Catching up with some pre-election whining, as James Taranto highlighted Friday in his “Best of the Web Today” compilation, character actor/playwright Wallace Shawn “blames President Bush for wrecking his love life and causing writer's block.” Shawn, a short man with a distinctive voice you'd recognize from his many guest roles on TV shows (IMDb page), from Murphy Brown to Law & Order: CI (screen shot is from a 2006 episode of that NBC drama), complained to the Times of London:
Bush has openly mocked law and proclaimed a certain pleasure in sadism and exulted in holding prisoners and mistreating and torturing them, really. Of course this affects one emotionally: my emotional life has been very strongly affected by the fact that Bush was president and my writing life is affected by my emotional life.
Taranto quipped: “If Wallace Shawn's output increases substantially in the next four years, a lot of people may find they miss George W. Bush.”
In the same collection of quotes, about George W. Bush's legacy, posted November 3 by the Times of London, Roseanne Barr kvetched:
I think the world is about to change for the better. Bush ruined it and now people have no choice but to try to put it back together. He's like Humpty Dumpty.
Shawn's complete reply:
I grew up in a country where my parents thought of Americans as benevolent people who were greeted joyfully by Europeans when they arrived in their jeeps at the end of World War II. Now we live in a time where you have to say that politicians openly proclaim the law of viciousness and trampling over people they didn't like: Bush has openly mocked law and proclaimed a certain pleasure in sadism and exulted in holding prisoners and mistreating and torturing them, really. Of course this affects one emotionally: my emotional life has been very strongly affected by the fact that Bush was president and my writing life is affected by my emotional life.
