JUST BEFORE THE WAR WITH THE ESKIMOS, OR:
TUCKER CARLSON MARKED FOR DEATH
(With apologies to J.D. Salinger and Lester Bangs, and none to anyone
else) by Joe Goldberg
A few months ago, the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal contained
a piece by Dennis Miller denigrating Norman Mailer, who had just
published an article against the Iraq war in the London Times, so, of
course, the WSJ sicced an attack dog on him. Mr. Miller wondered why
it should be he, since he had never written an Op-Ed piece before and
didn't know much about Mr. Mailer. But modesty is strange, unfamiliar
territory for Mr. Miller, and he didn't stay there long. Like Ken
Burns deciding to do a 19-hour film about jazz or George W. Bush
deciding to become President, he forged ahead, and stumbled right
away, by calling Mailer "the Father of the Non-Fiction Novel." I'm not
surprised that Miller doesn't know better, but you'd think that
someone at the WSJ would know that it was Truman Capote who claimed
the title, and perhaps even a few there who knew that it really
belonged to Ernest Hemingway. But displaying contempt for people and
things of which they are ignorant is virtually a job requirement of
conservative punditry. Not by accident does the word ignorant contain
the word rant.
Dennis Miller started out on Saturday Night Live and since he left
there has preached to an ever-smaller choir (with one brief,
inglorious stopover on Saturday Night Football), his ego increasing in
inverse proportion to the size of his audience. Somewhere along the
way, he decided he was a conservative. It happened just about the time
he lost his job on HBO along with his sense of humor. (Some people
say, because of his brother, Miller will never be out of work. His
brother is Miller's personal manager and is also the personal manager
of Jim Carrey, with whom any number of entertainment conglomerates
would be delighted to do business. Anyone thinking that idea
far-fetched might reflect on the fact that a man was made head of
Tri-Star Films because he had once been Robert Redford's attorney. In
Hollywood, relationships trump everything. It's even possible that
Miller's family situation has influenced his admiration for George W.
Bush, who has had to struggle through life as the son of a President
of the United States.) ...
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