Category: The Dish

Johann Hari has a profile of Andrew Roberts in TNR. Money quote:

Yet, beyond this surface sycophancy, there is something darker and more fetid. Bush, Cheney, and – in a recent, glowing cover story – National Review, have, in fact, embraced a man with links to white supremacism, whose book is not a history but an ahistorical catalogue of apologies and justifications for mass murder that even blames the victims of concentration camps for their own deaths. The decision to laud Roberts provides a bleak insight into the thinking of the Bush White House as his presidential clock nears midnight.

Matt has a cow here. The piece is pretty stunning. Roberts makes Imus look like Oprah. And he’s advising Bush!

I couldn’t help thinking about both last night. This week’s South Park was its usual sharp, subversive self. And the visual games they play with race and gender and sexual orientation, and the language they use, leaves Imus in the dust. And yet South Park is not in the slightest bit offensive to me at all. This week, they had a hilarious parody of 300, including a battle between a phalanx of determined lesbians defending a gay bar called "Les Bos" and a group of Eurotrash Persian club owners threatening to take over the club and fill it with velvet blue carpet, gold curtain rods and white statues. They also threw in some Latino immigrant stereotypes for good measure. How do they pull it off?

Three reasons, I think. The first is that they’re a cartoon. No actual person has to take responsibility for saying any of the naughty words and stereotypes involved. When Eric Cartman tells Kyle that he should go back to San Francisco with the rest of the Jews, it’s the character voicing the collective bigoted id – not an actual human being. It may be that in a multicultural society, cartoons will become the primary medium for speaking honestly and humorously about our differences. The same goes in a way for Sacha Baron Cohen who has created a character, Borat, to voice these things. It’s not him. The distance matters, and enables comedy based on bigotry not actually to be bigotry. The creators can legitimately say they’re not actual haters; they’re just exploring and making fun of prejudice, and invoke the First Amendment to defend themselves. Without this distancing device, Ricky Gervais, Dave Chapelle and Sarah Silverman would be in deep trouble. But even they sometimes balk, as Chapelle recently did, because it’s a morally precarious path to travel at times.

Second, South Park’s creators actually get and love the subcultures they lampoon. The amazing thing about this week’s South Park is how detailed the observation was. The lesbian bar was a classic – it was clearly created by people with actual and acute knowledge of what lesbian bars are like – and there were many hilarious shades of recognizable dykiness in the cartoon figures. In fact, this week’s episode was a landmark in mainstream depiction of lesbianism. It didn’t rely on any hoary stereotypes that spring from ignorance and fear; it created stereotypes based on knowledge and fondness.

Lastly, anyone watching the show can tell very very quickly that its creators are not actually bigots. You don’t need to know these guys personally to see that. In general, I think the American public is pretty shrewd about this. Mel Gibson got roasted because he is, in fact, a self-aware, vicious anti-Semite. Michael Richards? Confused guy who didn’t even realize his own repressed bigotry, until it came pouring out. Don Imus? I think most people think he actually is a bigot – and that’s why he got fired. It wasn’t just a shtick. Ann Coulter? A strange case. I can’t tell if she’s a bigot; she’s just decided to deploy hate in order to make money. Her "persona," however, is not removed enough from her person to get her a pass. And her support for political forces that would demonize and marginalize gay couples deprives her of the South Park defense, however many closet-cases she befriends. Besides, she beat up on "faggots." As Harvey Fierstein points out, we’re still fair game. Imus targeted all blacks and all women. That’s a majority of the population. Coulter picked on three percent. She’s smarter. And viler.

The romantic drawbacks of some anti-depressants. Can’t say I’ve felt any myself.

A sports-blog variation on one of this blog’s features. Cool.

I didn’t know this from Juan Williams:

My sense of what you have here is was that the market spoke. [Y]ou know it’s interesting, you look at the guy who runs — Ken Chenault, who runs American Express, they pulled their ads, Ken Chenault is black. I think there are a lot of people, in American corporate positions, wouldn’t have been there a generation ago, who now have some say, have voice over people like Imus. And I think Imus just didn’t anticipate that.

The culture has changed since Imus started in radio. White straight men don’t control everything any more, and they don’t get to set the rules for public discourse with the same finality they once did. What we’ve seen here is, I think, a genuine reflection of the new American mainstream. Most Americans simply find the spectacle of a rich white bigot beating up on young black female achievers after a crushing tournament loss to be gratuitously cruel and unfair. Punishing someone for calling college women "whores" – especially those who have beaten the odds and are role models for other back girls and women – is not a new step in political correctness. It’s applying a very old American standard of fairness and decency, which now applies to all Americans, regardless of race or gender. This was the voice of mainstream America speaking. It’s not what it once was. I wonder whether many of Imus’s buddies realize that yet.

Grand Junction, Colorado, 10.56 am.

Marc Ambinder defends himself from the charge of being anti-federalist.

It’s peak hours at the dish, which means you’re looking to be distracted from work. The Brits have a name for this. They have a gift for this kind of thing.

What will government busy-bodies do now?

"This is only the beginning. Sure, Imus is a liberal. You can measure the depth of his vapidity through his endorsement of John Kerry for president … Some of you have asked how in the world I can say that this is the beginning of an all-out push to damage or destroy conservative talk radio when it was a liberal who bit the dust. Simple. Imus was sacrificed. A ‘proof of concept’ exercise, if you will. Now the left knows that race hustler Al Sharpton can move large corporate mountains with his racially charged dialogue … so it’s time to use him to go after the real nemesis – talk radio…

Rutgers Coach Vivian Stringer says it’s time to ‘go forward and let the healing process begin.’ Healing process? What healing process? I’m not buying any of this nonsense that the Rutgers woman’s basketball team was egregiously hurt by Imus’ comments. Tennessee wins the championship and Rutgers gets all the publicity. It wasn’t the Tennessee girl that were allowed to sit before the national TV cameras a few days ago. And how many of you can name the Tennessee coach? Let’s face it … the only people really, genuinely hurt in this episode are those connected with the Imus show who are now going to lose their jobs," – Neal Boortz, libertarian talk show host, whose own record of remarks can be found here.