posted 2010/01/31 at 14:29
There have certainly been more pressing things to be concerned with than the late-night situation that's been unfolding at NBC, but I can't deny having my own thoughts and feelings about it. All things being equal, perhaps a bit of this silliness is needed after all the other heavy stuff going on, and as great as some of the humour that has come from this situation has been, at its core there's still some stuff going on that is far from funny and which, as insignificant as it may be compared to things like the crisis in Haiti, deserves a bit of attention.
For those of us who are old enough to have watched Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show on a regular basis, I don't think it controversial to say that most of us likely consider everyone who has come after him a pale imitation. If I were to pick a favourite of the people who have followed in the Carson mold, it would be David Letterman, but I thought Letterman was a lot funnier when he was at NBC. Somewhere in his transition to CBS, I think Letterman lost a fair bit of what made his run at Late Night so entertaining, the feeling that instead of his show being a "Big Show," it was just a bunch of dumb guys getting together and letting you in on all their dumb jokes. There was a subtlety to Letterman's NBC work that mirrored Carson's, and as the years have gone by on his CBS show, Letterman seems to be straying further and further from that.
That being said, I've hardly been a fan of Jay Leno's, at least apart from his stint as substitute host for Carson back in the day. When Leno took over The Tonight Show, it went from being The Tonight Show -- as brilliant as Carson was, he downplayed himself perfectly and let his guests shine -- into The Jay Leno Show. In addition to relying to heavily on overly staged gags and heavy production, Leno's interviews were often marked by Leno using the guest to get his own jokes over. This is not a criticism of Jay Leno the person, but Jay Leno the talk show host, but for someone who grew up watching Carson as often as possible, the change was dramatic and altogether uneasy. Leno might be a possible choice for my least favourite post-Carson late night host, had CBS not inexplicably given one of the least funny people on the face of the planet, Craig Kilborn, his own show for five years.
I watched Conan O'Brien's first couple of weeks in Letterman's old time slot, and I wasn't impressed, although I think even Conan himself will admit he was finding his legs then. I didn't catch his show much after that, and from what I watched it did look like he grew into the role. However, I never cared much for Conan because, honestly, it felt like his comedy was almost entirely shtick and gimmick, flaccid characters and stale bits that, once stripped away, didn't reveal much of an actual person, let alone comedian, underneath. Even with Leno, as much as his show bothered me, I still got the sense of Jay Leno the person underneath it all, and even though I may not have cared for his show, Leno as a person still seemed likable enough. I watched Conan's first shows as Tonight host, and it felt like he'd improved a bit, but nearly every show's first few episodes have a surplus of A-level material.
To be honest, I've always identified NBC as my favourite of the big networks; apart from my childhood love of The Cosby Show, I guess NBC has a way of marketing its shows that make them more appealing to me than other networks. That being said, I thought NBC made an unforgivable error by not consulting Carson when it came time to replace him, and giving his show to Leno instead of Carson's own choice, Letterman. It's hard not to have sympathy for NBC for trying to avoid that situation by negotiating a smooth hand-off between Leno and Conan several years ago, but at the same time, after the dust has cleared, it's obvious that Conan got supremely shafted by NBC in this whole deal, and my criticisms of his work aside, I feel incredibly sorry for him. I'm trying to be understanding of Leno's role in this whole situation as well, but at the same time, there's a very large part of me that wishes he'd just go away and leave late night to others.
If I were a regular late-night television watcher, I don't know what I'd do now. Letterman's okay, but that's about it for me. Jimmy Kimmel has his moments, but a lot of his material offends me. I've tried watching Jimmy Fallon a few times, but his show is literally too painful for me to watch; I worry that my television might short-circuit from all of his flop-sweat. Craig Ferguson and Carson Daly just don't do anything for me, and I associate Daly too much with the late-90's crapification of MTV when they went from Daria and Lilith Fair to TRL and Britney Spears.
Honestly, I think the only way I could watch a late night talk show again is if someone resurrected Johnny Carson, and I mean resurrected in the literal sense of the word. Carson had a unique gift that I'm not sure anyone else will ever have, becoming a legend of American comedy and television so sublimely. I'm not even sure his show would work today, though. There's clearly no big market for the alternative kinds of shows Tom Snyder and Whoopi Goldberg and Bob Costas have tried out, and these days when Jon Stewart so perfectly imitates Carson's phrases and mannerisms whenever a joke fails, all I hear young people say is, "What is he doing, that's so stupid and unfunny." I wasn't even eighteen when Carson ended his run on The Tonight Show; this whole sordid affair is making me feel way too old.
