God to VMAs: Yeah, I Don't Think So

WANTED: Position for former Viacom promo staffer who had the idea to stage the Video Music Awards in Miami during hurricane season. Will work cheap.

Is there anything more loathsome -- and I include in this calculus puppy abuse and the "Deuce Bigalow" movies  -- than awards shows? Is there anything more worthless and cheap than the sight of self-satisfied millionaires giving each other standing ovations and toting home thousand-dollar goodie bags? I don't think so.  And, not for the first time, God apparently agrees with me.  Let's all just wallow in the karmic specialness of the last-minute preparations for this year's Video Music Awards, shall we?

Hurricane Katrina, which intensified throughout the day Thursday, shut down MTV's run-up to the extravaganza, forcing the cancellation of dozens of outdoor concerts, poolside cocktail parties and promo events.... Heavy rains and high winds also prompted the revocation of all location shooting permits, starting the removal of tents, elaborate outdoor sets and camera positions as the precipitation fell harder.... No sooner had the doors opened Wednesday at The Doubletree Surfcomber Hotel on South Beach -- which MTV bought out and temporarily renamed Hotel MTV for the week -- did the city of Miami Beach step in and shut down the festivities.

I don't know what's more soul-satisfying here: The thought of Sean Combs running for his life in an Armani-soaking downpour, or the delicious prospect that Kelly Clarkson might have to spend Saturday night in a Red Cross shelter, squabbling bitterly with a family of nine over the last pack of Saltines.

It isn't that I want the spoiled crybabies of the entertainment world brought low, and forced to stare dumbly into the abyss of their own curdled humanity... Oh, wait. Yes it is. That's exactly what I want. Sorry; the deck is stacked so firmly in favor of celebrity in our culture that opportunities to see it foiled don't come along that often, and we don't always recognize them at first. That's just what we're looking at here -- a beautiful deus ex machina named Katrina. Please understand: I don't want to see anyone else hurt in this thing, even if it's, let's say, Ashlee Simpson. I just want to see her privileges curtailed for about 48 hours, and a reminder issued that there are forces in the universe more powerful than fame and more awful than United Talent Agency. So let's all hope the people of south Florida, by which I mean the ones who aren't flying in right now on chartered Gulfstreams, get through the weekend okay. And then let's sit back and watch the fun.

Breathing Again

We're breathing again here at Mr. Irresponsible World HQ after reports that missing teen actress Scout Taylor-Compton has been found alive and well. Honestly, though, it was touch and go for a while. My assistant Debbie had set up a little shrine on her desk and was running a continuous loop of 2004's "Sleepover," in which Taylor-Compton of course played Farrah; and Kip, our intern from the junior college, well, Kip was pretty much inconsolable. He just hunkered down in a corner and rocked back and forth muttering about how "Hidden Howie" wouldn't be the same with Taylor-Compton, who of course plays Madison, the girlfriend of young Alex Mandel, until eventually I had no choice but to have Debbie slap him.  There's some question about whether Debbie had to slap him quite as hard as she did, but I figure that's between the two of them. Anyway, now that things have settled a bit our thoughts have turned to the next young superstar to vanish. We don't know who it'll be, but we can hope.

This Just In: Actual Emotion Breaks Out on CNN! Mass Confusion Ensues!

Jack Cafferty is a beautiful thing in the age of cable news -- a crank, a grouch, a guy whose beans are permanently steamed. CNN has never quite known how to position the grumpy Cafferty in its constellation of twinkly-eyed feel-gooders, and has doomed him to live out his contract uselessly unleashing his ire on randomly-selected stories of the day: "Should battered spouses be allowed to carry guns? Email caffertyfile at CNN.com." (The anchor who responds to viewer emails is more or less the TV news equivalent of the desperate lounge singer who moves into the audience and starts shaking the patrons' hands.)

Yesterday, though, Cafferty found some prey he could really get his incisors into -- the network itself. Returning to the studio after two hours' wall-to-wall coverage of the BTK sentencing, the net went to its current poster boy, the drama-hyping Wolf Blitzer ("You are. IN... thesituationroom"), and then to Cafferty, who is nobody's idea of a poster boy for anything except possibly spleen. And splenetic he was, and gloriously so. "We ought to be ashamed of ourselves" for turning hours of network air over to the proceedings, he sputtered at Blitzer. Blitzer's instincts are second to no one's when it comes to pimping a dramatic story, and he tried to get Cafferty to admit that at least the BTK spectacle was one that viewers have an interest in. This is precisely the sort of responsibility-evading argument that has always justified coverage of questionable news by outlets that ought to know better. Cafferty, who spent more than 30 years in local news before joining CNN and has seen his share of this sort of thing, wasn't biting:

That's got nothing to do with anything, Wolf, as far as I'm concerned. This is a ghoulish exercise on the part of the news media and if ratings are the reason, then I'll say it again, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves.... It's nonsense. It doesn't belong on television. Nobody needs to watch this stuff. All it does is inspire other nut cases out there that maybe they can get themselves famous by doing this kind of -- it's terrible and I don't care how many people were watching.

