Frank: If the midterm results rebuff Trump, do Republicans unshackle and ungag themselves? How much and how soon?
Bret: It’s not going to happen next year, even if Republicans get drubbed in the midterms. It won’t happen after Trump leaves office, either, when he can still make or break Republican political careers with his endorsements. It won’t happen after his funeral, when Republicans will eulogize him as the cosmic love child of George Washington, Jesse Ventura and Jesus Christ. But it might happen in a generation or two. If we’re lucky.
Frank: I guess when you bury your scruples as deep as Republicans have since Trump won their party’s presidential nomination in 2016, the excavation takes decades. How immeasurably sad. Can you provide some compensatory uplift and give me and readers something to feel good about?
Bret: Anyone whose memory of 1980s MTV is still vivid will almost certainly know, word for word, the lyrics to Bonnie Tyler’s ecstatic outpouring of pathos, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (better known to a friend of mine as “Total Eclipse of All Art”). So nobody should miss Alex Williams’s brilliant obituary in The Times for Tyler, who died last week in Portugal at 75. Among other things I didn’t know, the song had been written by the hitmaker Jim Steinman with the singer Meat Loaf in mind, but the big man had the bad luck of having temporarily lost his voice, so the track went instead to Tyler, with her “gravelly voice that could match Rod Stewart or Kim Carnes pebble for pebble.” Alex’s description of the song and the music video that went with it is one for the ages:
Slowly and inexorably, momentum builds to climax after climax, during which Ms. Tyler’s surging vocals, dancing on the edge of camp, seem like they could melt the microphone: “Together we can take it to the end of the line — your love is like a shadow on me all of the time.”
The accompanying video, extravagant even by 1980s standards, was shot in a former asylum in Surrey, England. Conjuring a mood of gothic horror with ninjas, half-clad football players and altar boys with glowing eyes mixed in — “turn around, bright eyes,” indeed — it seemed to play once an hour on MTV, at the height of that network’s influence.
Have you ever seen a more perfectly placed “indeed,” Frank? Indeed, you have not.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