Labels: television
posted 2010/01/22 at 15:53
Longtime readers know that I have almost always been a fan on Keith Olbermann, dating far back to the pre-.org days when Olbermann was on ESPN, when he and Dan Patrick truly revolutionized the art of the sports recap. The two of them could make watching highlights of any sport, no matter what sport or who was playing, an enjoyable experience, and their reunification on Football Night in America made the show must-see viewing for me. I must admit, though, that I have to ask of them the same question I ask of the Beastie Boys: Does the high quality of their original, pioneering work make up for the wave of poor imitators that followed in their stead? I have been a fan of Olbermann's work on MSNBC as well, even though my politics are firmly to the left of his, and I think Countdown does a good job of balancing serious journalism with opinion and comedy. Even when I get tired of Olbermann shilling for Democrats instead of standing up for the liberal positions he espouses, I still feel compelled to watch his show, for both its informative and entertainment values.
His Special Comment last night on the Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to spend freely on elections, however, went far beyond the pale. I certainly agree with him that Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was not only poor jurisprudence, but sets a dangerous standard for the future of this country. The notion of equating the spending of money with free speech is inherently ludicrous, particularly given our country's notion of corporate personhood. Money, like speech, is a tool that can be used for great good or great evil, but find me one person in this economic downturn who lost his or her house not due to lack of money, but due to lack of words. The only people who could look at our current political system and think that the cure for ails it is more corporate money are people who stand to benefit from the infusion of nearly unlimited amounts of corporate cash into our elections. Unfortunately for we Americans, five of those people are on the Supreme Court right now.
That the court decision paves the way for corporations to tighten their strangleholds on American politics and American people should go without saying. However, for Olbermann to claim on his show last night that the decision was worse than Dred Scott v. Sandford was so hyperbolic as to be just as ludicrous as the decision he was deriding. That Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has the potential to do great, irreparable harm to this country cannot be denied, but to compare it to the most discriminatory decision in the court's history, one that led to this country's bloodiest war and the deaths of over 600,000 Americans, is at best highly paranoid, and at worst an insult to all those in this country whose ancestors toiled in the most inhumane institution this country even enacted, slavery. Olbermann was on the money when he said that American news outlets needed to spend much more time covering this decision and its ramifications, but his rhetoric in his Special Comment last night actually did our common cause a disservice.
It has been painful this past year to see Olbermann descend to a form of self-parody. His repeated setting aside of his principles to defend Democrats started in the aftermath of the 2006 elections, but became legion following Obama's inauguration. Even on those occasions when he does go after Democrats for abandoning progressive beliefs, he does so in a withering tone, giving the camera puppy-dog eyes as if to say, "Please don't stop your party officials from appearing on my show." Perhaps the most galling example of this was the unabashed name-calling he engaged in leading up to Scott Brown's election this past Tuesday, which Jon Stewart pointed out on last night's Daily Show. Again, Olbermann was correct in principle to address many of the concerns he brought up about Brown, but he did so in a manner which was, in a word, juvenile. The worst part is that Olbermann should know better; he has pointed out in the past that Bill O'Reilly is wise to ignore Olbermann's barbs because you never want to be seen as "punching down," trying to hit those underneath you, as Olbermann so clearly is in television ratings and national stature. Olbermann has been punching down at Republicans for some time now, and while this can be effective for right-wing pundits and talking heads -- we all need to laugh at their pompousness, and Olbermann can still be very funny -- when he does it to Republicans, he only reinforces the ludicrous Republican notion that they are the dominant political party in America right now.
