Oh jeez, Saturday Night Live. You didn’t have to do this. Really, you didn’t. You got away with the Hillary Clinton–singing-“Hallelujah” thing, but that was a uniquely terrible week (and long before it was apparent that Hillary Clinton had, in fact, given up). But once was enough—too much even. This is just, and I’m saying this because I care about you, kind of embarrassing for everyone.
And “To Sir, With Love,” from a movie in which Sidney Poitier teaches respectability politics to unruly students? Was that supposed to be a meta-joke that nobody got or was it, oh no. It was sincere, wasn’t it? This is an elaborate homemade valentine to a popular boy who doesn’t know your name. Let’s just pretend, you and me, that we never saw it, ok? You can take it off the internet. It’ll be like that Shazaam movie that doesn’t exist. We’ll all claim we never heard of such a thing, that it would never fly in the United States, where we have presidents, not kings.
Presidents leave after eight years. Sometimes they do good things, sometimes they do bad things, but what’s good or bad are the things. They’re employees, they’re not friends, and they’re definitely not brooding high school teachers. Just because our new president is dedicated to enthusiastically doing bad things—and George W. Bush was no picnic either—is no excuse for building a cult of personality around our last president. I’m gonna go now, but when I come back, could you do a fake lawyer ad or something? We don’t have to talk about this again, I promise. I was never here. This never happened.
