Day: October 20, 2003

Over at Slate, Jack Shafer and Mickey Kaus both have pretty good takes on the debacle of Easterbrook’s strange Kill Bill blog. Kaus also links to about 10 million other blogs that discuss (or mindlessly rant about) Easterbrook’s entry and subsequent apology.

Funnily enough, Shafer actually had the exact same reaction I did when he read the column last Monday. He writes:

The moral posturing and witless embrace of loathsome cultural stereotypes found in these 84 words seemed so un-Easterbrook that I hoped that someone would e-mail me the news that somebody had hacked Gregg’s blog and inserted this bogus copy.

I’m glad that people who are close to Easterbrook have defended him as a person, even as they’ve criticized his work in this instance. It’s much better than reading, “Y’know, he told me he was collecting that Nazi memorabilia for a special project, but I never thought…”

Anyway, it seems that this rant of his got out of hand, such was his indignation at Tarantino’s film (which I’m now dying to see, admittedly). It’s not like he’d be the first blogger to misstep; it’s more a sign of his gravitas that such comments were taken so seriously (though I still contend they’re more muddled than anti-semitic). Anyone who’s read this blog in the past 8 months knows that essay-like entries can really go off the rails sometimes.

One other disturbing thing: It completely slipped my mind when I was writing the first entry, but ESPN (where TMQ was published each week) is actually owned by Disney. See, I thought TMQ’s quick hook was a post-Limbaugh response by ESPN. But now, it raises a more sinister question: Did a high-up at Disney (Eisner or Weinstein, perhaps) call for Easterbrook’s firing? Media consolidation sucks.

I hope that Tuesday Morning Quarterback resurfaces somewhere like Slate (where the column originated).

Or at Virtual Memories! Why, I’m pretty unconsolidated, by Big Media terms (well, I do run a publishing company by night, edit a pharmaceutical magazine by day, and watch NFL Direct Ticket on Sundays)!

So let it be known that I am now offering Gregg Easterbrook a place to post his Tuesday Morning Quarterback columns. I can’t promise that my server won’t collapse under the weight of the new traffic, but I can offer an absoluete minimum of editorial interference (after all, I am used to running a trade magazine)!

Ouch. Gregg Easterbrook — whose essays I enjoy and whose Tuesday Morning Quarterback columns on ESPN Page 2 are always a hoot — just got canned from the latter gig. I meant to write about his blog on The New Republic’s site last week, because he wrote an entry that I found pretty incomprehensible. Since the blog doesn’t use internal bookmark hyperlinks, you’ll have to go to here or over the Easterbrook link on the left side of this page, and scroll down to the 10.13.03 entry about Kill Bill and Quentin Tarantino’s fatuousness.

I don’t agree with his stance on the complete uselessness of Tarantino’s work, and I think Ron Rosenbaum makes a very neat case for Oliver Stone and Tarantino serving as stand-ins for Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but it was the closing paragraph that I found troubling and incomprehensible. And it’s why he’s been fired from his ESPN gig (and, in Soviet fashion, throw in the memory hole of the Page 2 site).

If you’re too lazy to go to the page itself, shame on you. But here’s the paragraph in question:

Set aside what it says about Hollywood that today even Disney thinks what the public needs is ever-more-graphic depictions of killing the innocent as cool amusement. Disney’s CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice. But history is hardly the only concern. Films made in Hollywood are now shown all over the world, to audiences that may not understand the dialogue or even look at the subtitles, but can’t possibly miss the message–now Disney’s message–that hearing the screams of the innocent is a really fun way to express yourself.

I’ve read a bunch of Easterbrook’s work. I know that he’s a devout Christian, but not, as near as I could tell, an anti-semite. So the notion that Eisner and Weinstein, as Jews, “worship money above all else,” was disturbing. There’s been an uproar (I hate when people use the term ‘furor’ for this sorta thing, for obvious reasons) about the blog, and Easterbrook’s editor, a Jew, spoke out to defend him and criticize blogs (somewhat predictably).

Anyway, one of the reasons I didn’t write about this entry at the time was because I simply didn’t understand where he was coming from. The criticism of Jews came so out of left field that I actually thought the blog had been hacked that morning. It hadn’t. On Thursday, Easterbrook wrote an apology. Unfortunately, it didn’t make his argument that much clearer, and it seemed to imply that all Jews, as Jews, should think in certain ways. If you read it differently, please drop me an e-mail so we can discuss it.

PS: I won’t buy a Volkswagen. My father drives a Mercedes-Benz. We differ on a lot of subjects, and we’re just two Jews.