纽约时报 令人费解的时代策略(3)

Even beyond that, though, Sterling's address was just plain watchable: urgent, sincere, impassioned -

不过，即便如此，斯特林的讲话还是显而易见的急迫、真诚、热情——

exactly the kind of thing we've been taught, by decades of earnest films and Aaron Sorkin teleplays, to see as a stirring outcropping of authentic humanity into the hot air and hedging of politics.

正是我们从几十年的严肃电影和阿伦·索尔金的电视剧中学到的东西，让我们看到真实人性在政治的热浪中激荡的迸发。

But then the problem - the intractable, signature problem of our moment - is that for many people, the same was true of Carone.

但如今棘手的标志性问题在于，对于许多人而言，卡隆也是如此。

It's not as if we've had any shortage, lately, of people clamoring for the role of vivid truth-tellers against an incorrigible system.

最近，我们并没有出现过这样的情况：有人叫嚷着要扮演一个生动的真理讲述者的角色，反对一个无法治愈的体系。

Our president, for one, learned long ago that people enjoyed watching him abandon the decorum usually brought to the office.

例如，我们的总统很久以前就知道，人们喜欢看他放弃在办公室中应有的礼节。

Add to that his unique lack of attachment to consistent principles or positions or sets of facts, and often all that's left when the White House speaks is raw interpersonal drama - taunting, baiting, shaming, flattering or humiliating whomever it is that's being addressed.

再加上他对一贯的原则、立场或一系列事实缺乏兴趣，而且当他在白宫发表讲话时，通常只剩下原始的人际关系戏剧——嘲弄、诱饵、羞辱、奉承或羞辱正在讨论的人。

This is the approach to communication that made Carone more watchable than any of the more polished crackpots around her.

正是这种沟通方式让卡隆比周围任何一个更光鲜的疯子都更容易被观察得到。

It tends to stick in the mind.

它往往会留在脑海里。

The Trump administration spent less time engaging the press than any since Reagan's, but you may well carry forward more indelible memories of its surreal theater than you will from eight years' worth of Obama briefings -

特朗普政府与媒体接触的时间比里根执政以来的任何一届都少，但你很可能会对其超现实主义戏剧留下更多难以磨灭的记忆，而不是你从奥巴马8年的简报中得到的记忆——

whether you thought that spectacle came at the expense of the presidency, or the press corps, or just the nation.

不管你认为这场奇观是以牺牲总统、记者团还是整个国家为代价的。