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FATHER'S LITTLE DISAPPOINTMENT
by Daren Foster

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FATHER'S LITTLE DISAPPOINTMENT
by Daren Foster

***Some apples do fall far from the tree.***

I sometimes wonder what it’s like to raise a child that grows up to be a disappointment. My late father’s ghost oftentimes haunts me, popping up at the foot of the bed to chastise me for my continued lack of enthusiasm for Boston Legal. Show some respect for the dead, boy, the Jacob Marley-like apparition croaks, embrace Denny Crane and honour your father! More creepily still, he’ll pop up in the shower, berating me for the scorn I still heap on another of his baffling favourites. What’s wrong with your head, son? Charlie Sheen’s the funniest guy on TV! To which I reply that Charlie Sheen’s not even the funniest guy in his family let alone on TV.

DAREN FOSTER PODCAST August 11 2009 - PRESS PLAY TO LISTEN

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child, some old Shakespearean codger said. But what about a shiftless child? One that refuses to move out of the basement, claiming he’s this close -- this close -- to developing the next killer app for the iPhone. Killer app? How about a killer of the serial type? Ever wonder how Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy’s parents slept at night aside from with one eye open? We don’t see many bumper stickers out there boldly proclaiming: PROUD PARENTS OF THE WORLD’S BEST SERIAL KILLER.

Even more agnatically (that’s a word; check it yourself if you don’t believe me) devastating must be the time when son turns to father and says, you know what, pa? I’m going to be a world famous celebrity gossip show host. Ditto daughter to mother. Daughter to father. Son to mother. I just really, really wanted to use some form of the word ‘agnatic’ to show my father’s restless spirit the next time it/he shows up that he didn’t throw good money on bad by sending me to university.

I’m sorry, what? A celebrity gossip show host? Are you just making careers up again so I don’t ask Uncle Ned to hire you in his insurance office? As everybody knows, including your parents, nobody becomes a celebrity gossip show host. They’re made in secret Hollywood laboratories using advanced computer generated imaging. Saying you want to be a celebrity gossip show host is like saying you want to be Santa Claus or one of the Back Street Boys or a unicorn tamer. They either don’t exist or they’re robotically created.

Or they spring from the loins of oleaginous former Prime Ministers of Canada.

In hindsight, it doesn’t seem at all surprising that Brian Mulroney churned out toothy son, Ben, host of both Canadian Idol and eTalk Daily. As a politician, Mulroney-père was something of a game show emcee, cavalierly talking about ‘rolling the dice’ with constitutional reform or accepting envelopes stuffed with cash in hotel rooms with the hope of securing the prize behind Door Number 1. But even the shadiest of fathers often desire better things for their children. Bootlegger Joe Kennedy Sr. dreamed of presidential sons, not a criminal syndicate clan. Brian Mulroney successfully married off a daughter into the American elite albeit the liberal leaning Lapham family. Still, son Ben making a living blathering inanely with project pushing, camera hogging, empty headed celebrities and their hangers-on must be something of a come down for the striving Boy from Baie-Comeau®©.

Sure. Ben could’ve turned out worse. Maybe. He might’ve taken his law degree and actually become a lawyer… not that I have any trouble with lawyers but his father was/is a lawyer and look how that turned out. Rather than becoming a celebrity show host, Ben could’ve decided to become a celebrity himself, forming an indie alt-rock band named, Tom Pynchon’s Impenetrable Prose. I’ll let you mull over the implications of that gruesome possibility for a moment before proceeding… Who knows? Things might’ve gone horribly awry with Ben winding up as a hobo. Worse things have befallen better families.

Yet there can be no denying that you wallow in the goo and muck of ill-deserved fame when you choose to become a celebrity gossip show host. You are the pimp of celebrity whoredom. An enabler of mind-numbing triteness, you give the veneer of need-to-know information to what is nothing more than entertainment industrial complex P.R. A ringmaster to the circus freak show of over-weening, self-important Warholian grasping for public recognition at whatever cost. At least as a hobo, you bring shame to only you and your family. The celebrity gossip show host rains ignominy down upon us all.

Too severe? Excessively overwrought? I don’t know. You think we should be more up on the ever-changing romantic entanglements of Jennifer Aniston than we are the details of health care reform? Why can more Americans tell you the exact date of Michael Jackson’s death than give even approximate numbers of their soldiers who’ve died in Iraq and Afghanistan? Name the 3 judges on So You Think You Can Dance. Now how about 3 judges from the Supreme Court?

We fill our lives and minds with piffle, occupying large portions of our hard drives with insignificant facts and figures in a quest to be culturally in tune. Heaven forbid we are left out of the loop and fail to grasp Jon Stewart’s latest pointed reference or Tarantino’s self-reflexive hipster quipster. If the halls of academia can be filled with Pop Culture studies, what’s the harm in brushing up on the curriculum via the E! Network or the latest instalment of Entertainment Tonight?

Damn you straight to hell, Mary Hart! (Is she even still around, flinging the latest dish? I know John Tesh moved on to the green pastures of easy listening dreck years ago.) Perez Hilton. More people should punch you in the face. Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush and Nancy O’Dell. I truly hope you enjoy your lightning brief time at the edge of the spotlight, hob-knobbing with Tinsletown royalty and their retinues. Your fame will last the duration of a fruit fly’s life span and you will suddenly find yourself hanging out in bars that house the likes of Danny Bonaduce, Gary Coleman and Vanilla Ice.

And don’t even get me started on Jay Leno. I thought once he left his late night perch earlier this year, it’d be all good riddance to bad rubbish. But apparently his overlords at NBC believe Leno to be so vital to our continued existence that they’re hijacking 5 hours of prime time real estate every week for his cackling inanities to live on. Ten o’clock to eleven, every Monday through Friday night. All Jay. Every day. If that’s not enough to turn your heart to cold, cold stone then you are already dead, my friend.

While the late night talk show circuit was never high art, the likes of Jay Leno have rendered the format virtually unwatchable. They are now little more than promotional whistle stops, slavish testimonials to the ever burgeoning enterprise of cult of personality building.

Perhaps they always were. They just used to mask it better.

Why all the huff and bother you ask? If you don’t like these shows, just don’t watch them. Take your priggish and uppity opinions and go attend the opera. Well firstly, I don’t care for the opera and all its high renaissance superciliousness. Secondly, try as I might to avoid the celebrity gossip shows, they are everywhere. Pervasive, I believe the word to be. TV networks love them because they’re cheap to produce and provide platforms for the media companies that invariably own them to promote the movies and other television shows they also spend money producing. It’s all just advertising without looking like commercials.

More insidious however, is how these shows adversely influence the way actual news and information programming (owned by all the same conglomerates) is disseminated. Politics is now all about star power. We tend to vote for the person who gives us the best show not the one with the best ideas. Packaged just right and anyone can become President or Prime Minister. Literally anyone, as the last decade or so has proven. It’s all show business, baby. The news. The weather. The stock market. We’re not simply getting information anymore. We’re given a spectacle. Spectacformation! Infotacle!!

Thinking about it, maybe we would’ve been better served if Ben Mulroney had followed in his father’s footsteps. We would’ve been given the opportunity to vote him off the island. Now, he just stares out at us with those soul dead eyes of his, exhorting us to follow him into his glittery world of empty celebrity, fatuous fame and wretched genuflection. And there’s nothing I can do to get him off my television other than turning the damn thing off.