It's personal and not political, so it goes here instead of in my Versus/Reversus blog, I think. It involves Bill Maher, one of my personal heroes, and it involves the late Steve Irwin, another of them. Anyone interested in either of these justly celebrated men doubtless knows exactly what I'm talking about. And as it occurred over two weeks ago and the election is now behind us, I feel I can deal with this with the requisite objectivity.
So it seems Bill Maher thought it would be amusing to dress up as Steve Irwin---not more than a few weeks after Irwin died from a stingray barb to the heart---in a costume which, according to this article was "complete with a bloody stingray barb" attached to the shirt. And indeed I know that he did, because he defiantly showed the photograph of himself when he presented his "New Rules" ("Stop hassling me about my Halloween costume..."). [If you somehow missed the photograph, google it yourself because I'm naturally not linking to it here]
The audience didn't seem to like it any better than Nick or I did; there were some hollow courtesy laughs and some groans, but I think most of the people in the audience were just shocked.
It's only fair to remark (based on my research) that many people seem to have had the same idea this Halloween. Steve Irwin costumes were evidently a very popular item. But I would expect Bill Maher to have a somewhat more developed sense of fitness than the average fraternity moron.
Furthermore, since he's a celebrity, he's of course going to get noticed more than your typical Judd, Jude, or Jeremy. So whereas the sick jokes that may have inspired some of the favored costumes at your basic college animal house would pass unnoticed by the world and Irwin's family, a Bill Maher joke at the expense of the crocodile hunter is going to get noticed.
Now we all know that Bill Maher, one of the most intelligent men on the planet, has a habit of defiantly proclaiming his Playboy-from-the-Seventies-like approach to life. Frankly, most of the people I know who really admire him just find this quaint. After all, if we didn't believe adults should have the freedom to go to hell in their own way, we wouldn't be watching. We're all, okay, Bill, fine; whatever. Strippers. Hot tubs. Sex with models. Who gives a shit? When he starts going on about something that doesn't sit well with me personally, I stick my fingers in my ears and go LALALALALALALALA till he stops. What he has done is important. I need for him to keep doing that. I never pay attention to anything he says about his private life because I don't care.
As long as he continues to point the finger at the hypocrites, the sanctimonious, and the self-righteous---which anyone who actually has read the Gospels knows is truly the Lord's work, without regard to what you think about the man himself---almost anything else he does is fine with me.
Unlike most Americans, I don't need my heroes to be saints; it's enough if they have the sort of courage and indifference to opinion it takes to speak the truth even when the tide of public opinion is all going the other way. I'm not interested in character except to the extent it impinges on a person's ability to do the job he or she has undertaken. And being a libertarian/comedian/political commentator is the sort of work that allows a person a wide latitude in his personal life.
The one thing I do ask is that the people I admire don't hold other people to higher stands of conduct than they hold themselves. In other words, you don't get to be a famous evangelical Christian who claims that the Bible makes homosexuality a sin, that homosexuals should be treated differently from the rest of us, and to be secretly gay or bi-curious in your private life. And Bill Maher generally doesn't ask more of other people than he asks of himself. After all, to say that people shouldn't be hypocrites is setting the bar pretty low.
So I wrote a note awhile ago where I tweaked Bill Maher a little---not too harshly---over his high fructose corn syrup/obesity rants. I did so on the ground that this sort of reflects the same sort of puritanical judgments masked as "concern" as most of the rants from the other side about sex and sexual promiscuity. Among the deadly sins, gluttony and lust probably rank about the same. Fat people and the sexually incontinent: this neoCathar would assess them in pretty much the same light, if I were in the business of making those kinds of judgments (and I do make them, but at least I know I'll pay for them). I find it hypocritical and disingenuous for skinny carnal or substance enjoying types to make vicious judgments about fat glutton types. Everybody gets to choose his or her favorite brand of incontinence. I wish they'd all shut up.
