For anyone tired of watching the “Star Wars” franchise deliver less and less on the big screen, there is some comfort to be found in Chicago: The Death Star has landed.
Officially, of course, it is called the Obama Presidential Center. But come on. Look at it. They are not fooling anybody. We have not yet seen what its lasers can do, but the working theory is that, unless Susan Collins can fire a proton torpedo into the thermal exhaust port, it may soon be powerful enough to wipe Graham Platner’s old Reddit history clean off the map.
For the rest of us, the center opens June 19, which is Juneteenth, in case anyone needed another reminder that Barack Obama was America’s first black president. But if you were famous enough, you did not have to wait. There was a “dynamic ceremony” on Thursday, as the center’s own website put it, and it was “livestreamed globally” so the commoners could watch from a safe distance.
Plenty of recognizable people showed up, including at least one guest Obama did not exactly seem eager to have in the room. It was pretty clear nobody was clamoring for Scranton Joe to be there. What was less obvious, at least going in, was that Tom Hanks would end up making the left look bad at its own glossy event.
And really, what Democrat would not want Tom Hanks in attendance? Every time he turns up on television, Americans are reminded that he is a national treasure and that everyone, regardless of politics, is apparently required to adore him.
We are also regularly told that “Forrest Gump” is a great movie. Personally, I would rather be trapped on a flight from Dallas to Singapore watching “Waterworld” on loop than sit through Gump again. So tastes differ.
Still, I started to see the appeal when MS NOW, the left-wing outlet formerly known as MSNBC, approached Hanks for a live interview at the event.
Host Jacob Soboroff jokingly confused Hanks with historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Hanks responded with a joke of his own, and it landed a little harder than Soboroff probably expected.
“What can I do for the 800 people watching MS NOW?” Hanks asked.
Soboroff, clearly caught off guard by the shot at the network’s ratings, replied, “We’re live on MS NOW!”
“All right,” Hanks said, smiling. “Add a zero if need be.”
That is the trouble with live television. Like life, and like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get. In this case, the network got Tom Hanks casually reminding everyone that hardly anyone is watching. Soboroff’s attempt to make the audience sound much larger only made the moment more awkward.
The reason the joke worked is that there was truth behind it. According to TV Insider, MS NOW had only one show among the top 15 cable news programs in May: Rachel Maddow’s.
CNN had it even worse, with no shows in the top 15. Fox News claimed the other 14 spots.
Maddow, meanwhile, is not exactly the future of the network. She is more like the last sturdy beam holding up a house that has already started to sag. Once she leaves for something better, or simply decides she has had enough, MS NOW may struggle to find even those 800 viewers Hanks joked about.
And when Tom Hanks, of all people, drops the friendly liberal everyman act long enough to point out the obvious, it stings.