As he sat down on Friday with Mr. Putin on the sidelines of an international summit in Japan, Mr. Trump was asked by a reporter if he would tell Russia not to meddle in American elections.

“Yes, of course I will,” Mr. Trump said.

Turning to Mr. Putin, he said, with a half-grin on his face and mock seriousness in his voice, “Don’t meddle in the election, President.” – NY TIMES, 28 JUNE 2019

PARIS, 30 MAY 1814

REPORTER: Are you at all worried that Napoleon might try to break out of Elba and terrify Europe once again?

LOUIS XVIII: [rolling his eyes] Hey Bony Pie, don’t leave the island, OK?

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE: You know, I am a pretty good swimmer, but not that good, ha ha!

MUNICH, 30 SEPTEMBER 1939

REPORTER: Aren’t you concerned that Adolph Hitler might go back on his word and invade the rest of Czechoslovakia and other countries as well?

NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN: [chuckles] Yeah, I’m practically terrified! Hey Adolph, no more invasions!

ADOLPH HITLER: [shaking his head in disbelief] You got it buddy, whatever!

YALTA, FEBRUARY 11 1945

REPORTER: Considering the Soviet Union’s annexation of half of Poland before the war, are you at all worried that Stalin might go back on his word and meddle in Polish elections?

WINSTON CHURCHILL: No, should I be? [grinning] Hey Comrade, no meddling in the Polish elections, OK?  I’m totally serious!

JOSEPH STALIN: [stifling a laugh] “Meddling?” Is that even a word? Hey, can someone meddle up some lunch here?

Trump administration cancels English classes, soccer, legal aid for unaccompanied child migrants in U.S. shelters – Washington Post, June 5 2019

SCENE: A conference room somewhere in the bowels of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Time: 6:00 A.M. PRESENT: The President of the United States of America, various staff, Homeland Security administrators

POTUS (sipping a diet Pepsi): What have you got for me, Mike?

MIKE POMPEO, U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: We had some more missiles launched towards Japan from North Korea last night…

POTUS: Aw hell, Mike, that’s just Kim being Kim. A guy’s gotta shoot some off once in a while, you know that. What’s up, Wilbur?

WILBUR ROSS, U.S. SECRETARY OF COMMERCE:  The Chinese are upset about the latest tariffs.  They’re threatening to call in our debt now unless we give them Hawaii.

POTUS: Well they can’t have it!  That is sovereign US territory! And I have a hotel in Waikiki!  Give them Oregon!  And if those pinkos in Portland don’t like it let ‘em complain to the PLA!  Talk to me Kevin!

KEVIN MCALEENAN, ACTING U.S. SECRETARY OF HOMELAND SECURITY: We’re getting more intelligence that the Russians can and will interfere in the 2020…

POTUS: (Strangely calm) You know Kevin, I was watching Fox News last night.  And early this morning.  And just now.  And you know what I saw? Kevin? Anyone? Christ, I could use another diet cola!  

MCALEENAN: Another state punishing women for the crime of bearing a fertilized egg?

ROSS: Children dying from measles being spread by idiots in MAGA caps who believe vaccinations are a government conspiracy to spread autism, for God knows what reason?

POMPEO: Another coastal city flooded by some random cause that is definitely not climate-change related?

POTUS: This morning, on Fox news, I saw brown children.  That’s right, little brown children. [SILENCE IN THE ROOM] Some of them were smiling.  Some of them were laughing. Some of them were playing soccer, which is some kind of foreign game apparently.  And some of them…some of them were getting educated.

[POMPEO and ROSS glance at each other nervously]

POTUS:  Look folks, I know you’re all scared.  Hell, I’m scared.  If we don’t put a stop to this now these kids are going to grow up to be decent, normal productive members of society.  [DRAMATIC PAUSE] Did I become president of these United States by a clear electoral majority just to have some innocent little kids get treated with normal human decency and respect?!

CABINET: No, Mr. President.

POTUS: Did I avoid the possibility of injury or even death in Vietnam just so some little girl from a [REDACTED]-hole country could be informed of her legal rights under our constitution!?

CABINET: No, Mr. President! You did not!  Hell no! Remember the Maine! [etc]

POTUS: As long as there is one cute little kid laughing, one vivacious little girl playing soccer, one promising youth learning to read and write in English, our work is not done!  We will not rest until every kind of hardship and deprivation these loser kids could suffer has been thoroughly inflicted!

CABINET: Yes sir! Right away sir! [etc]

POTUS: This is America!  We beat the Nazis!  We put a man on the moon!  If we can’t be gratuitously cruel to poor defenseless children…then who are we?

WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS [to VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE]: God, I love working for this man!

POTUS: So let’s get out there and be mean, folks!  Now, who can dig up some dirt for me on the late Senator John McCain?

What are we to do with Great Artists (Male), or GA(M)s, who are insecure, bullying schnooks in their personal lives, especially towards the women and children in their lives? I have observed three basic approaches to the problem:

A) Using the available evidence, ruthlessly expose them for what they are, dulling the shine of their sainthood but otherwise reserving moral judgement as a matter of personal opinion. (See Hemingway’s Boat for a good example.)