I will admit to being very distressed by Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and the potential it has, but for Olbermann to act like Chicken Little because of it was unintentionally hilarious, and requires me to do something I never thought I would do: Go to Olbermann's right and defend capitalism. As much as the spectre of complete corporate domination was made substantive by the decision, the idea that it will lead to a One World Nation is remote at best. Despite its many disadvantages and how they've been repeatedly demonstrated in my adult lifetime, American capitalism has shown that it does have a capacity, perhaps even a natural instinct, to make sure that people of different tastes are catered to. If that were not the case, then right now there would be either Coke or Pepsi on my local grocer's shelves, but not both. There would be no Big Three automakers because one of them would have bought out the other two ages ago. Even if liberals are, sadly, a minority in this country, the idea that corporations would homogenize everything and squelch liberalism, or even criminalize it, is unlikely. That this country's laws will become more favourable to big business as a result of this court decision is inevitable, but to declare it the death of the country is absurd.
That it is a possibility is without question, and if there is a company that could rise to become this nation's Shinra, it is certainly Walmart. They already have a record of using their money to curry lawmakers into helping them become more dominant in America, and that is likely to get even worse in the months and years ahead. However, even Walmart's resources are not always enough to counteract the ability of the American people to realize a bad deal when they see one. I teach in a county where, despite Walmart's best efforts, the people there resoundingly voted against the ability for Walmart to build one of its big box stores there, right next to the very building in which I teach. As much as I worry about how ill-informed Americans are about the forces at work to manipulate them into doing things against their own interest, they have shown that sometimes they can still recognize when to take a stand against corporations and the blight they would inflict upon the land.
That Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission could, potentially, turn America into a country uninhabitable by free-thinking liberals and progressives is, sad to say, real, and it is something that I will be guarding against, and I hope that others will join me in seeking whatever legal means are possible to overturn this unfortunate, uninformed, and undemocratic decision. To declare it worse than a decision sanctifying and legalizing the enslavement of a race of people, however, is not only incorrect, but it is insulting, and Keith Olbermann should know better.
Labels: politics, rhetoric, television
posted 2010/01/20 at 14:40
I wish I could say that the special election of Scott Brown to the Senate last night came as any kind of surprise to me. I watched the news last night, dumbly hopeful that somehow the people of Massachusetts would go with the lesser of three evils (counting the Libertarian candidate), but hearing the tales of his closing the gap with Martha Coakely so quickly in the past couple of weeks, and the repeated missteps of the Coakely campaign, this result was pretty much a given three or four days before the election. The fact that the teabaggers could get a candidate into the Senate in less than a year, while the Green Party has still yet to get anyone to Congress, is the kind of thing that makes me wish I didn't hate the cold so much, because Canada and Western Europe are looking more and more like a better fit for me and my politics.
I spent the night listening to the usual Democratic talking heads making excuses about how elections always trend against the party in the executive office, and how voters see the ruling party as the status quo, and all of that other gobbledybook. They tried to downplay the numerical significance of losing just one Senate seat when the Democrats still command such a huge lead, totally overlooking the symbolic value of losing the Kennedy seat less than a year after his death, as if their caving in on health care wasn't making Teddy spin in his grave enough. Now he's spinning so much he could probably power all the streetlights in Hyannis Port if you hooked them up to his corpse. As usual, the Republicans are reacting even more stupidly, claiming a statewide vote somehow counts as a national referendum and trying to get Obama to surrender the presidency to Rush Limbaugh because "obviously" he is now a total and complete failure.
If Obama and the Democrats continue on their present course, though, a winning Limbaugh-Coulter ticket (or Palin-Beck or O'Reilly-Hannity or what have you) is becoming more and more of a probability. The Coakley campaign encapsulated perfectly what the Green Party has been saying about Democrats for years now: that they think if they're one step to the left of the most moderate Republican, that they're automatically entitled to the votes of everyone to the left of them. I don't know if what Coakley and her staff did should even be called a campaign, given how they took so much time off, seemingly thinking that the seat was theirs, that there was no way the voters of Massachusetts would vote for anyone other than a Democrat. From health care to gays in the military to a host of other issues, Obama and the Democratic Congress have been either putting off meaningful change or cutting it short entirely, under the same assumption that anyone to their left is somehow obligated to vote for them. It has now cost them one Senate seat, and it's likely not going to be the last.
