Odd nicknames or titles used as punctuation. Anecdotes and stories leading to big revelations. Also, all kinds of things that haven’t aged all that well! Hence exclusively male pronouns! The word “feminista” is used by one of our heroes, non-ironically, twice, and while the first time he follows it with “Whoa, that was way too far,” it doesn’t stop him from using it again in the context of trying to woo Mary-Louise Parker! What a time.ĭuring Sorkin’s tenure running the writers’ room for The West Wing-that’s seasons One through Four-the show returned to some familiar wells again and again. But when a writer with a gift for language, writing about a subject he knows well and reveres, lets loose, a lot of things can happen: brilliance, sure, but also excess poetry, but also self-importance. That’s my best Aaron Sorkin writing The West Wing impression. Here’s what my Great Uncle Algie used to say of ideas that impossibly foolish: “Wow, is that ever stupid.” Not here, not now, not ever while blood moves through my veins. The light that comes from stars takes billions of years to reach us, fighting through the still yet changing universe to lightly touch our faces, and yet we doubt poetry? Not now. To try to divorce the speech of a man from its speaker, and the speaker from his audience, and the audience from the teeming world in which they live, is an errand so foolish Harpo Marx himself would gauge his options, open his mouth with a dusty creak and say, “Well that ain’t a job I’d much like to have there, Sparky.” Yet the citizen of this Earth who argues that words do not hurl themselves through history is one who has lost his way, straying far, too far, too far from the surest road.
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