Kicks are for trids

A show about nothing

It's never pleasant to watch someone commit career suicide. It's even sadder when it's the real deal.

All corners of the Internet - and water coolers across the land - are alive with chatter about putative "comedian" Michael Richards's racial slurs, directed at a heckler. I won't elevate the initial indignity by deep-linking to the offending video.

His subsequent apology did little, if anything, to quell the slaughter. Richards has now hired his own crisis communications advisor and reached out to the Revered Jesse Jackson - that noted paragon of PR - as a way of building bridges back to the black community.

The difficult part in all of this is, when you watch Richards now, you can see he's deeply troubled. And not just by the reaction to outburst. He's troubled, period.

He's a man on the edge. I don't know exactly what someone looks like just before a complete nervous breakdown, but I'd be willing to be this is pretty much it.

Watching him on Letterman, I was concerned. He had an affect of despondency and confusion that I could only surmise was genuine. And it worried me.

Many tongues have clucked over the "question" of why so many celebrities insist on nuking their own careers, and in such flagrantly public ways. Or whether Richards will become more than a one-day wonder as he does the "apology circuit" - and whether in doing so he might, in fact, revive any smouldering embers of his moribund career.

There aren't enough pixels in the digital universe to list all the shallow, self-centred and self-destructive celebrities in Hollywood and elsewhere. There is a distressing similarity to these patterns:

1. Take one celebrity, preferably one not known to have any talents other than those required for entertainment purposes.
2. Add parties, intoxicants and far more money than any one person could ever really need.
3. Stir in some modicum of success, and shake vigourously.
4. Ferment for 5, 10 or 15 years.
5. Top with unecessary cosmetic surgery, and voilà: the perfect recipe for premature death.

I wish I could say that Michael Richards was a misunderstood genius, the kind of wistful post mortem afforded the likes of the late Andy Kaufman (although I would dispute that assertion, too - I never found him very funny).

Some bloggers and other pundits have compared Richards to Don Rickles. Rickles was hot 30 years ago. Times have changed, friends.

But I would argue that it's never funny to attack people. Violence is not humour.

And, as I'm fond of teaching my kids, yelling - or in this case, calling names - is a form of violence with words.

He shall (no longer) from time to time...

There were many characters who died on The West Wing:

• Dolores Landingham
• Admiral Percy Fitzwallace
• Josh Lyman's dad
• Morris Tolliver, President Bartlet's personal physician
• And, of course, Chief of Staff-cum-VP Candidate Leo McGarry - following the real-life death of the actor who played him, John Spencer (ibid.)

In fact, to this fan, Spencer/McGarry's death was actually more of a body blow than that of the show itself.

That's because the relationship between McGarry and Bartlet was the foundation of the entire show. Everything else spun off from there. With the two of them gone, the demise of the entire franchise was a foregone conclusion.

It was certainly about more than just the quality of the acting that these two fine performers delivered. Although there was that. They had that elusive quality sometimes called "chemistry."

There's a phenomenal scene in the outtakes of The Score - you can actually watch Marlon Brando and Robert DeNiro, two of the finest thespians of their generation, creating art before your very eyes as they do the same scene about six different ways, riffing on the characters, the dialogue and the moment.

Martin Sheen and John Spencer had that same chemistry. One could easily imagine their careers forever linked, like some latter-day (but much more talented) Lemmon and Matthau (or Randall and Klugman, if you prefer).

That's what made Spencer's death so tragic. And made the cancellation of The West Wing so eminently logical.

I will mourn the show's passing, but it's not that which makes me wistful.

For seven years of Wednesdays (and then Sundays), the show - described by its creator, the visionary madman Aaron Sorkin, as "a valentine to public service" - gave me hope that there were those who viewed government employment not as a drain on society, but as an enhancement.

Who saw public service as a calling, who knew that "governing" was also a verb, and that government is not necessarily a dirty word.

Now, that's gone. The same shrill crew that once terrorized the Ontario public service is in charge of the federal government. There will be labour battles. Pitched, screaming, violent battles.

The battles that befell the Bartlet White House, to be sure, were angry and violent. But they were waged by those with a hateful agenda - racists, thugs and marauders intent on wreaking political instability geared to their own political gain (real or perceived).

But the good guys persisted. And they won, guided by their better angels. By simply surviving. Sometimes, that really is the best you can say.

A couple of posters over at Television Without Pity have written that television itself died along with this show. And that may be true - certainly, there is no longer any witty, intelligent commercial television anywhere on what used to be called "the dial."