The irony in all of this is that this past month I've been reading The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience, in which author Kirstin Downey shows that, although fraught with poor compromises of its own, FDR and Perkins managed to push through grand, wide-ranging social reforms, reforms that, try as they may, Republicans have still yet to take off the books. If Republicans truly believed that a national health care program would be bad for the nation, they wouldn't be so eager to can it. As with New Deal social reforms, and as with the civil rights advances of the last fifty years, once these programmes are in place, Republicans know that there is no way to kill them because the American people will realize how beneficial they are, and that despite their costs, they will want to keep them in place because they appeal to our better nature, a nature Republicans and the Religious Right spend the majority of their time trying to crush so their donors and benefactors can make more money. Even with majorities in both houses of Congress that rubber-stamped almost everything he did, Dubya couldn't spend his so-called "political capital" from his 2004 election to privatize Social Security. Why Democrats cannot take a lesson from this example both eludes and frustrates me.
If yesterday's election shows anything, it is that fractured as they may be with the whole Tea Party thing, the right-wing in this country is energized, and the left-wing is hopelessly though justly apathetic. If the Democrats want to minimize the chances of another 1994 Republican landslide, this is the time they need to get tough and start behaving like liberals. Don't Ask Don't Tell should have been stopped by executive order as soon as Obama took office, and not only does he need to end the discriminatory policy now, but he needs to rehire all the servicepeople thrown out of the military due to this policy in his presidency, if not all of them altogether. Our operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen would immediately benefit from aignificant influx of Arabic translators. Given that Brown's election puts a likely end to the health care bill in its present state, congressional Democrats need to use every tool at their disposal -- including budget reconciliation -- to push through as much reform as they can get with 218 votes in the House and fifty-one in the Senate, hopefully including a public plan. They need to raise taxes on upper-class individuals and corporations, and they need to do so without apology.
There may be too many historical forces at work to prevent Democrats from losses in the midterms, but if they want to at least stem those losses, they need to give their base more reason to vote Democratic. I wish I could say they'll vote Green instead, but if history has shown anything, it's that they'll stay at home. If that happens this year, then next year we may have a Tea Party Congress on our hands, and Goddess help us all if that should happen.
Labels: politics
posted 2010/01/17 at 15:15
I know not many of you follow one of my favourite authors, Poppy Z. Brite, but I subscribe to both her LiveJournal and Twitter feeds. Brite has lived in New Orleans for most of her adult life, and was among those who lost their homes when the gulf coast levees failed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. She's quick to point out that the levee failures, not the storm itself, was what caused most of the destruction, and it's hard not to agree with that assessment. She also points out, quite frequently, that that part of the country has yet to really recover from the destruction of four and a half years ago. If you remember back to last August, when President Obama visited the stricken areas, the news networks covered him as he visited areas and gave speeches and pledged support.
Therein lies the problem. When the cameras shut off and the news went back to tea party protests and the like, nearly everyone, once again, forgot how the people of Louisiana still need help. I will shamefully admit to being one of those people; reading Brite's posts and tweets about the damage and need for help does remind me, but within minutes I forget about it and go on with the rest of my life. I have my own needs to meet, and it isn't always easy to balance that with being aware of those who are less fortunate than I am. It's a problem that many of you deal with as well, I'm sure; we can't all be Mother Teresa, but at the same time we wish we could do a better job of taking care of others.
However, I think our culture deserves a lot of the blame for this. It should go without saying that most American news outlets spend too much time talking about the latest celebrity gossip, particularly from reality television shows, and too little time talking about the rest of the world and what's going on outside of our borders. If it's out of sight, then it's out of mind, and certainly there are those out there who like it that way, because it enables them to put so much more focus on "real problems" like stopping same-sex marriages and reducing taxes on millionaires. Most people in this country probably hadn't given more than a passing thought about Haiti since the United States' military presence in the 1990s departed, and it's only now, in the wake of the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, that we're drawn to Haiti again.
As the news reports coming out of Haiti this past week have made clear, the economic and infrastructure problems in Haiti were legion well before the earthquake hit, and Haiti's impoverishment in comparison to other Western countries was so enormous that it demanded much more attention than it got. Given how little attention was paid to how disaster-stricken Haiti was even before this earthquake, it's no wonder that this news comes as such a shock to so many people; quite honestly, I should have known better. As with Hurricane Katrina, there was no way to prevent every death, but if money had been spent on making the region as disaster-proof as reasonably possible, maybe we wouldn't have so many piles of corpses on our screens and in our heads.
