President Obama, who you think would have better things to do, will become the first sitting president to appear on a late-night talk show when he shows up on Leno tonight. Just in case someone is watching Letterman instead, Obama will also be addressing the nation Tuesday night, bumping the most popular show on TV, Fox's "American Idol." TV execs are pissed. The presidential election meant in a fall season regularly interrupted by political coverage, followed by loads of live inauguration coverage and two primetime speeches about the economy. Now the White House wants yet another primetime slot, during sweeps, with rumors of more to come. Looks like there's no economic stimulus for Hollywood.
Jon Stewart is getting some serious backlash for beating up on Jim Cramer. Richard Cohen in the Washington Post writes that Stewart seems to have forgotten that his job is to be funny. Tucker Carlson writes on The Daily Beast that Stewart seems to believe his own press:
The relationship between Stewart and the media is a marriage of the self-loathing and the self-loving: He insists their real news is fake, they insist his fake news is real. He doesn't take them seriously at all. They take him way too seriously. But nobody takes anybody as seriously as Jon Stewart takes himself.
Gawker has clips of Bill O'Reilly reading from his terrible novel interspersed with Papa Bear lecturing on promiscuity. We're not quite sure what the point is. Writing a book with lame sex scenes doesn't make O'Reilly a hypocrite, which seems to be the implication. But the prose, and his performance of it, is laughably bad.
There is nothing laughable about Natasha Richardson's death. Even if you didn't know her work, which was excellent, her sudden passing still was a shock. Here was this healthy woman, in the prime of life, who took a not-very-bad spill on a not very steep mountain. She had what seemed to be a minor bump on the head. Then she was gone. Scary stuff.
You could argue that all the attention Richardson has gotten; and all the attention her funeral will get, and the phenomenon of "celebrity deaths" in general, are all signs of a sick society. Richardson, after all, was a rich, famous movie star, born into a renowned family, who lived her whole life in luxury and traveled in the world's most exclusive circles. Roughly, about 146,000 human beings die every day. 146,000. That's about 100 people each minute. Why does this one woman deserve so much attention. You could make the case that our compassion would be better spent elsewhere, like, say, on kids suffering in Darfur.
You could make that case. But you would be an idiot. People don't "spend" compassion. Human beings do not have a limited supply of empathy which they run out of unless it's carefully rationed. On the contrary. Most people find that compassion breeds compassion. That is, feeling empathetic towards other human beings is a habit that grows with practice.
What makes Richardson's death so sad is, precisely, because she had so much. Let's face it; the people in Darfur are having very shitty lives. They are having lives shitty in ways we in the West can scarcely imagine. Richardson, though, was not. She was talented, attractive and accomplished, with a seemingly perfect family and, arguably, the world's best job. She had everything most people aspire to. That's exactly what makes it so shocking to see it all vanish in such a strange, quick, tawdry little way.