What also died, a little, for me was the love of public service. And that? Is the real tragedy.

Leather dull

I normally refrain from using this space to rant about work.

I save it for the office.

But something happened this week - something so galling - that I had to vent. Lest I explode. Or worse.

On April 22, Toronto Sun Money Editor Linda Leatherdale wrote a column in which she took the provincial government to task for a "sneaky, backhanded" increase in the land transfer tax.

It was typical, Leatherdale high dudgeon. Full of words like "hideous" and "hated" and "secretive." And then the kicker: "It took an astute law clerk in a Mississauga real estate law firm to notice the March 31 tax bulletin on the finance ministry’s website under 'What’s New' and alert me."

A law clerk. No name. No attribution. And no apology.

Because Leatherdale - beacon of journalism that she is - simply got the story wrong. The land transfer tax - and the items used in the calculation she described - hadn't changed in 20 years.

So this was neither a new tax, nor an increase in an existing tax.

It was a simple tax bulletin, of the type the ministry publishes 10, 15, 20 times a year or more, shedding light on something that's already on the books.

The Auditor General, in 2004, had asked the Ministry of Finance to clarify this matter to simplify the  home buying process.

The Ministry complied. It took two years, but it complied.

Leatherdale - who never met a tax she liked - rode this one like an Olympic equestrian competitor.

However, she did not meet the most basic test of journalism - which is to check the facts before you publish.

A first-year journalism student would know better than to crank up the rhetoric on the putative "authority" of one unnamed (and presumably, not terribly experienced) source. This is the type of piffle one would expect to see in a supermarket checkout tabloid, not a daily newspaper in the biggest city in the country.

But Leatherdale wasn't writing about a recluse discovered, dead and decaying in a home stacked with 72 years' worth of newspaper and a mountain of cat shit.

She was writing about tax policy, and from a position in which her words had the potential to influence a large number of people - and potentially mislead them.

This was shoddy journalism, not worthy of the Sun or any other reputable newspaper. I do not condemn Leatherdale for her perspective; she's entitled to it, whether I agree with her or not.

But no one - least of all an "editor" of a major daily newspaper - has the right to go off half-cocked on the say so of one anonymous law clerk.

Leatherdale's readers deserve better. Does no one at the Sun read her material before it's published?

Like fish in a barrel

Harry Whittington, the man U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney "accidentally" shot in a hunting mishap earlier this month, has managed to achieve something that nothing - not 9/11, not the Iraqi war debacle, not six years and counting of deception, deceit and dishonour - has been able to accomplish: he has presented mainstream media with an excuse to start covering President George Bush in a manner approximating aggressive.

It is startling, to me, that the White House press corps - not to mention most, if not all of the American-based MSM - has chosen to see this relatively minor incident as the tipping point in its relationship with a White House that has done its level best to treat them - and through them, the American people - with utter disdain during 1½ terms of office.

As a recovering journalist myself, I would have thought that the Jeff Gannon incident - in which the White House planted a fake reporter amidst the professionals in the press corps, so as to ensure friendlier questions - would have so enraged the journalistic community that they would never look at Bush or his administration in the same light again.

But I was wrong.

Sure, there was some anger over that incident. But just as quickly, Fox News and its agenda-distorting ilk went back to downlplaying - or ignorning - the unfolding horor of Iraq, the on-going horror of Afghanistan, and pretty much every other horror in the world. Except for Hurricane Katrina, in which case,  they went after virtually everyone except those responsible.

The White House's initial response to the shooting of Harry Whittington - which was to laugh it off and treat it as a non-story - quickly faded to a ghastly, hospital green when it became apparent that no details would be forthcoming. From there, it was a short jog to indignation when White House spokesman Scott McLellan tried to "change the channel," as public relations practitioners sometimes put it. "We're not interested in talking about that any more," he said. "We're interested in talking about things that matter to the American people."

Um, excuse us? Came the response. We'll decide what questions we want to ask. We're the gatekeepers of what interests the American people. You're not.

Hal. Lay. Lou. Yeah.

An acquiescent, obedient press is antithetical to democracy. Reporters are charged with the responsibility to stand in for those who don't have the same opportunity to ask questions of those in power.

When they abdicate that responsibility, they diminish not just themselves, but their society.

One almost gets the sense that l'affaire Whittington is more a safety valve than a tipping point, actually. Years of neglect - not all of it benign - has left American journos feeling angry, ignored and cheated.

About freakin' time.