The question now is whether we'll remember the problems in Haiti after the news cameras leave and the nightly news goes back to covering the latest celebrity sex scandal, or we'll just go back to not thinking about those less fortunate than us because we're not confronted with the images of them like we are right now. I'm going to try to remember the people of Haiti long after the wall-to-wall news coverage ends, but I know that I'll probably get caught up in the vagaries of my own life at some point and won't keep them, or the people of Louisiana, in mind as much I should. I just wish the American news media would do the role they're supposed to do and spend more time covering the injustice in this world, and less time on the trivia of celebrity drama. It shouldn't have taken this earthquake to get them, or us, to pay close attention to the problems in Haiti. Those problems don't go away when the news cameras shut off.
Labels: politics, television
posted 2010/01/08 at 16:04
I had thought that nothing could happen that would make me blog about, or even give much conscious thought to, the whole Tiger Woods brouhaha. Once again, I underestimated the ability of Fox News to take any situation and turn it into an opportunity to force their beliefs and morals down our throats. If I were to post a picture of the fingernail I broke earlier today and how I clipped it off, someone at Fox News could find some way to turn it into an example of how Obama's socialist policies are destroying America, or write some paean about how the religious right's version of Christianity means I'd never have to deal with another broken nail for the rest of my life.
I've come to expect Fox News personalities to say things so out of place with both reality and rational thought that more civilized countries would institutionalize them. I'm still a staunch believer in the First Amendment, and I still believe that the best defence against lunatic ideas is to allow the lunatics who espouse them to state them loudly, and at every possible opportunity, so people can judge for themselves how crazy they are. Granted, I think this would work a lot better if we could take a pair of scissors to this country and cut off the Deep South (they sound like they'd like that right now, anyway), but all Americans, now matter how misguided or misinformed, deserve a right to have their voices heard and votes counted.
That being said, the presence of Fox News in our culture, particularly when it is so dominant in some areas, complicates this matter a great deal. Fox News has always been a partisan tool for the right-wingers of this country to use to influence public discourse, obfuscating opinion and cherry-picked facts with actual journalism, and anyone in denial of this fact is in need of an intensive course of deprogramming. In the past, though, Fox News would at least put on a thicker veneer of objectivity with its Alan Colmeses and oh-so-rare shows that were actually "fair and balanced," although those shows usually came on weeknights at three in the morning. They still pull good ratings, though, because Fox News' demographic skews so old that at any time in this country, there are probably hundreds of thousands of televisions tuned into Fox News because their owners just died of old age.
That veneer has been steadily thinning since the election of Obama, though. Openly promoting Tea Party protests this past year was a textbook crossing of the line between journalism and advocacy, and although some on the left called Fox News out on this, such protests were nowhere near as vociferous as they should have been. Brit Hume's comments about Buddhism and Christianity were equally outrageous, and in the past even Fox News knew when to apologize when its personalities said something so out of line to defy description. Instead, Fox News has stood behind Hume's comments, even going so far as to have him basically reiterate them word-for-word on Bill O'Reilly's show.
Now, I will admit to not being as well-informed about the intricacies of Christianity as I'd like, but I think it reasonably safe to say that I know more about Buddhism than Brit Hume does. Setting aside the sheer offenciveness of Hume's comments for the moment, the notion that Christianity is somehow "better" at dealing with forgiveness than Buddhism is just patently and demonstrably false. Hume was speaking of what Tiger Woods would have to do to be forgived not by any actual higher power, but by the "higher power" of the religious right. Nothing short of beocming a card-carrying dittohead would redeem Tiger in their eyes, and for many of us, that would be a far greater sin than his affairs.
Worse yet, right-wingers continue to use the co-opt the language of victimization -- something which, in all seriousness, makes me physically ill -- and claim that criticism of Hume's comments are what are intolerant and misinformed, not Hume's comments themselves. Pretending for a moment that I held any actual cultural or political sway (a huge stretch, I know), imagine what would have happened if I'd written about any of the Republican politicians who got caught in affairs and sex scandals these past two years (I've lost count too), and said that what that politician needed to do was embrace Wicca, because Christianity was inadequate when it came to polyamory. My piece would probably be the lead story on The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck's radio shows for at least five days. Ann Coulter and Michele Malkin would be writing columns calling for my assassination. Brent Bozell would be shouting that my claim showed exactly how Christians are discriminated against in America. This controversy isn't about Tiger Woods or Buddhism or anything like that; it's about the religious right and their continuing efforts to make their warped religion the norm against which everything else should be compared.
