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The Nose Misses Howard K. Smith

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David Letterman is retiring.

Which side are you on?

In the mammoth PEN Awards kerfuffle, that is. Table captains have walked out over the award being given to the survivors from Charlie Hebdo. And now 145 writers, including six table captains and such notables as Junot Díaz, Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Eric Bogosian and Michael Cunningham, have signed a letter protesting the award to Hebdo. As LBJ  apparently never said regarding Vietnam and Walter Cronkite (but we'll come to that): Once you've lost Joyce Carol Oates, you've lost America. Francine 

Prose summed it up thusly: 

Our job, in presenting an award, is to honor writers and journalists who are saying things that need to be said, who are working actively to tell us the truth about the world in which we live. That is important work that requires perseverance and courage. And this is not quite the same as drawing crude caricatures and mocking religion.

On the other side, you've got New Yorker titan Adam Gopnik:

The principle involved is that the free expression of ideas, including insulting ideas, is part of what writing is. If people aren’t free to insult authority in some distant country, then we aren’t entirely free here. This does seem like a good principle to banquet upon.

I'm on Team Francine. We'll see what The Nose does with this today aspoet Kate Rushin makes her debut with regulars Rand Richards Cooper and Irene Papoulis. We all wondered if the question of Charlie Hebdo's tastefulness could be connected to Adam Sandler's Native American actor walk-out. Joke I wish I had written: people usually wait for an Adam Sandler movie to open before they walk out.

On Wednesday, about a dozen Native American actors, including the film’s Native consultant, walked off the set of Adam Sandler’s new Western parody,The Ridiculous Six. The actors found the language in the script to be offensive toward native women and misrepresentative of Apache culture. In not-exactly-surprising Sandler fashion, the screenplay offers up jokes about an Apache woman smoking a peace pipe while squatting to pee. Other native women have names like “Beaver’s Breath” and “No Bra.” Looks like we may have a new contender for Sandler’s most offensive flick to date. Loren Anthony, a Navajo Nation tribal member and lead singer of metal band Bloodline, told Indian Country Today Media Network that he’d originally declined to participate in the movie. “I was asked a long time ago to do some work on this and I wasn’t down for it. Then they told me it was going to be a comedy, but it would not be racist.”

Over the last few days, we got into some interesting reflections on how humor and satire does or doesn't age well. 

Also on our radar, A Letterman in Winter. May 20 is the last show. I just went looking for a pull quote, but there wasn't one. It's more his whole tone and his reflection on relevancy. And it marries somehow with the Frank Rich piece on the end of the anchorman, A few favorite bits

The first network anchor to have leading-man qualities in the Hollywood manner was Huntley, who had little news experience but was a tall, handsome, and deep-voiced product of small-town Montana. Huntley was partnered with the more cerebral David Brinkley, a seasoned reporter with a wry delivery and a witty writing style, because, as Reuven Frank, the Huntley-Brinkley Report’s longtime producer, explained, Brinkley didn’t have “the authority that the audience wants” and “Huntley did.” What gave Huntley that authority, Frank said, was “that great leonine head and that Murrow-like voice.” The “image of probity or authority” was “a lie,” Frank added, but “people want to believe it.”

And

That’s due not just to a technological revolution but to the erosion of confidence in nearly all American institutions and authority figures, including anchormen who seem unreconstructed relics of the Mad Men era. Williams is hardly unaware of this. The revelation that he had campaigned to succeed Jay Leno and David Letterman in their late-night gigs, and done so at the height of his success as an anchorman, can be read as the act of a man besotted by comedy, for which he discovered he had a modest talent. But more probably it was a panicked response to the reality that he was the last old-school anchorman standing.

All that, plus endorsements!

GUESTS: 

  • Rand Cooper - author, essayist, and  restaurant critic for the New York Times
  • Irene Papoulis - lecturer in the Allan K. Smith Center for Writing and Rhetoric at Trinity College
  • Kate Rushin - poet and former Director of The Center for African American Studies and Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University
Colin McEnroe is a radio host, newspaper columnist, magazine writer, author, playwright, lecturer, moderator, college instructor and occasional singer. Colin can be reached at colin@ctpublic.org.

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