This morning I was reading a brilliant post by one of my new favorite bloggers, at Death Wore a Feathered Mullet about Poor Lil' Miss Tara Conner, the recently rehabbing Miss USA. I don't think I've read a better analysis anywhere. It got me to thinking about another recent celebrity naughtiness story, actor Danny Devito.
If you'll remember, Devito appeared on The View, one of my mother's favorite programs, after a night of tippling with George Clooney. Apparently, Danny was still a little lit that morning. He did what any self-respecting tanked guy would do-- he got silly, hammed it up and bashed our idiot President. In otherwords, pretty much what I do when I've had a few.
Usually the routine is to appear in some public forum, hat in hand, acting contrite, asking forgiveness for your trespasses. What did Danny do?
Nothing.
He didn't apologize for it. He didn't check into Betty Ford. He didn't make a weepy public statement. He basically just said "Yeah, probably should have napped a little longer before I went on the show."
This little routine where celebrities fuck up, and then go on their little penitance tour has become tiresome. When did perfection become obligatory for celebrities? Or anyone else, for that matter? If I, and most every human being on this planet were held accountable for every stupid comment they've made, drunk or sober, nobody would meet the standard.
I have a lot of respect for Danny Devito. He's a gifted comic actor. He is, by all accounts, a great guy. He's got an apparently successful marriage, a rarity in Hollywood, or anywhere else for that matter, these days. And by what he said on the television show, I like his politics. He's the kind of guy, in fact, that I'd like to have a drink with. When the scandal rags tried to make a bunch of hay about what he did, he did the right thing-- he ignored them. He is my hero.
5 comments:
I was thinking that same thing. How refreshing it is to forego the usual ritual contrition, which is usually so much self-serving, hypocritical bullshit.
Of course, I was more than a little offended by his remarks about the president.
I could tell. It was all in the way you spelled President with a lower-case "p."
I'm working on a list of good things about the George W. Bush presidency. One of them is that it's making Warren Harding and Richard Nixon's presidencies look a lot better. It's a lot like what we were saying about Chicago and New Orleans-- the difference between functional nimrod presidents, and dysfunctional nimrod presidents. As a student of political science and history, I can actually find good things to say about Harding and Nixon. I'm hard-pressed to find even an accidentally good thing about this guy.
Last night, my last customer at the restaurant was a guy who turned out to be finishing the pharmacy program at UIC, which I'm thinking of applying to. We ended up talking about the Medicare D program, which has turned out to be a very good program-- recently, my father was telling me about how good it was, as well. And I found myself wondering how in the hell it managed to pass with this twit in office.
That does not bode well for his legacy.
Heh. My father in law, a devoted Nixon-hater from the 60's and early 70's, said a couple years ago that Dubya was...gasp...worse than Nixon. That meant something coming from him.
I always compared this administration to the McKinley--unfettered corporate power coupled with imperial foreign policy.
My father is a devoted Nixon-hater as well. He campaigned for McCarthy in '68 and McGovern in '72. No matter how conservative he got in the intervening years, he hated Nixon.
W has driven my father rapidly back to liberalism. Well, Clinton had a big part in that too. And my father has made the same admission as your father-in-law.
Come to think of it, my father-in-law, a WWII vet and life-long Republican voter admitted to voting for W's opponent in this last election.
I had a bumper sticker on my truck for some time (until it wore off): "I Never Thought I'd Miss Nixon."
Um... Is it a good thing that he kinda looks like a puppy?
Or can we celebrate the fact that such an idiotic presidency has given such great comedic fodder to The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and many, many blogs across this great nation of ours?
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