I've come to accept Fox News and the Bill O'Reillys and Sean Hannitys and Brit Humes of this world the same way I've come to accept the scar I have on my right calf from when I sliced it open trying to climb a chain-link fence when I was younger: A reminder that stupidity exists in this world, and that it usually leads to painful, lifelong consequences. Even in the context of Fox News' laughable definition of "fair and balanced," though, Brit Hume's comments went way over the line, and not just liberals, but moderates and journalists as well should be screaming bloody murder until Hume apologizes and retracts his ill-informed statements about Buddhism and Christianity. If we don't, then we can expect similar comments from other right-wingers every time anyone not of their ilk gets in the news for anything.
Labels: politics, rhetoric, sports, television
posted 2010/01/04 at 13:36
I've written before about how I went to private school with children of the family that runs Toledo's local cable company, Buckeye Cablesystem. (The same family also owns our local paper, the Toledo Blade.) I've made no secret of the fact that I'm hardly a fan of Buckeye, particularly when they were slow to add new channels I really wanted in the 1990s (Food Network, ZDTV, MuchMusic, Bravo), which was why I had DirecTV for a few years there. After the fire I didn't bother renewing DirecTV, though, mostly because I didn't have much interest in television once I went back to college, and by that point I was tired of trying to catch every single televised performance of every musician I liked. (Now that other people have put those performances up on YouTube, I feel fairly vindicated in my decision.) Buckeye does have the best local cable and high-speed Internet access in town, yes, but given how Toledo is, that's kind of like being valedictorian at summer school. There wasn't even any serious competition in town until recently, when AT&T started making offerings, and so far their introduction into Toledo has been a huge disappointment. (I don't even think they've gotten their service out here to my suburb yet.)
That being said, Buckeye still puts up a lot of its own commercials during various broadcasts advertising their various services, and apart from the gratingly smug tone many of these commercials take, some of them are just so bad I can't stand to watch them. One of their recent commercial lines has been to show "humourous" things you can do with your old satellite dish after getting Buckeye Cable, like use it as a frisbee or an outdoor grill. Now, they're not that funny to me, but I'm willing to accept that my sense of humour is significantly different from most people's, so maybe that's just me. However, in each of these commercials, when they're advertising their special offers at the end, those offers include cash and/or credit for selling them your old satellite equipment. In other worse, they're showing you what you can do with your old satellite dish, and then basically saying you won't have the dish after you use this special deal. This is the kind of elementary logic failure that makes me want to go down to Buckeye Cable's offices and start yelling at no one in particular about how ridiculous they make themselves out to be.
In another of these "alternate use for your old satellite dish" ads, they show a guy turning his old dish into a replica of a Star Trek starship that he then hangs from the ceiling of his bedroom. They even have a crappy synthesizer playing a rip-off of the first four notes of the old Star Trek theme, and they only refer to it in the commercial as a "starship model." However, the man's bedroom is full of licensed Star Trek merchandise, including bedsheets with the Next Generation logo on them and a life-size cardboard cutout of Data. It's like they're trying to have it both ways, referring obliquely to Star Trek like they're trying to avoid a lawsuit, but then having all this official merchandise in the background. There's no disclaimer about Paramount licensing the use of Star Trek stuff for the commercial, either, so I have to assume that Paramount could shoot a cease-and-desist order to Buckeye Cable here to get that commercial taken off the air, which would do wonders for my nerves.
The other big line of commercials Buckeye has introduced lately has been for their home phone service, trying to show why it's a good idea to have a landline even in this age of cheap cellular service. I have to admit that the first of these commercials, about a grown-up daughter bonding with her mother over the phone, was actually quite touching and well done; it's probably the best commercial I've ever seen Buckeye put out. However, after that they started trying to be funny, and as before, the commercials became ludicrous. One commercial shows a guy having to lean out of a window of his house, with an active beehive right above him, trying to get good reception on his cell phone. (They couldn't even afford to get fake bees for him to swat at, so he just looks like he's having an episode.) After the Buckeye guy comes in and does his thing and hands the guy a wireless landline phone, though, the guy goes back into his house, but only closes his window part of the way. If the bees there were as bad as he made them out to be, his home would be uninhabitable within about five minutes. It's like that commercial the soda industry put out trying to get Congress not to put a national tax on sodas where the woman takes groceries out of her car's trunk and then leaves the trunk wide open as she goes into her house and closes the door behind her. I'd meant to blog about that commercial a while ago, but then Jon Stewart beat me to it.