You could practically see Blitzer's world collapsing like a flan in the sun. ("Thinking: Independent. Attitude: Angry. Must... throw to commercial.") It's probably wishful thinking to say that I felt a tremor in the Force at that moment, a crack in the edifice of strained jokes and gooey fake empathy that defines cable news at this unfortunate moment. Maybe it was just the tonic sight of somebody with actual news instincts expressing true frustration and outrage. Not the kind you gin up for ratings over something sensational like the performance of the Aruban police; the kind you feel innately about something close to your heart, like the plummeting standards of your troubled profession.  Viewers may differ on the appropriateness of Cafferty biting the hand that feeds him on the air that gives him an outlet. Nobody who saw it can claim it wasn't bracingly sincere.

Nobody Knows Anything (About Money)

If you've ever wondered why economics is impenetrable to most people, you probably have too much time on your hands. Or you're an economist yourself. Now that I think about it, there may be some overlap between the two. Is it just me, or do economists seem to issue pronouncements more or less quarterly, after which they... well, do what? Head back down to the rec room and play Skittles for 90 days? What's griping me this afternoon, however, isn't how often the economic experts seem to punch in. It's how often they're wrong when they do. Look at this quote from Bloomberg, and tell me how many times you've seen ones just like it in the news:

"My belief is that you've probably got six or nine more months of positive performance on the economy," said Philip Dow, director of equity strategy at RBC Dain Rauscher Corp. in Minneapolis. He expects the Standard & Poor's 500 Index to gain 10 percent in 2005. It has risen 0.6 percent this year. "If you look at economic progress and guideposts like earnings, they have been better than analysts predicted," he said.

In other words, the good news is that the experts were wrong. Huzzah! Smoke 'em if you got 'em, boys! See you in 90 days!

Is there another field in which the batting average of the practitioners is so low, and the excuse for lousy performance so thoroughly institutionalized? As an advice columnist, I'm regularly called to account for poor results. I generally decline to assume responsibility, as I'm a big believer in people, by which I mean other people, assuming personal responsibility for actions. By which I mean their actions. But still, you see my point. The screenwriter William Goldman was talking about show business when he famously observed that "Nobody knows anything." He might just as well have been talking about the Dismal Science, which might just as well have been called Cointossology. (™ applied for, just in case.)

Demi-Terrible

I know, I know. It'd be shooting fish in a barrel to tee off on today's AP story slugged "Report: Are Demi, Ashton Trying For Baby?" The trouble is, sometimes the fish are so plump and delicious that you just can't resist. And so... avanti!

According to Demi Moore via AP's cheap, hacky retread timely summary of a Harper's Bazaar story, Moore, 56, and Kutcher, 11, met "not through Sean Combs, as everyone said, but through a mutual friend, Sara Foster, an actress who's known Ashton from the day he arrived in Los Angeles." Why, I remember it as if it were yesterday, the day everyone was saying Sean Combs introduced Demi Moore (then 63) and six-and-a-half-year-old Ashton Kutcher. All I wanted to do was walk down to the newsstand and get the papers, but there were huge clots of people on every corner talking animatedly about how Sean Combs had just introduced Demi Moore (at the time a youthful 74) and a still-in-Underoos Ashton Kutcher, and you just couldn't get anywhere. I swear, it was like VJ Day and the World's Fair rolled into one. Oh, by the way: "...a mutual friend, Sara Foster, an actress who's known Ashton since the day he arrived in Los Angeles"? Am I wrong, or does this awkward, overbuilt sentence fragment bear the stamp of someone who has either learned it phonetically or is having it fed to her through a tiny earpiece by Peggy Siegal? No matter: That's good eating! Moore continues, apropos of marriage:  "I feel that we are and that we don't need something formal, so to do so isn't a big deal one way or another." (Translation: The lawyers are still fine-tuning the pre-nup.) And say, how do Moore, who is amazingly vigorous for a woman nearing her centenary, and Kutcher, whose posterior fontanelle is almost completely closed, like to spend an evening? Oh, you know, just like you and me: "Sharing a bath with one another and watching Court TV," Moore confides, and then adds the extra little fillip that helps the anecdote turn the corner from stiffly unbelievable to creepily specific: "Snuggling up naked." Okay then!

