There’s a TV set in my office that I keep turned on — sound down — most of the day when I’m working. I guess I use it as a bit of visual distraction to keep from feeling so solitary when writing.
For a dose of surrealism I’ve been turning the sound up at lunchtime to watch the “The View” now and again.
I wasn’t a particular fan of the show at the onset — Joy Behar was mildly amusing and Barbara Walters was starting to remind me of Julia Child in her final days. Star Jones was living in a world of non-reality and I was getting soooooo tired of that stupid tiara and scepter get up and there wasn’t much about Meredith Viera to hold my attention.
But all that’s changed now.
In a roll of the dice to see if she could make it appear as though she was leaving the show of her own volition, Jones announced that she would be departing during an impromptu conversation with Walters.
Clearly Walters was surprised by the unplanned revelation — but for the moment she decided to play along.
The following day Jones was immediately sacked and Walters announced that Jones already knew that ABC had decided not to renew her contract at year’s end and was unclear as to why she jumped the gun.
Then Rosie O’Donnell came aboard.
I remember watching O’Donnell when she was a stand-up comic on VH1 back in the mid-’80s. She was very funny and I liked her a lot. Even then she was giving off a queer vibe.
When she finally became the talk show host queen of the late ’90s and early ’00s, producers had apparently urged her to retool her image for mainstream America: now she was this “Queen of Nice,” who acted extra wacky, stuck to positive topics and heaped lots of praise on celebrity guests and the children of the world. It was like looking at a meter maid in an ill-fitting pair of police department-issued slacks.
The Rosie O’Donnell of “The View” is somewhere between her early beginnings and mainstream success days. She’s not pretending to be someone she’s not anymore — gone is all the gush and over-enthusiastic praise-heaping — but the wacky slapstick gimmicks are still just as prevalent as they used to be.
With the once milquetoast cast of “The View,” O’Donnell has turned the show into a surrealistic sideshow that now offers a voice against ultra-conservative propaganda along with continuing presentations of bizarre, yet entertaining stand-up production numbers.
Hardly a week passes without an outcry from some rightwing hack over commentary from O’Donnell.
On an Oct. 9 episode Catholic League president Bill Donohue took aim at O’Donnell for her comments on the pope.
“… O’Donnell said that the person who was in charge of investigating all the allegations of pedophiles in the Catholic Church from the ’80s until just recently was … the current pope.
“What started as a discussion on the problems facing the disgraced former congressman Mark Foley, quickly digressed into a lengthy conversation about the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. Given the fact that the exchange began and ended with brief comments about Foley, it is obvious that the real target was the Catholic Church.”
On an earlier episode O’Donnell butted heads with Elisabeth Hasselbeck when she extolled the virtues of President Bush’s strategy in the Middle East.
“I mean, it’s been five years, we have not been attacked,” Hasselbeck said. “We’re on the offense here. We have to be, because we were attacked five years ago.”
O’Donnell took issue with Hasselbeck’s assertion that Iraq and Afghanistan had something to do with the events that transpired on Sept. 11, 2001.
“One second. We were attacked, not by a nation,” O’Donnell said. “And as a result of the attack and the killing of nearly 3,000 innocent people we invaded two countries and killed innocent people in their countries.”
Hasselbeck continued, insisting that she believed the U.S. was not attacking the countries, but the Islamic fundamentalists who support and carry out terrorism.
“But do you understand that the belief funding those attacks … is wide spread?” Hasselbeck asked O’Donnell. “And if you take radical Islam and you want to talk about what’s going on there, you have to...”
O’Donnell interjected: “Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have a separation of church and state. We’re a democracy here.”
O’Donnell’s comments comparing fundamentalist Islam and Christianity outraged evangelical activists. For most of us, though, her observations about a needless war and the importance of separation of church and state are a breath of fresh air.
Couple her ability to say what’s on the minds of Americans everywhere with singing and dancing routines involving the likes of the Keebler Elf and shirtless bodybuilders and it’s like a car wreck or somebody you’re really hot for. You can’t take your eyes off it.
David Moore Editor
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