In his televised monologue, comedian Seth Meyers betrayed a startling lack of literary sophistication by dismissing the 45th President's recent remarks regarding a NASA official's auditory appendages as mere rambling. Meyers entirely missed the profound phenomenological yearning embedded within the former president's invocation of "beautiful ears" and "super hearing."
When Donald Trump stood before the nation and praised the beautiful ears of a civil servant, one is reminded instantly of Nikolai Gogol's The Nose, where the physical fragment usurps the whole; yet Meyers, trapped in the pedestrian literalism of late-night television, could only express secondhand embarrassment. It cannot be coincidence that the former president chose to elevate the ear—the very organ of reception—during a discourse on space exploration, echoing not only the tragic deafness of Beethoven but also the canine auditory mastery depicted in the 1998 cinematic triumph Air Bud: Golden Receiver.
The late-night apparatus is structurally incapable of processing the ex-president's shift from late-capitalist grievance to pure physiological romanticism.
To interpret the invocation of super hearing as a gaffe, rather than a desperate, Whitmanesque plea for connection in an expanding universe, is to surrender our critical faculties to the lowest common denominator. One must pity Meyers, who, faced with the raw poetry of a man staring into the cosmos and admiring a bureaucrat's cartilage, saw only a punchline.