By Owen Lee, Staff Writer
Sean Spicer was an honored speaker at the Emmys, and that’s horrible. As somebody who’s been paying even moderate attention to political events for the past year, Sean Spicer’s appearance at the 69th annual Emmys was honestly legitimately disturbing for me.
The former White House Press Secretary was known as one of the president’s uglier cabinet picks, who openly lied about public events, threatened reporters, and revealed Nazi-ish tendencies.
Since he resigned from Trump’s White House, he’s shown not an inch of remorse.
He’s not a person I wanted to see more of, and yet the Emmys put him right in front of the view of millions and millions of American viewers.
The idea of the Emmys is that it rewards the best of the best in television, although classically the awards have gone to cisgender, straight, white actors. That night though, a small number of very significant, record-breaking awards were given in favor of diverse creators.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus won her sixth Best Leading Actress award in a row for the role of Selina Meyer in VEEP, breaking records for consecutive Emmys for one actor starring in one role.
Donald Glover became the first black director to win in the Best Comedy category for Atlanta, and Lena Waithe became the first black woman to win Best Comedy Writer, which she shared with Aziz Ansari for Master of None.
Lena Waithe’s award is made more significant due to the fact that she is openly lesbian, and gave a speech to honor her LGBT viewers, and that just rocks so hard.
Calling this year’s Emmys a “big win for diversity” would be a bit much, but what’s important is that these academic establishments are growing more and more willing to honor hard-working media professionals who lie outside the sphere of straight white men.
That’s awesome! There’s an endless number of hardworking people who don’t fall under that label, people who work harder than the establishment even.
But Sean Spicer slimed his way up to that podium that night and ruined the vibe. He got an introduction by Stephen Colbert no less, who I was rooting for at least a little up until this point.
After his speech, pictures revealed that he spent the aftershow palling around with the attendees, some of them definitely more comfortable than others.
Trump and his cabinet are doing atrocious things with their power. They are gutting science industries and research, trying to take health care from the vulnerable American people, wasting hundreds of millions to fund private vacations and war efforts that are already killing internationally.
Trump and his cabinet, including Spicer, display fascist tendencies on a daily basis, and are responsible as a whole for the new wave of white terrorists who are killing marginalized people.
There is so much more, and Sean Spicer is complicit in it, and he hasn’t even so much as said sorry.
On the part of the celebrities who welcomed him, I feel like any pretense of caring about the human element goes out the window once you welcome an aide to a white supremacist.
This year’s Emmy awards, held on Sunday, September 17, show that Hollywood is ready to forgive Sean Spicer.
The idea, I guess, is that an enemy of Trump is a friend of ours, but that’s not how that works in this case. Forgiveness goes out to people who need it, not people like Sean Spicer.
Now, the questions are how long until another former Trump croney is given a Hollywood stage out of goodwill? How long until they abuse it? And who can you trust, if you can’t trust Stephen Colbert?