Bill O'Really Lies and Gets Shrill
Tempest
for breakfast. He kept interrupting, so that no point could be made that
could win a reply, much less a reasoned response -- not so much a gabble
of sound bites as a howling from Bedlam.
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My Fox trot with Bill O'Reilly
By HEATHER MALLICK
http://www.globeandmail.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040501/MALLICK01/TPComment/Columnists
It's someone's fault I appeared on The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News
Tuesday night to discuss a column I wrote welcoming the presence of
American deserters in Canada.
So who's responsible? Either Globe and Mail TV critic John Doyle, the
Dalai Lama or me.
Eeny meeny miney mo, Doyle.
Mr. Doyle, a dear friend -- together we have plucked the gowans fine --
has long campaigned for Fox News to run in Canada. I think he regards it
as a second Comedy Network. It's all staged, so we can all laugh at its
Bush-licking rendition of the news, its ridiculous "fair and balanced"
slogan and this man Bill O'Reilly, whose talk show is really more of a
spitting contest gone off track.
Al Franken calls Mr. O'Reilly a "lying, splotchy bully," and proves it
in his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced
Look at the Right, but Mr. Doyle thinks he's a great comic creation, I
guess, like Britain's The Pub Landlord, this guy who's always ranting
about how Great Britain used to be called Fookin' Fantastic Britain
until all the immigrants arrived.
But Mr. Doyle is Irish and he likes his comedy blacker than a raven's
eyeball. I should have remembered this, more fool me.
Eeny meeny miney mo, Dalai Lama.
It's not enough to show compassion to people you love, the great man
told Canadians this week. You also have to show it to people who hate
you. This was lingering in my mind as Nate Fredman, the nice assistant
to Mr. O'Reilly, the man who once said to the son of a Twin Towers
victim, "Get out of my studio before I tear you to fucking pieces,"
urged me to appear. You're the best kind of guest, Nate told me. You
really believe in what you're saying, so you don't take it personally
when . . . and then his voice tailed off. Nate was so sweet, and then
the Dalai's (the Lama's?) words echoed in the distance.
Eeny meeny miney mo, me.
I always say yes to American TV because how else are Americans going to
hear about radical notions like feeding the poor and sheltering the
gentle, or letting black people vote in Florida?
So I asked Nate for a car and driver and a makeup person to lacquer my
face into immobility, and I did one of those remote-studio things where
the host can see you but you can't see him and he asks you questions
through an ear mike. And that's when the trouble started.
Mr. O'Reilly is not a smart man. He's like one of those old guys you see
on the street ringing a bell and shouting about eternal damnation. He
talks to his trousers. You know the type. They let wasps nest in their
hair so they can lure weasels, trap 'em and eat 'em slow over the summer.
We were supposed to be discussing American deserters fleeing to Canada;
instead, he went off on some wild thing about the mayor of Vancouver
injecting people with heroin and unless Canada shapes up, "we" will
boycott you and destroy your economy, just like "we" did to France.
I said France seemed to be doing fine. He implied that France now looked
like Dresden in 1945. I hadn't heard that.
I said the United States couldn't boycott Canadian goods because it
would be mutually damaging. "We're your biggest trading partner."
"No, you're not." (We are.) Naturally, I wanted to reply, "Yes, we are,"
so that he could say "No, we're not," and then I'd say, "Everything you
say bounces off me and reflects back on you, so there," but I couldn't
regress that far. Mr. Doyle would have been shrieking.
And then he asked me if I was a socialist, and I said, "Certainly," and
it was as if I'd said I like donkey semen in my latte instead of milk.
He then went into a mad rant about lefties like Mr. Doyle and how I was
a typical Globe columnist. I said, no, truthfully, I think I'm regarded
as "idiosyncratic" (the first six-syllable word ever spoken on the
O'Reilly show), and he erupted again.
It was like talking to a manic child who had eaten 800 cherry Pop Tarts
for breakfast. He kept interrupting, so that no point could be made that
could win a reply, much less a reasoned response -- not so much a gabble
of sound bites as a howling from Bedlam.
Overnight, I received hundreds of e-mail messages from American men who
think my private parts have gone communist, if you grasp my meaning. The
saddest thing was the e-mail from kind Americans, apologizing for their
"idiot," quivering with humiliation and praising me for having remained
calm and composed under fire, not realizing that I was simply frozen
with disbelief. I have replied to each one of the nice ones.
The whole degraded debacle and everyone's reaction to it, including
mine, reminded me that Americans now have to cope with a new surrealism
in public life. In the 1936 Spanish Civil War entries in a diary I read
long ago, by someone who may well have been Stephen Spender, the writer
describes an O'Reilly-esque scene. "A man squats and defecates in the
street, without comment." Re-reading these diaries decades later,
Spender writes, "What on earth did I expect him to say? Olé?"
--
"The tyranny of a prince is not so dangerous to the public welfare as
the apathy of a citizen in a democracy."
- Baron de Montesquieu, 1748
Man from Mars!
"Tempest" <tem...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:40940BE3...@hotmail.com...
O'Really should get a life.