There's more -- isn't there always? But honestly, you have things to do today and so do I. From 11 AM to noon, for example, I'll be rubbing my eyes raw in an attempt to expunge the image of these two nitwits curled up naked in a bathtub watching "Forensic Files," while Moore's half-grown children play with matches and live ammo in the next room and pine for the days when their positive male role model was Bruce Willis. Then lunch. Then I plan to spend the afternoon thinking nostalgically of a time before every dope with a steel will and a couple of lines in IMDB got to impose her every thought on the American populace, and before the American populace had nothing better to do than listen.

Olbermann: Too Good For Prime Time?

Some incidents provide such compelling lessons on appropriate public behavior that an advice columnist just can't turn away. Bad etiquette? Touchy ethical and moral ground? Life and death themselves hovering just offstage? Baby, that's where Mr. Irresponsible eats. And so to the flap over MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann's graphic commentary on his recent cancer scare. (It's here; scroll down to the bottom.) Reasonable people may disagree over whether Olbermann's remarks were self-promoting, or his imagery dialed up too high. Never having had the experience myself, I'm reluctant to tell someone who has that he ought to tone things down. If you're inclined to believe, though, that Olbermann needs to provide a rationale for his text, the one he expressed in a posting to media columnist Jim Romenesko's web site seems perfectly legitimate:

My point in putting the audience through all that was to emphasize that even when the biopsy results are good, that experience alone can be nightmarish and frightening enough to tip the balance irrevocably away from any sense that there are any positives to smoking -- a sense that I can assure you, as a recovering smoker, a lot of us cling to as the basis of our rationalizations.

Initial broadcast, subsequent debate, reasoned response -- this is all is good, and healthy. Somewhat less healthy and more... What's the word I want? Oh yeah: Nuts... is the reaction of Olbermann's boss, as reported by Lloyd Grove of the New York Daily News:

Olbermann... is said to have looked stunned as [MSNBC president Rick] Kaplan raced onto the set and shouted at him after he signed off....

I'm told that Kaplan erupted angrily and at length, calling Olbermann "out of control" and "not to be trusted," and accusing him of driving away viewers from the 9 p.m. debut of Kaplan hire Rita Cosby's show, "Live and Direct."

Here's the thing: I've been called names. I've been called "cynical" and "Machiavellian" and "dangerous." But it would never occur to me to use a brush with cancer to sink a co-worker. The implication that Olbermann would reveals in Kaplan a depth of paranoia that strikes even me as excessive, and I sleep with a Glock under my pillow. Besides, if Olbermann really wants to doom Cosby, a new MSNBC hire in the Camera-Gobbling-Scary-Lady mold of CNN's terrifying Nancy Grace, all he's got to do is urge people to watch her. Cosby is too bewilderingly spooky to last for long, even on MSNBC, and seems so unhinged by the presence of the bright studio lights that a run on prime time could induce a debilitating freak-out.  Olbermann, meanwhile, is a born broadcaster, which probably means he's on borrowed time in the floundering, trend-happy world of cable news. In any event, he deserves better than to be called out in front of his colleagues for injecting passion and personality into a commentary -- one whose aim, let's not forget, was to get people to quit smoking and live a little longer. Although, to paraphrase the old joke, people who quit smoking and watch Rita Cosby may not actually live longer. It may just seem that way.

Google This

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," according to Google itself. And this is a swell mission, except that it apparently doesn't apply to all information. Information about Google bigwigs, for example -- even fairly innocuous stuff and things that lie squarely in the public record -- well, the Goog would just as soon keep that kind of info to itself. According to News.com, Google took exception to reporter Elinor Mills using Google to gather some data on Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a story about how easy it is to use Google to Google people. Mills didn't publish the results of Schmidt's last prostate exam; she simply used the company's own search engine to gather up some nuggets like how much Schmidt pulled in selling his stock in the last two months (at least $50 million), that he's an amateur pilot, and that he attended Burning Man. This didn't sit so well with Google, which chose to retaliate by saying that it'll refuse to speak to News.com for the next year.

This brings us to today's manners lesson: Make irony your friend. If you're a big public company -- well, no, let's use a more accessible example. Let's say you're a private citizen, just some guy named Al. And let's say that you, Al, have made untold billions providing millions of computer users a comprehensive and efficient system for accessing information, and that a pesky reporter uses your own technology to access information about your CEO, and that this fairly innocent and common bit of journalistic methodology for some reason infuriates you (Al). How to punish her? Why, by withholding information! It's positively brilliant! And it isn't that you, Al, as an average guy, have corporate America's sociopathic need to control the agenda of any meeting in which you sit; it's just that you have a puckish sense of humor and really, really enjoy the madcap use of rhetorical devices! And by golly, the next time somebody pisses you off you might just whip some metonymy on 'em, or brush 'em back with some synecdoche, or -- whoa! -- even go all anadiplosis on 'em! Heeeaaah!