B) Shrug one’s shoulders and declare that it is only the art that matters.

C) Stretch, fill in, and re-imagine the available evidence as far as possible to rehabilitate the GA(M) as a loving, appreciative husband and attentive, affectionate father who was at worst an artifact of his contemporary culture but who nonetheless gets “woke” in time to become a properly repentant nice guy, before passing into history.

I used to be a B) man.  But after becoming more (though I hate to admit it) “woke” about all the wives and girlfriends who have been demeaned, dismissed, and abandoned by their GA(M) (including some whose own artistic contributions have gone uncredited) I now lean toward A). But in any case C) is unforgivable.

And so I cannot forgive Kenneth Branagh for the cinematic mediocrity All Is True. He takes the troubling questions about William Shakespeare’s personal life and gives us soothing, pre-approved answers for every one, however much the sour evidence must be tortured in order to yield the sweet result.  (And there is even the loathsome group hug–though with everyone slightly turned toward the camera–near the end.)

For example, wasn’t Will kind of a dick for leaving poor Ann Hathaway at home in Stratford to raise two daughters, while barely acknowledging the death of his young son Hamnet, as he pursued his vocation in a London overloaded with stuff like wenches and ale?

Yeah (says Branagh), but you gotta understand.  He honestly believed that he was fulfilling his paternal duties by sending money home.  (All right so far.) Plus he was actually prostrate with grief over Hamnet for many years afterwards. (Sure, OK.) Why, especially? (And here we start to go off the rails.) Because he recognized in Hamnet a budding genius, based upon the juvenile poetry the boy wrote down and showed to his proud father.  Hamnet would not only carry on the Shakespeare familial name but become his literary successor as well.  Thus the younger, male-chauvinist Shakespeare saw the world. And was therefore extra-crushed with sorrow when the little Hamnet died of the plague.   Blinded by grief, the father immerses himself in work and regrettably ignores the surviving women in his life.

But wait, we cannot let things go like this.  The rehabilitation is just getting started. It turns out that Hamnet didn’t die of the plague.  The little boy (aged 11) ran out of the house in the middle of the night and threw himself into a pond in which (as earlier expository dialogue has helpfully revealed) he couldn’t swim.  Why?  Because he was terrified of a looming visit home by his proud father.  Why?  Because he was afraid of being exposed as a literary fraud. Why? Because he didn’t write the poetry. His talented, unappreciated twin sister composed the poems in her head and recited them.  But she is unable to write them down, being the victim of a society that educates boys but not girls (another fact pointed out for us dullards in the audience).  Hamnet then records the poems on paper.  His father discovers the first one and takes his son for a genius.  The rest of the family cannot bear to undeceive him and thus a lifelong fraud is perpetrated. 

But one day the frustrated sister threatens to reveal the fraud to the father on his next visit.  The distraught boy must fling himself into that pond (of the lush, shady John-Millais-Floating-Ophelia variety) that very night.  And the family, wishing to save Hamnet’s soul from suicide’s damnation, conceals the drowning and blames the death on the plague.  (Presumably God, like TMZ, knows all about the Shakespeares’ dirty secrets, but the script addresses even this.  I won’t bore you.)

Late in life, the father discovers (I won’t bore you with how.  The script covers it, OK?) the real reason behind the son’s death.  To sum up the finale: truth revealed, truth acknowledged, daughter appreciated, daughter belatedly set on the road to literacy (the pen-sharpening-knife meant for Hamnet symbolically handed down to daughter), group hug. We have boldly faced our sexist past in Shakespeare-as-kind-of-a-dick, but in return for our pain we are finally rewarded with a transformed Elizabethan Father Knows Best. All buttons pushed, all ribbons tied.

Such a ridiculous plot might have been bearable or even enjoyable if were used as the engine behind a clever, knowing farce, ala Shakespeare in Love.  But it is rendered with dull, condescending seriousness.

I don’t mind having my artistic idols revealed as the ugly humans they were.  I would not spare anyone.  The Groucho Marx who serially married much younger women and then delighted in belittling them.  Bertolt Brecht, long on accepting help from his female proteges and short on giving them credit. Ernest Hemingway, an alcoholic, homophobic bully.  And on and on and on.  

What I do not appreciate is having these guys artificially prettied up.  And for what purpose? We don’t do ourselves (or the feminist cause) any favors by cleaning these guys up ex-post-inconvenient-facto. And in any case, I don’t need to like William Shakespeare.  Hell, I don’t even know the guy.  All I know is that man could write one hell of a sonnet. 

If you want to give me a bio-pic that imaginatively fills in the unknown, give me something like Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh’s unflinchingly unsentimental and utterly believable portrait of the great landscape painter, who (for example) greets his housemaid after coming home from a long trip by briefly groping one breast. At the end he doesn’t get “woke”. He dies. I probably wouldn’t have cared to share an ale with the guy. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to marry him. But when I’m in London I’ll stop by the National Gallery to take a look at what he left behind. And that’s fine with me.