"God's Love" and The Celebrity Apprentice

I stopped watching The Apprentice long ago, basically when it became clear that decisions were not about winning the weekly contests but about creating conflict that was good for "drama." I was, however, interested enough to read this interview with Joan Rivers who defended calling one of her rivals (apparently Annie Duke, the poker player) "worse than Hitler."

King: Joanny, where did you come up with that 'worse than Hitler' crack?

Rivers: Oh, I don't know. You know, you're always saying things. Hitler is the worst villain in the world. So when you really get furious at someone, you say, 'Oh, you're a female Hitler' or something, you know? It's just an expression. But I stand behind it.

So, it's all in the game, and it's all about making money for charity.

Joan's charity? I'm not making this up:

Trump: She got $250,000 plus she raised hundreds of thousands more during the course of the 14 weeks. But she gets $250,000. That goes to God's Love We Deliver, which is a great charity in New York.

I guess I should cap this post with a clever zinger about irony, but really, one senses that if people don't get it themselves, anything I could say about it would probably be lost. So, instead, I'll just say, thank you Joan Rivers for delivering God's love, and congratulations on acquiring $250,000 for your charity.

Dom DeLuise has died...

...and so has Bea Arthur. So has Jack Kemp.

But that's not really what this post is about.

The first celebrity passing which I recall actually being aware of was when a newscaster for the evening news gave a teaser that John Wayne had passed.

People died back then, but, pardon the crassness of my saying so, it seemed to happen less frequently. I'm sure there were obituaries and all, but with the Internet, it seems that someone dies every day.

And that's what this post is about.

There seems to me to be something pat, routine, and "Now...This"ish about the whole exercise of acknowledging (different from memorializing) celebrity passings that I actually find dispiriting and depressing. The phrase "Now...This" is from the book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman (who I think is dead, but I'm not sure). It is the transition, he says, that indicates what you have just heard and been asked to think about has absolutely no connection to what you are about to hear or think about. Okay, that part is just typical media age disconnectedness. He also says, though, that it is the cue that you have thought long enough (an appropriate time) about whatever and now are okay to think about something else. If it is a really big celebrity, that might mean long enough to post a thought on your blog (or read someone's), but if it was someone you didn't really know was alive or dead until you read the obit, it's more usually a moment of silence or an acknowledgment.

What's wrong with that?

Well, nothing, I guess, other than my general dislike of expressions of anything that are ceremonial rather than actual. But it just seems like the canned way of responding is so routine that it just means that all we think about is death, that death is the only thing that gives the story meaning. It's also a bit of a trap in that not acknowledging makes us feel cold and hypocritical, so we have to acknowledge everyone...."Hey, that person that was in the commercial for x died...yeah, that was a funny commercial...hey and the first drummer on the One Hit Wonders...and the reserve point guard who played on the NBA finals..." But in acknowledging everyone, isn't there a kind of trap or hypocrisy as well? "So and so...wasn't he the one who did that television show I never watched before doing that other television show that I didn't watch?"

If nobody died, we can always do a catch up with the friends or family of somebody who died last month or last year. Earlier this month I was at the supermarket and there was a magazine that had a famous celebrity talking about dealing with the death of a family member. "Oh, yes," I thought, "I remember [vaguely] when it was reported that that happened."

The fact that I hadn't thought about it once since then is, perhaps an indication that this story didn't really have anything to do with me. That a stranger died in another part of the country under sad and tragic circumstances. Or perhaps it is an indication that whatever sympathies I had for that family and those people was parcelled into increasingly smaller packages to be shared with the friends and families of Dom DeLuise, and Bea Arthur, and (not dead yet!) Roger Ebert, and Patrick Swayze, and Farrah Fawcett...

Kon Ichikawa died this year. Seems like just yesterday we were talking about Bergman and Antonioni going in quick succession. Oh, wait that was 2007. I totally skipped over the tragic deaths of Heath Ledger and Natasha Richardson, didn't I? How could I have forgotten those stories? No, I mean that literally, how? They were all over the news, weren't they?

I don't mean to disparage any of these celebrities who brought beauty and entertainment to countless people and who, I hope, had friends and loved ones who will feel their losses very deeply, not because a newspaper told them to, but because they were integral parts of their lives. I don't even mind people who have a particular remembrance of a film or a performance writing a memory or an appreciation. (I did, when Nick Reynolds passed away last year...or was it 2 years ago...). I just wish that we could find some way of making such gestures something other than compulsory so that I could trust and believe them when I read them and not just feel like they served no other purposed than to make the person making them feel insulated from the charge of being a jerk less anyone notice that, "Hey, Marilyn Chambers died, and Ken was so busy writing about his life and his family that he didn't even mention it."

D.L. Hughley Breaks the "News"??

Okay, I've been pretty critical of the conservative notion that the American media is biased. And I've been pretty critical of Governor Palin's false eschewing of labels when she in fact indulgences in labels and stereotypes all the time.

So I had to cringe when CNN's newest show was D.L. Hughley Breaks the News.

Hughley, on a cable news network, gave a monologue that included such gems as were Obama to have a place for Colin Powell in his administration, it would be the first time two black people were in the White House "since Thomas Jefferson had a three-way" and then went on to say the Election had somehow influenced the world series because the reason the Boston Red Sox lost to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays was that the were "all white." Of course, no monologue would be complete without some reference to John McCain's age; Hughley opined that McCain was especially disappointed that a 106 year-old nun recently endorsed Obama because "they used to date" (he somehow didn't realize or care that this may be insulting to the nun, making light of her vows, as it was of McCain). He also suggested that McCain's legacy would be historically tarnished if he lost because he would be forever known as the guy who couldn't even beat a black man. Oh yeah, and in riffing about Obama's cholestrol level, Hughley trotted out the old ethnic stereotypes about eating fatty foods. It was all positively cringe worthy.

There are, I suppose, a lot of comments one could make about this. It's hard to call out Hughley for cheap remarks when the GOP and McCain's follows are full of them, but, "They started it" is hardly a convincing disavowal.

Really, though, the main thing that jumps out to me is why the heck was this on CNN? If Hughley had given the same monologue on Comedy Central, or Fox (hah, fat chance) or the WB, or NBC (like, say on SNL), I'd still find it offensive, but I wouldn't find it disingenuous. This show was on CNN, though, and the clip above was linked not to the "Entertainment" page on CNN but to the "Politics" page on CNN. This isn't news and reporting, it is a showcase on a major news network for a "comedian" to engage in partisan satire. Whatever credibility CNN has as a respected news network just took a big hit.