Jen to Brad: My Publicist Isn't Angry, She's Just Very Disappointed (In Your Publicist)

Mr. Irresponsible took a few days off last week, if by "off" you mean "holed up with my lawyers plotting revenge on my enemies," while Debbie held the fort here at Irresponsible World HQ. (If by "held the fort" you mean "put her Chuck Taylor high tops up on my desk and ate donuts, and don't try to deny it because there are crumbs in my paper clip tray.") And when I got back and checked the Web, what did I find? One more example of how media and celebrities collude in an awful conspiracy to expunge the remaining traces of decorum from our public life.

Here's a CBS.com story about Jennifer Aniston "breaking her silence on her break-up with Brad Pitt." But wait, before we get into the dish let's pause a second to admire its provenance. In a dazzling example of the echo-chamber effect so often seen in stories like this, the silence-breaking doesn't actually originate with CBS.com, because CBS.com exists largely to repurpose content from the broadcast network, and man, would Mr. Irresponsible like five minutes in a quiet alley with the guy who came up with the word "repurpose." So the Aniston interview took place on CBS's air, right? No, of course not; what are you, new in town? Aniston talked to Vanity Fair, CBS's "The Early Show" did a segment on the article, and a precis of that is what ended up on the web site. And if that isn't a triple-play from Hell, then I don't know baseball.

Okay, now we get to look at what Aniston actually said. "She said she still loves Brad very much," according to VF via "The Early Show" by way of CBS.com, as parsed by People editor and "Early Show" contributor Jess Cagle. (Still with me?) Cagle goes on to opine that "I don't think [Aniston's remarks are] a plea for sympathy." No, of course not, because that would be cheap and showy; this is a good honest plea for publicity, which is totally different. Aniston also thinks Pitt is "missing a sensitivity chip" for appearing in a photo spread that showed him playing house with Angelina Jolie. (This just in: Fading TV star confirms celebs actually robots!) The story continues:

In addition to those photos, Aniston expressed shock over the ones that appeared in tabloid magazines of Pitt and Jolie, and her adopted son Maddox in Africa. Why the surprise, considering all the rumors about the affair? As in so many marriages where this happens, there is an element of denial, Cagle says....

Cagle apparently had time to slip out and get a degree in psychology between segments. So he's got that going for him, which is nice.

It goes on like this for quite a while, but honestly, after a paragraph or two I started to get that bees-living-in-my-head feeling and had to take a break and do something mindless, like vacuuming the donut crumbs from my paper clip tray. And when my vision had cleared I thought: Here we see the unfair balance of power that exists between celebrities and normal people. If you or I go through a divorce we handle the aftermath in the traditional way -- we whisper spiteful half-truths about our exes to friends in the checkout line. There's an appropriateness to that. It's one-to-one. Celebrities, however, have a metaphorical bullhorn in the willing shills and lackeys of the press. (Hmmm. Note to self: Get a bullhorn.) Not only will somebody from Vanity Fair come to Aniston's house and collect her grievances as if they were the precious droppings of a rare and exotic bird, he will then bear them away to be published and broadcast and Web-enabled literally all over the world in a dizzying cycle of endlessly-reciprocating vituperation.

Is there no more proportionality in the world? Does everybody in this seedy little ménage à trois absolutely have to get a spread in Vanity Fair out of it? When my own divorce was finalized some sixteen years ago I didn't take to the public prints to deliver artful little knife-blows to my ex; I did what a man does, which is to say I drank a volume of Captain Morgan's equal to the displacement of my own body every 12 hours for two weeks. Then I got up and went back to work, pausing only to pick an extremely ill-advised bar fight with a guy who turned out to be one of the early practitioners of what would now be called "Ultimate Fighting." Do you see what I'm saying? Where is that kind of dignity today?

