Fran Lebowitz describes herself as “angry since birth.” Given the conduct of the administration of President Trump, it doesn’t appear that her general mien will be changing anytime soon.

The outrages, she said in a recent interview, are coming “every 20 minutes ... every two seconds.” She recalls one incident not that long ago. “I have a very clear recollection of standing in my hotel room in Salt Lake City in front of the television set. I was alone in my room, and I said aloud, ‘He knocked down the White House!’ Because you can’t imagine this stuff. I mean, some of it you can, but that I certainly could not.”

Lebowitz, who comes to the Emerson Colonial Theatre for a speaking engagement on Feb. 19, established herself in her 20s as an essayist, a witty observer of the manners and mores of contemporary urban life. Her pieces were collected in two celebrated volumes, “Metropolitan Life” (1978) and “Social Studies” (1981), and she made regular stops on late-night TV.

After that, her published writing slowed to a trickle. Her last new book was a children’s book, “Mr. Chas and Lisa Sue Meet the Pandas” (1994). (She has called her writer’s block a “writer’s blockade.”) But she continued to show up on TV, including a recurring role as a judge on “Law & Order,” and she played a judge in Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street.” She also became a popular public speaker. Two Scorsese documentary portraits, the film “Public Speaking” (2010) and the Netflix TV series “Pretend It’s a City” (2021), solidified Lebowitz’s reputation as a scathing — and very funny — critic of our times.

At the Colonial, she will follow her usual format: taking questions from a moderator (in this case,Christine Jacobson, an associate curator at Harvard’s Houghton Library), and then from the audience. These evenings with Lebowitz can range far and wide, from politics to her experiences with a wide-ranging group of friends and associates in the New York world of arts and culture: Scorsese, Toni Morrison, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jerome Robbins, and Charles Mingus, to name a few.

I spoke to Lebowitz, 75, on the phone from her apartment in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood following the weekend in January whenAlex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and US citizen, was shot to death in Minneapolis by federal agents. Earlier last month, an ICE agent in Minneapolis had shot and killed another US citizen,Renee Good. Clearly the state of the union had taken a very dark turn from the days when some of Lebowitz’s sharpest invective was aimed atMayor Michael Bloombergof New York, or when her most vocal exasperation concerned whether incumbent presidential candidate Barack Obama could bounce back from a disastrous first debate with challenger Mitt Romney.

“Of all the horrible things he [Trump] does — which is every single thing he does — this stuff, this immigration stuff, is to me the worst,” Lebowitz told me. “It’s the most stomach-turning. It’s enraging and heartbreaking.”

Citing video of the Pretti shooting, Lebowitz said, “The cruelty of this administration and the people in it is pretty shocking.” Hinting at her ownoft-cited misanthropy, she added, “The average person is not a wonderful being, but [they’re] better than this.”

Lebowitz described herself as “a pretty conventional New Deal Democrat. Many of my friends have always been way to the left of me, and I’ve always argued with them. I’ve spent decades saying to people, ‘No, no, you’re not right. No, this isn’t like Hitler.’”

But things have changed, she said. “This isexactlylike Hitler. This is exactly what the Nazis did. This is notkind oflike what the Nazis did. This is precisely what the Nazis did.”

Source: Drudge Report