Why is Aaron Sorkin such an asshole?
It’s bad enough The West Wing has gotten too preachy to sit through. It’s well-crafted and compelling enough to keep me coming back--though not in first run, obviously--but more an more I find myself wincing at its school-marm tone. Seems to be drifting closer and closer to his ghastly work on "A Few Good Men." Does he still not get what an abomination that was, even in retrospect?
So where the fuck does he get off speaking for artists? Artisans, maybe. He’s a pretty gifted hack, but clearly still a hack. I had the displeasure of watching tonight’s rerun for the first time tonight. It was pretty uninvolving all along, but I couldn’t fall asleep, and it really did seem my best bet for drowsiness. Then, in the final ten minutes, he culminates the main subplot of the episode, with a speech from the new poet laureate of the U.S. I had to shudder and then chuckle, when the first words out of her mouth were, "There was a man in (Vanya Luca?) that I met. He took his son and I to go fishing . . ." His son and I? He has the poet laureate of the U.S. making one of the most annoyingly common grammatical mistakes in the opening of her big speech? Perhaps Aaron doesn’t have much facility with the language, but didn’t anyone on the staff? Couldn’t they have thought to have the dialogue for the poet laureate double-checked for obvious errors? Come to think of it, couldn’t they have created a poet laureate who showed any facility for the language herself? Couldn’t he have created a character that bore any resemblance to a poet other than a few stereotypical moments of flightiness? Ugh.
But I’m drifting. That was just prologue. Quibbles, I know, but they sure do belie his shallowness. The real outrage was the crux of her Big Speech, delivered over rising Big Music: "You think I think that an artist’s job is to speak the truth? An artist’s job is to captivate you for however long we’ve asked for your attention. If we stumble into the truth, we got lucky. . . ."
Fuck you, you pathetic little weasel. Why don’t you let the artists speak for themselves. If there could possibly have been any doubt, you just demonstrated that you will never reach that status yourself.
You’re an entertainer Aaron. And not a very good one, lately. So go back to spinning fun little yarns, and quit trying to preach, because you are way WAY off the truth, and you’re failing more and more to captivate the audiences expending their precious attentions on you.
12:39:54 AM 
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