Letterman's bizarre experience

David Letterman had a bizarre experience. And it turns out that this experience has produced a bizarre one of my own: I have been forced, in my own unwilling psyche, to accept the words of Sarah Palin -- "I told you so."

First, an exegesis of Letterman's unpleasant schtick last night in which he adulterated wan jokes with squeamish self-revelations. It appears that Letterman's morality has been in arrears for the past few years, to be quite doggerel about it. He has managed not a few trysts with his female underlings.

To make matters worse, for him that is, someone at CBS who knew about the business threatened the ironic comedian with a revealing book and screenplay -- a literary/dramatic process that would unveil the number-one-in-the-time-slot raconteur as just another lounge lizard lothario. 

Unless, of course, Dave would cough up 2 million.

Can't have that of course, a beloved comedian being harassed by extortion for doing a perfectly legal thing.

So much for the sitz im leben. We've just outlined the historical setting, and thrown in the obligatory nods toward form analysis: now for the real business, the words themselves from the speaker himself.

He framed the whole unpleasantness as a "bizarre experience" that left him feeling "disturbed and menaced." Immediately we have here the rhetoric of displacement: "He went thataway!" the pickpocket points offstage and you glance away while he runs, snatched purse in hand. Never mind the adultery, the sex outside of marriage (I guess we should be thankful it was "only" heterosexual, whose disruptions have been diminished into the category of "hanky panky"). Never mind the toxin -- of which males in their frat-consciousness are customarily ignorant -- that pollutes an office environment when some underlings win connections and affections, and others do not. Never mind the theme of exploitation here -- we all got annoyed with a former President who parleyed his position into insinuations with a lowly intern: but an entertainer should be given a pass for this, shouldn't he?, because he makes us laugh late at night and doesn't really wield power, doesn't he? That framing turns out to be par for the course for such an accomplished ironicist, yes?

So now, instead of adultery as the offense (it was "consensual" after all, and this makes it all better so we can sleep easy after turning off Dave), it is rather the scary aspect of "extortion." Now, the socially-defined evil of the moment is the bad man who demanding a payoff "or else" -- the "or else" being a tell-all-to-end-all. Now, the thing that excites our pity and -- judging from the frat house laughter and applause from his signature sardonic cadence -- sympathy is the fact that Letterman has had to suffer a sequence of events that is "bizarre," that now he feels "disturbed and menaced." There was no possibility of pity and sympathy that we used to -- in the good old days -- reserve only for contrition and repentance. There was none of that. There was only the discomfiture of having fallen in the hands of wicked men.

I think Solomon somewhere said something about how the door into an adulterous bedroom leads oily and steep down into the smoky shadows, where thieves and extortioners and worse run rampant. David is now complaining that his own private Hades has the character that he had surely heard about but headed off to anyways, ignoring the warning labels on the map.

He is rightly upset now that a greasy, pimply extortioner interposed himself outside his apartment door with typewritten sheafs in his grubby hands. I am sorry he went through this: but grubby hands follow, normally, hands that roam.

So now he blames the darkness for being dark, not himself for having turned off the lights in the first place.

Enough of exegesis. Now for the Kafka-esque near-insufferable turn of events.

You remember, some months ago, when Sarah Palin worried, in her deft dialect and singular patois, about David ever being around her daughter? And I was one of the many who guffawed?

I hear "I told you so" in that clipped-vowel Fargo-esque english-language-grinder accent of the ex-vice-presidential candidate, and I say "yes you did."

But life will go on. Nielson assures us that millions of people tonight will eschew prayers and icon, even connubial relations, in favor of Dave (and other ironicists), waiting for their displacement-prophecies and self-caressing lyrics, to lullabye them into meaningless dreams of leftover passions -- a common bizarre experience for a fragmented, disaffected soul.

It's hard to sleep, to rest, nowadays. What's demanded these days is a narcotic to bring on narcosis, since the sleep of good work, grief and joy, is so hard (notice how many sleep clinics there are?). What's wanted is a nightly, fanciful dose of ironic anaphora that repeats, in vain caressing repetition, the invocations of a chuckling world without sin -- sinless because, you know, camouflaged in shadow.

Goodnight moon. Goodnight Dave.

Nighty night.

Snare roll, thump and cymbal.

Comments

[Robert]

Thanks for reminding me why I had cut-off TV a year or so ago. With every passing day I feel better about that decision. Call me a prude.

One word: Hypnosis.

[Aaron Taylor]

Reminds me of some of the astonishing sentiments over Roman Polanski's just and delayed arrest. How did the US courts become the bad guy and the child-rapist win all the sympathy?

[Robert]

no surprise from the pushers of perversion

[Visibilium]

As repellent as his unfunny jokes is the presence of that bizarrely decadent bandleader-sidekick.

[Abba Poemen the Ubermensch]

"But life will go on. Nielson assures us that millions of people tonight will eschew prayers and icon, even connubial relations, in favor of Dave (and other ironicists), waiting for their displacement-prophecies and self-caressing lyrics, to lullabye them into meaningless dreams of leftover passions -- a common bizarre experience for a fragmented, disaffected soul."

"It's hard to sleep, to rest, nowadays. What's demanded these days is a narcotic to bring on narcosis, since the sleep of good work, grief and joy, is so hard (notice how many sleep clinics there are?). What's wanted is a nightly, fanciful dose of ironic anaphora that repeats, in vain caressing repetition, the invocations of a chuckling world without sin -- sinless because, you know, camouflaged in shadow."

These are the most disturbing paragraphs I've read recently. Bravo.

[Stephen]

Yes, Dave is quite the magician with all the comedic smoke and mirrors. I couldn't help but to think, "Wait a second! what about the infidelity and fornication stuff?" not to mention the connection to his work place. I could not see myself getting away with even the illusion of desire toward a female co-worker. I would receive a quick and unceremonious dismissal for someone who would be seen as expendable and unprofitable.
Dave comes from a long line of womanizers which we have become to comfortable with allowing them certain freedoms for the sake of entertainment.

[JCW]

Father Tobias,

Father, bless. (To be warned, this is completely off-topic.) I have been reading the Psalms daily, trying to read them both morning and evening, and I am struck by the continual references to "enemies." It seems, in our Western culture, that we have few enemies, possibly because of indifference to the affairs of others. If enemies do exist, they do so when another person tries to climb the "corporate ladder" in our stead. We hate so inadequately, possibly because we love so thinly. (I am probably mis-reading our culture.) In any event, my question is, "How are we to read all the Psalter's references to enemies in the light of Christ's logion to 'love our enemies'?" Thank you for your time and attention in this regard; keep well.

[Fr. Jonathan]

Joshua,

The enemies in the Psalms (and really, everywhere in the memory of the Church written and unwritten) are not to be understood as "fellow man" at all. I had a chanter once who took no little glee at aiming certain Psalmic complaints against his perceived enemies. The problem lay on two points for him. One was that he really had no enemies to speak of, since all he suffered was a sullen look here and a negative comment there. The other point was that since the Incarnation and Pentecost, our enemies are spiritual. We are commanded to be angry at the demonic, but to confine our anger toward them and not toward any other creature, especially they who bear the image of God.

We should hate these enemies. And I have to think that we sin and hate our fellow man mostly because we are not hate the demonic enough, because we do not love the divine enough.

How's that?

[Fr. Jonathan]

Oh, and Visibilium (V, for short), were you aware that the sidekick is a PK?

[JCW]

Father, that's excellent. I don't remember where I read this quotation about anger, but it was one of the Fathers: "God gave us anger to bear toward the serpent, but we have borne it toward our neighbour." Thank you for your time and attention in this regard.