." Take it from the Scottish, who greeted Trump last year with a 20-foot inflatable orange baby in diapers, holding a cellphone.
Trump hates this stuff. More than anything, he fears ridicule. It's the necklace of garlic against the vampire. When Bill Maher compared him to an orangutan, Trump sued. The court threw out the case because jokes about pompous, hypersensitive, orangutan-looking public figures are protected free speech. It was news to no one but Trump.
The best comedy makes fun of the powerful and the ridiculous. Oddly, the White House Correspondents' Association has decided this is not a year to be funny. The grim-faced hosts of the nerd prom will have a fine historian, Ron Chernow, as their speaker at the annual dinner, but no laughs, please.
In the same dour cast, colleges are no longer a source of good political satire. Lenny Bruce, now getting a revival in "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," was a god with students. Today's campus environment is a humor desert. The kids are too fragile.
Good politicians can tell jokes on themselves. Abraham Lincoln, when accused of being two-faced, replied, "Honestly, if I had two faces, would I be showing you this one?" Barack Obama lamented his diminishment. "I look in the mirror and say, 'I'm not the strapping young Muslim socialist I used to be.'"
Comedians are truth tellers. The journalistic fact checkers, God bless 'em, can reach only so many people. The antidote to a long day of White House lies is a long late night of comedy.
So it's encouraging, at the dawn of divided government, to see nonprofessionals get into the act. Take the wall - please, it's the source of our government shutdown. It's not big, or beautiful, or made of concrete or steel slats. It's nothing, at this point. "To be honest, it's not a wall," as Trump's former chief of staff, John Kelly, said.
Nancy Pelosi, the new - and this time around, well-fortified - speaker of the House, had the best line on the wall. "He's now down to, I think, a beaded curtain or something." Not bad. Keep it up.
The New York Times