MOMENTS OF ZEN
by Daren Foster

***TV hits a couple ones out of the park!***

As a rapacious but highly censorious TV viewer, I feel it my duty to take each and every opportunity that arises to heap praise on the medium when it manages on rare occasions to lift itself above the usual level of nonsense and excrementitious content. In other words, let’s give a shout out to the ‘thumbs up’ when TV forgoes its usual crappy, desultory fare. (Yeah I’m looking at you Jim Belushi. Again.)

Twice in the past couple weeks, I’ve been stopped up by instances of absolutely absorbing television viewing. One came from a totally expected source, the other landed in my lap from left field via the internet, and no, it wasn’t The World According to Jim. (An aside: How exactly can we finally be rid of this show? Will it come down to putting a stake through Jim Belushi’s heart? I’ll happily volunteer. Maybe go on a full-fledged rampage and take out Dan Aykroyd while I’m at it.)

First up, Jon Stewart’s dust-up with the financial news media in general and the U.S. cable network, CNBC, specifically. A brouhaha that had only vaguely registered with me. Much of what Stewart and fellow satirist, Stephen Colbert, do inhabits that space in my life. Sitting perched on the semi-aware plane of consciousness, they’re liable to leap out into the forefront at a moment’s notice. It’s not out of disinterest or lack of access on my part that I don’t watch each and every show, Monday – Thursday. There are only so many hours in the day. I tune in when I’m around but will watch when it is absolutely necessary.

Both situations combined when Stewart and CNBC’s Jim Cramer sat down across The Daily Show desk. I just so happened to have my ass planted in front of the TV and, as it turned out, it was absolutely Must See TV. Cramer, host of CNBC’s Mad Money, had come into Stewart’s sites as a prime example of everything that’s wrong with financial reporting. A former hedge fund (????) manager, Cramer had a reputation for being wrong as often as he was right in matters ranging from stock picks to the health and well-being of such industry titans as Bear Stearns. Peripatetically careening around the set of his show, ranting like a lunatic, and using sound effects from the golden age of radio to enhance his stature as a financial analyst, his prognostications had also come up woefully short in predicting the market meltdown that sent global economies tumbling into the biggest recession in at least a decade and a half. With the dust nowhere near settling, Cramer seemed equally at a loss to affix the blame for the downturn where Stewart thought some of it was due.

A pissing match between the two ensued, tit-for-tat exchanges gleefully reported on by media outlets far and wide culminating (possibly) in their showdown on The Daily Show. Hyped sardonically by the show as the week-long, Brawl Street feud of the century, the interview ran almost the entire length of the episode. But like so many other highly touted, overly P.R. fuelled, mass media events, this one failed to live up to the expectations of a rough-and-tumble, knock-`em-down-drag-it-out, back-and-forth battle royale. It was all so painfully one-sided. I’m thinking Mike Tyson-Michael Spinx or Larry Holmes-Gerry Cooney. Or Michael Spinx-Gerry Cooney. Or Mike Tyson versus nearly everyone until Cus D’Amato died.

It wasn’t a fight so much as a pounding. Jim Cramer never rolled over as he never really stood up to Stewart during the entire interview. Aside from the odd, vaguely pathetic attempt to defend what he does (The CEOs lied to me! What could I do? or the old I’m a commentator not a reporter gambit), the normally blustery and bombastic Cramer sat passively back as Stewart pummelled him with informed questions and damning clips promoting financial wheeling and dealing that he now claims to deride.

While the confrontation itself lacked drama, the spectacle was truly engrossing. Here was a stand-up comic, a self-proclaimed snake oil salesman and one time MTV personality taking to task a so-called financial expert and television guru for not only falling down on his job in providing his audience with useful information but for partaking in and promoting a system that was integral to inflicting untold economic damage on an untold number of people. The comedian was angry. The supposedly angry man was buffoonish and almost, quite possibly, contrite. Maybe that’s what he was supposed to be; the public face that absorbs the heat for the rest of the company. Whatever it was, it made for some fascinating television viewing.

Contrition provided the other piece of shockingly compelling TV from a completely unexpected source, David Letterman. For you youngsters out there unsure of who this David Letterman fellow is, years ago he occupied that same edgy late night TV territory now occupied by the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. But then he got caught up in the race to succeed Johnny Carson (don’t ask) and succumbed to the inevitable blandnessing that comes from middle age and catering to the tenets of network television. He only looks less irrelevant in comparison to Jay Leno.

Like the segment where he went to town on a seemingly incapacitated Joaquin Phoenix, I came across this particular Letterman bit via the internet. In late January, he dedicated a portion of his show to airing a stand-up routine from October 1993 by the late comedian Bill Hicks that Letterman and his producers had cut from the program owing to its allegedly provocative content. A Late Night veteran with 11 previous appearances on the show, Hicks took the insult very personally. He fired off a 30-page letter to critic John Lahr, kicking up a stink that very likely made much more of his routine than if it had aired. The fact that Hicks, battling pancreatic cancer at the time, would be dead in less than 6 months added a dose of bitter poignancy to the entire affair.

Fast forward fifteen years and for no apparent reason outside his own personal motivation, Letterman brought Hicks’ mother and overseer of her son’s estate on the show and made what seemed to me to be a heartfelt apology for the entire incident. Accepting sole responsibility for the censoring of her son, Letterman admitted to a stupid cravenness in doing what he had done and the obvious distress he had caused Hicks during a time when he (unbeknownst to Letterman) was waging a much bigger battle. With a steely Southern graciousness, Mary Hicks accepted Letterman’s apology and they sat back to watch the previously unaired stand-up routine.

As Letterman admitted after the segment, it was hard to see why such a fuss had been made. The normally ferocious Hicks was tame, not simply in retrospect but, relative to what he was doing on stage at the time. Not familiar with the man’s work? Well first, shame on you. Let me take a moment while you get yourself acquainted here and here and here. Network television extols the jokey choppiness of Jerry Seinfeld but flattens the incendiary comedic truth seeking of Bill Hicks.

Still, as a comedians’ comedian, Hicks was a mainstay on the Letterman franchise until Letterman deemed him to be a threat to the franchise and knee-capped him. Fifteen years after the fact, Letterman sought to make amends on national television. With this brief glimpse of human fallibility, remorse and forgiveness, TV delivered what it so often tramples over: a tiny perfect moment of being.