In The Doldrums With The Fourth Estate

This started out as a post about how we've become a nation of biddies, the most sniffy and censorious and irony-impaired gaggle of yahoos ever to breathe air. It was prompted by a wire story citing "genuine outrage" by "some veterans and members of Congress" over a gimmick on the "Wedding Crashers" web site allowing people to download and print out phony paper Purple Hearts. (The titular characters are two oafs who use various means, including fake medals, to score chicks at wedding receptions.) This seemed like a perfect opportunity to fulminate against  the climate of creeping humorlessness in which we seem to live. And honestly, I was all set to tee off.  I mean, I had the ball in my sights and I was waggling my hips and checking my grip and squinting down-course to take range. I was already framing an argument, something along the lines of "Tell me specifically how this dumb joke materially denigrates the real contributions of American vets." I was also toying with the notion of wondering exactly how dopey you have to be to wear a paper military medal at all, let alone try to pass it off as real. And I was going to bring it home with a gratuitous screed about how thoroughly "Wedding Crashers" fell apart in its last three-fifths, and bastinado the filmmakers for trying to give the oafs some heart, of all things, which is as Kryptonite to true funny. I mean, I was ready to go. I was set to break for lunch. Then I read the story. Then I read it again.

And you know what? As best I can tell, the "some veterans" expressing "genuine outrage" over the thing seem to number in the low single digits, or approximately one: Hershel Gober, a former deputy secretary of Veterans Affairs and himself a Purple Heart winner. At that, his unsettlement seems to be fairly mild. "I have no problem with spoofs," Gober told Scripps Howard. "But we're trying to protect the medals." To which a reasonable person can only respond: Um, okay. Thinking I must have missed something, I combed the wires for other stories on the subject, turning up only an AP dispatch which cited an FBI agent who enforces federal laws against the illicit trafficking of Medals of Honor -- a guy who's conscientiously performing the duties for which he gets paid, in other words -- and a Vietnam vet who runs a web site devoted to medal recipients.

So here's a puzzler. Is it possible that somebody would be cynical enough to trade on the popularity of a hit movie, enlisting a couple of drowsy, hyperbolically-inclined wire reporters in the dog days of summer -- Aw hell, it's too hot to do any reporting today -- in the service of, let's say, a self-aggrandizing attempt to pad a resume and gather some column inches? Who would do such a thing? Bingo: A member of the United States Congress! In this case, it's Rep. John T. Salazar of Colorado, whose fingerprints are all over the wire stories. Salazar is, as it happens, the sponsor of legislation aimed at curtailing the illegal procurement or display of military medals. "With the recent release of the popular movie 'Wedding Crashers', Hollywood has stumbled upon the serious problem of phony medal recipients," Salazar's office said in a press release quoted in the Scripps story. To which a reasonable person can only respond: It has?

Look: Earning medals is no cakewalk. In some cases the price is tremendously high, and people who've paid it deserve respect and thanks, and people who haven't and claim they have, well, it doesn't take an act of Congress to know they should be pummeled with sticks. This isn't what's sticking in Mr. Irresponsible's craw today. It's the unending lazy-ass credulousness of some of my colleagues in the press. So let me address this to the low-level journodrones who got stuck in the office on a steamy Friday when that release from DC came in, and didn't have the sense or the nerve to push back when their aging, running-on-fumes editors got that crazy "I smell a trend" look in their bloodshot eyes: Fellas, I know it's hot. I know you're sleepy. We're all sleepy. But the next time you get an assignment to gin up a trend story from a press release, try to find more than three people -- that's three people total in two stories -- to bolster your theory that there's something widespread going on. (You might have to quit downloading porn and MP3s long enough to make some phone calls. It's a pretty basic technique, and if you're stuck I can show you how it works.) And when you're done -- ah ah ah, when you're done, mister -- then maybe we'll get to go outside and play hackey sack for a while. All right, run along now and file your stories. Mr. Irresponsible's late for lunch, and you wouldn't want him to get cranky.

Word Soup

Say, here's a brain-tickler: If I punched you in the head once or twice really hard, and then assured you you weren't "hurt" but rather "pre-recovered," would you think I was "nuts" or just "stupid"? This is in essence the dilemma raised by a retired school teacher who wants to ban the word failure from British classrooms and replace it with the term success-deferred. "Learning should be lifelong and it should be something that everybody knows they can do and knows they can have a bash at.  I’d rather tell kids that they have done jolly well," says Liz Beattie, 68, presumably adding "Cheerio, pip pip, toad in the hole, bangers and mash," the cherries and daffodils on her crazy-old-lady hat bobbing wildly, although by that time the reporter from the Times had probably fled back to her tiny odd car parked on the wrong side of the road.

Mr. Irresponsible doesn't take this sort of thing lightly. Words are my business, and I know the power they hold -- power to wound, to uplift, and in my own case, to fund the installation of a plasma TV display which is so large it can very nearly be seen from space. But there are some things words can't do. Some problems lie beyond the bounds of semantics, and kids failing success-deferring to measure up to academic standards is one of them. It's ludicrous to think one can make intractable problems go away by renaming them. If this were true, I would have long ago started referring to the cirrhosis in my liver as a "passel of posies."