"Hello, I’m Tom Hanks. The US government has lost its credibility, so it’s borrowing some of mine."

 Said Tom Hanks in "The Simpsons Movie" (in 2007), quoted in "‘The Simpsons did it first’: Tom Hanks’s video for Biden likened to cameo" (London Times).

From the London Times article:

In a two-minute video released by the Biden Inaugural Committee yesterday, the Oscar-winning actor narrates the accomplishments of the Biden administration in its inaugural year — pointing to the distribution of vaccines and that “shops and businesses are buzzing again all over the country.” 

Here's the new video, which I clicked off — muttering "Oh, jeez" — at the 3-second mark: 

 

I'm going to try again to watch it, for the sake of this post, but I'm going to publish first, because I don't know how many on-and-off clickings it will take for me to reach the end. 

ADDED: Okay. I've finished. It was long, but it mainly said we're dealing with Covid and the economy is coming back. It would have worked just as well as a Trump ad. Maybe the Democrats realize they need to squirrel away the divisive issues.

"When Polka Dots Signal Both Optimism and Disquiet/The motif has long been associated with a certain brand of American cheeriness but, as its recent ubiquity attests, is most visible during times of turbulence."

A headline in T, the NYT Style Magazine, for an article by Nick Haramis.

The history of polka dots. This is the article I want to read. I feel some pressure to write about Biden's 2-hour news conference yesterday, which I watched, but I'm loath to blog it without a complete transcript. I have seen the "5 takeaways" pieces and the "utter disaster!!!" stuff, and it's propaganda on top of propaganda. Until I find a transcript, I'm holding off, I'm in the ellipsis... and therefore: polka dots!

Haramis writes delightfully:

Though a staple of Central European folk art, and named for a dance popularized in mid-19th-century Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), polka dots have played an outsize role in defining America’s national identity over the past century. For a country constitutionally preoccupied with happiness, the print has proved a useful and recurring signifier of optimism, especially when it seems furthest from reach. Polka dots are the uniform of the ever-perky Minnie Mouse, and of a relentlessly high-spirited Shirley Temple in 1934’s “Stand Up and Cheer!,” released in the midst of the Great Depression. During World War II, when Westinghouse Electric produced a poster to boost the morale of female workers, it depicted a factory employee with her hair wrapped in a red polka-dot scarf, ready to get the job done. (The refined New Look — rounded shoulders, cinched waist, billowing skirt — that Christian Dior developed in the postwar years was in many ways an expression of European distaste for Rosie the Riveter’s earnest vigor.) By the 1950s, polka dots had come to symbolize, for better or worse, the dogged cheer of midcentury America. Marilyn Monroe and Lucille Ball wore the print with such frequency that it became the visual equivalent of apple pie — comforting but predictable — and in Billy Wilder’s 1961 political satire, “One, Two, Three,” East German Stasi officers torment a suspected spy by playing, on repeat, a caterwauling version of the 1960 Brian Hyland song “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.” Too much of a good thing can be wonderful; it can also be torture. 

Ha ha. I remember when that song came out. There were so many novelty songs at the time, and they were wonderful to me when I was 9. As for bikinis, though they were very controversial until the 1970s, they'd been around since 1946, when the designer named them after the atomic bomb test that had just taken place on the Bikini Atoll. And that drags me back into contemplating Biden's new conference, in which I believe he advised Putin that the only way for him to succeed in Ukraine would be to use nuclear weapons. I need the transcript....

Here's the Wikipedia article on polka dots, where, among other things, I learned about Polka Dot Man and the fact that because the dots on his costume are different sizes and colors, they are not actual polka dots:

Apparently, Polka Dot Man can peel off those dots and turn them into useful weaponry. He looks a little like Biden, don't you think? That smile! Those eyes... speaking of dots....

But the ultimate use of polka dots to keep us giddy in times of turbulence has got to be "The Polka-Dot Polka" — the "surreal finale" of the 1943 Busby Berkeley musical "The Gang's All Here":

 

ADDED: 2 years before "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini," there was that other novelty song about skimpy clothing for women, "Short Shorts." On the piano, that's Bob Gaudio, who co-wrote the song and went on to co-write all the most famous Four Seasons songs:

And as long as I'm extending this post with extra video of songs about wild things women are wearing, here's the most famous number from "The Gang's All Here," "The Lady In The Tutti Frutti Hat":

That moved the classy critic James Agee to write: "There is one routine with giant papier-mache bananas, cutting to thighs, then feet, then rows of toes, which deserves to survive in every casebook of blatant film surreptition for the next century." And here we are in the next century, talking about it.

AND: From the OED entry for "polka dot":

1966    Mrs. L. B. Johnson White House Diary 3 Apr. (1970) 382   A young newspaper-woman in a black-and-white polka-dot bikini, with a figure to suit it....

1957    V. Nabokov Pnin vi. 138   Amber-brown Monarch butterflies flapped.., their incompletely retracted black legs hanging rather low beneath their polka-dotted bodies.

1996    Esquire June 38   A model whose nom de spume was Big Ginger bobbed her lush mangoes perkily against her polka-dotted bikini top.

 

 

"He’s so lost in the snows of yesteryear that he is continuing his Amtrak Joe nearly-every-weekend commute to Delaware, albeit with better wheels, trading in the train for Marine One."

"We want the president to rise above it and be an inspirational figure. We don’t want the incremental updates of his negotiations with Joe Manchin. We want to see Covid under control. We want to see the sacred right to vote protected. We want the grocery shelves stocked with affordable milk and meat. We want a president who tells us that we will get through this and we will be stronger for it."

Writes Maureen Dowd in her new column, and she sounds just as "lost in the snows of yesteryear" if she thinks Biden telling us "we will get through this and we will be stronger" would be anything at all at this point.

As for "the snows of yesteryear" — here's the old poem you may — like me — remember from high school French class. It's about women.

Remember when Biden cured cancer?

Relive the good times — replete with Bruce Springsteen soundtrack:

 

To be fair, we really have conquered cancer in the sense that when you think about what disease is really bothering you, you don't go straight for "Cancer!" anymore.

Did the week-long commemoration of January 6th boost Joe Biden's popularity?

No.

Multiple polls have measured opinion post-Jan. 6, and the ratings continue to decline. 

"[Stacy] Abrams hasn’t specified what led her to bypass Biden’s event... Her decision triggered speculation... that she was avoiding the president’s souring approval ratings."

"But that narrative hasn’t reflected her strategy. She has closely aligned herself with Biden, campaigned to be his running-mate and launched her bid [for governor] with a promise to back the president’s agenda.... While Georgia Democrats typically celebrate a Democratic president’s visit to the state, Biden’s trip was met with complaints from activists and party officials. Some grumbled about the lack of coordination with local Democratic leaders and the timing of an event scheduled a day after Georgia played in the college football championship game in Indianapolis. Others questioned why Biden didn’t hold a fundraiser for Georgia candidates during his trip and lamented that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris made the trip at all given that the Democratic U.S. senators who needed to be convinced to relax filibuster rules were in Washington."

From "Abrams camp rejects ‘false rumors’ about her no-show at Biden event" (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

Here's the transcript of the event, with the text of the speeches given by Biden and Harris. Did anyone even mention the glorious victory of Georgia's football team the day before? A tremendously uplifting event had occurred. It wasn't political. It was special to Georgia. 

But the Washingtonians descended upon the state with dramatic, racialized negativity. They insisted on setting the tone, their tone, and it wasn't jubilation. And not one speaker mentioned football. How could they? It would spoil their message of joylessness. It would offer discordant evidence that Americans can come together, and life isn't all about politics.