I will remark in passing that Bill Maher is entirely right, in my opinion, about high fructose corn syrup. I try to stay away from that stuff. But the whole "disgusting gluttonous Americans" thing sounds exactly the same to me as the rantings over other people's sexual choices. Pleasure-seeking is a way of life is pretty infantile or at best adolescent, but on the other hand, we live in stressful times. Some people would rather screw; some people would rather eat. And most Americans earnest believe that when their favorite pasttime ceases to deliver that same release from tension, they should do it more. As a Woman Who Blogs Too Much, I try not to judge.
My problem with the Bill Maher/Steve Irwin thing isn't just the visceral protest I felt when I saw one admired hero mocking the tragic death of another. Like some of Maher's other fans---because I happen to know some of them---I felt Irwin's death as an actual personal loss. Unlike Bill Maher, I think Irwin did a great service to many of the world's maligned animals by loving them all with such passionate disregard of scaliness, toxicity, or excess of teeth or appetite. I don't think he would ever have consciously harmed anything, and he in fact rescued many a crocodile or other creature that would otherwise have been killed. I'm sure he understood in his final moments, bleeding to death from the wound in his chest, exactly why that stingray struck. And I'm going to stop now because I'm tearing up a bit.
Does Bill Maher not understand this about Steve Irwin, does he think it doesn't matter, does he think it's feigned[-feigned] [sorry; couldn't resist]; or did the "irony" of Irwin's death just seem too good not to use? Or does he think South Park is funny? Whatever; I think I'd have overlooked the bad judgment involved in wearing that costume (which grosses me out to look at). It's harder to overlook the indifference it shows to the grief of Irwin's family.
But I might still have written it off to the Peter Pan aspect of Maher's personality that would have us know he dates models, likes to have sex in hot tubs, etc. etc. I can't help reflecting here that it was Maher who told us years ago that Americans needed to spend less time indulging the inner child and more time getting in touch with the outer adult. But: whatever. I am prepared to cut Bill Maher a lot of slack. He's important. He does important work.
What upset me, and upset a lot of people, is that he evidently can't let it go; evidently, he was deeply stung---some karmic justice at work there---by the public response, because he made it the basis of one of his new rules on a recent episode. The "new rule" that we must not hassle him about his Halloween costume was the straw that for a lot of my friends broke the camel's back. It was a failed policy, Bill, like the war in Iraq. You can't make it okay by ad hoc rationalizations that perhaps Irwin was somehow doing something bad to the stingray or by references to PETA. All you can do is move on and---preferably---apologize. But if you're not going to apologize, at least don't rub your fans' faces in your blood-bespattered khaki shirt.
Hell, even the massively imperceptive "Michael Scott" character from The Office reflected in one episode that there are some jokes you can't make till a lot of time passes. "The Lincoln assassination only recently became funny," he says in one episode (wish I could remember which).
I don't know when or if Steve Irwin's death will ever seem to me to be more than a terrible loss to the world, but I do know that the day when the "ironic" component of his death will strike me as anything but a side issue will be a long time in coming. It's not that I lack humor or an appreciation for irony. I laughed at Maher's rejoinder when a guest unexpectedly revealed that he's HIV positive. But that guest was present, alive, and well, and quite capable of speaking up for himself.
I didn't laugh when Rush Limbaugh mocked poor Michael J. Fox symptoms. I wanted to whomp him upside the head. Which is pretty much how I'd have felt toward Bill Maher when he trotted out his new rule if I didn't have enough respect for him to make the loss of some of it fatal to my continuing to view him as one of my personal heroes. He had a large fund of respect to draw upon.
Hence my New Rule: From now on, Bill Maher must choose Halloween costumes based on jokes designed to appeal primarily to drunken frat boys.
And that said, I'm done with the issue.
Don't know if you're old enough to remember this, but shortly after Karen Carpenter died of anorexia, Joan Rivers made a *really* tacky joke about her and got the same reaction Maher got on his Steve Irwin costume. Unfortunately it just seems to have become part of our culture, to make fun of celebrities who die in unusual ways. The worst part of Maher's stunt is that he's far from the only one making Steve Irwin jokes - and since this is Irwin's family's first Christmas without him, it seems extra mean.
Posted by: Stooges Woman :-) | December 08, 2006 at 03:52 PM