The worst of these Buckeye phone commercials, though, makes me want to pull my hair out, so of course it's in heavy rotation. It's about this guy who tries to order a pizza at 2101 (9:01 PM, if you insist) since he doesn't want to use up any of his weekday minutes, only to be told that the pizza place he called stopped delivering a minute ago. First of all, nearly every cell phone company I know starts offering reduced/free minutes at 1900, not 2100. Secondly, no pizza place I know of stops delivering that early. Pizza places, like fast food (especially Taco Bell), make a killing on the late night just-got-stoned-and-need-munchies crowd, so it's in their best interest to stay open as late as possible. Those logical flaws alone would be bad enough, but then the Buckeye guy comes in and gives the caller a landline phone, the caller smiles, and then places a call on the landline phone. Uh, excuse me, but why the Toot is he calling again! The pizza place will still be closed! He's still going to spend the night hungry and miserable! Couldn't you have gotten the phone to him fifteen minutes earlier?
I know that looking for logic in television commercials is kind of foolish to start with, and I admit I probably view Buckeye more harshly than I do other companies, so I'm probably looking for this stuff to point out. Still, though, stuff like this makes me batty. If your commercials are going to be smug and self-righteous, at least have them make some sense.
Labels: commercials, television, toledo
posted 2010/01/02 at 21:21
Looking back at the past year, which was easily the most anemic ever in terms of how much I worked on the .org, it's clear that I've lost enthusiasm for a lot of the political stuff I've been so interested in for so long. I entered the year eager to see how Obama would handle himself at the start of his presidency, and I have to admit that I let my hopes get up after his inauguration speech, when he delivered a pretty stinging rebuke to the eight years of Dubya with the man himself sitting not twenty feet away. (I still wonder if Obama would have delivered that speech had Dick Cheney not been wheelchair-bound at the time.) From there, though, things quickly went downhill, either actively (allowing health care reform to become anything but reform), or passively (not repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" even as many of our country's best Arabic translators sit at home unable to serve their country because of entrenched homophobia). Obama was never "my guy," but I still let myself believe that he, like nearly anyone else, would lead the country in a significantly better direction. Things are better now, yes, but not significantly so by any stretch of the imagination.
As a teacher of rhetoric, keeping abreast of current news is kind of part of my job; doing so provides me with a wealth of information from which to draw potential discussion topics, and it also helps me guide my students towards paper topics that might actually interest them. All things being equal, it's one of the easier parts of my job, since I also need to stay clued in to things like college football, Taylor Swift, and (gag) the Twilight movies and books. This means catching a fair amount of television news, and also checking news Websites throughout the day, and back when I had more motivation to deal with politics, this wasn't such a problem. Recently, though, I stopped checking for Toledo news stories via Yahoo! News' Toledo portal, because it just felt like a real chore to me that didn't yield much, even with the city changing mayors recently. One of the things I've liked most about this vacation is simply that so much television news is just year-end recycled stuff instead of new stories, and I haven't had to catch Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert for a while. That last bit says something because I really like their shows, but recently I've just wished I could have that time to do something else with my life.
In the past, it's taken things that hit really close to home for me to get back into politics, like when I was at Antioch when the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, and several of my friends were arrested protesting outside of John Kasich's office. You'd think that with all the medical stuff my family has been through these past couple of years that the health care debate would do more to energize me, to get me on my soapbox, but after suffering defeat after defeat this past year, and not knowing if anything will actually ultimately get passed into law, it just seems like there's no use in it. Obama and the Democrats constantly moved themselves away from progressive principles this past year, and yet Republicans are likely to make significant gains in the upcoming November elections. Sometimes I feel like there really isn't a place for me here in America.
copyright © 2010 Sean Shannon