The TiVo's been working overtime lately, with the NBA Finals, the new season of Celebrity Poker Showdown, and Zach Selwyn on Around the Horn, to name a few, vying for its attention. So, the MTV Movie Awards have been pushed back to Saturday, at the earliest. Still, I needed my Lindsay Lohan buzz this morning, so I checked out the show's coverage in my hometown Chronicle.
I'm not sure what to make of an article that leads with this paragraph:
Everybody knows awards shows are pointless. That's why nobody watches the Oscars without getting a blood transfusion before the credits and another one by the time Phil Collins sings.
Call me Stodgy McStickinthemud, but I've always felt that the front page of a newspaper section should devote it self to, well, non-pointless things. What gives? Is this award show different?
But what about the MTV Movie Awards? They're supposed to be pointless because they're for young people and young people don't care about anything, especially things like voting and catching venereal diseases.
I see. It's okay to cover pointless things when they're supposed to be pointless. Because all the kids today have herpes.
"Who wrote this?" I asked myself. I secretly hoped the author was a thirteen-year-old contest winner. He's not. He is AIDIN VAZIRI: MUSIC JOURNALIST. His web page archive stretches back to May 2004, but it seems he's been around longer than that. His recent interviews with Jena Malone and Eric Idle drew critical letters, both of which take Vaziri to task for belittling someone. He has a massive web presence that I don't particularly feel like sifting through right now. Back to the article.
Vaziri's piece is excellent for keeping me spoiler-free until the weekend. He only reveals one winner, in the penultimate paragraph (he closes, succinctly, with "Good job blowing everything, MTV."). The rest of the article is devoted to criticizing everyone who showed up. Lohan's breasts, Ashton Kutcher's chewing gum, and Quentin Tarantino's pants are all on the receiving end of Vaziri's withering pen. The Beastie Boys even take a hit for daring to be so freaking old. Aidin is good enough to provide a history lesson (it's not every day that the Modoc War gets a shoutout), but the rest is pretty devoid of content.
Why, then, was this article written? Vaziri admits at the start that his subject is pointless (intentionally so!) and reinforces this by providing precious little detail of the awards program. What he's written is not so much television coverage or even television criticism, but television blogging on the printed page. People read newspapers for coverage of the day's events and informed opinion on a wide range of subjects. Writers naturally bring something of themselves to a piece (the best ones do, at least), but the focus is generally the opinion, not the opiner. A decent share of writing on the web, on the other hand, is stylized ranting, in which the voice of the writer is more important than her subject, and some of it is darn good. I consider Television Without Pity an invaluable resource, but it's not journalism. Neither is this article.
Of course there's crossover between the two forms. The blogs over at The New Republic generally meet excellent journalistic standards, and people read Dave Barry's column because he's Dave Barry, not because they're keen on exploding toilets. But columnists like Barry have a difficult task of blending observation, humor, criticism, and temperance, and Vaziri has failed to clear the bar. Ultimately, I don't really care what Aidin Vaziri thinks about the MTV Movie Awards, and his article does nothing to make me care.
What's the point of this, then? I'm concerned. There is a generation of young writers growing up on the Internet, immersed in a style that is both entertaining and liberating. But it is also limiting and, in the wrong hands, petty and myopic. The best critics criticize because they care; the worst criticize because they can. It's important that the former don't lose out to the latter in this modern age.
So President Reagan died. There's a lot to be said about the man, some of good, some of it unpleasant, some of it damning, but for a lot of people, there's a lot of grief, and I try not to kick people when they're grieving. There will be plenty of time to discuss Reagan's legacy when the wounds aren't fresh. Or, as my boy Grambo puts it, "no buzz for you, you effing handjobs."
That said, it's disappointing to see people who I'd expect to be grieving instead trying to score political points. Over on The Corner, they're dredging up everything Senator Kerry has said about Reagan over the past 25 years (including, to their credit, this). Among the choice entries is this quote from 1992:
But, you know, Abraham Lincoln didn’t serve, but he saved this nation and sent men into combat with moral authority. Ronald Reagan certainly was never in combat. I mean, many of his movies depicted him there. And he may have believed he was, but he never was. And the fact is that he sent Americans off to die. Bill Clinton I believe because of his experience, because of the agony he went through facing this kind of dilemma will understand the consensus that you need in this nation, the fact that you need a winning strategy, the fact that you do not send young people, young Americans off to war, unless you are committed to win it, and I think Bill Clinton would come to the Presidency equally as aware of those principles we learn in that agony as anybody else.
The spin here is captured in the post's title: "KERRY: REAGAN DIDN’T SERVE IN VIETNAM (AND I DID)". How callous of the Democratic challenger to impugn President Reagan's military service a mere twelve years before his death! But isn't Kerry's point here that it's perfectly all right for a Commander-in-Chief to lack military experience? I mean, Democratic politicians aren't really in the habit of smearing President Lincoln's character, so isn't associating him with Reagan a positive thing? Sure there's an obligatory partisan jab in there, but it seems to me that this quote is a defense of then-Governor Clinton's ability to lead the largest military in the world, citing Lincoln and Reagan as presidents with a similar amount of prior experience.
Too many 21st-century Republicans cynically hear invective whenever their opponents open their mouths. A sad reminder of how far they've come from the party that embraced "Reagan Democrats."