Hey, remember those wars in the Middle East? Well, just like a David Copperfield illusion trick on prime time, they disappeared.
Well, not really disappeared. About 100 civilians a day are still dying in Iraq. And in the Israeli/Hezbollah war, more than a million Lebanese were displaced, more than 1,000 killed and several thousand more injured, more than 100 Israelis were killed, 1,000 injured and a half-million displaced. But those pictures aren't on the tube any more. They're messy and bloody, and make us sick of the so-called war on terror.
Instead we have the new summer replacement show for the war, The Blair Switch Project. That's the show in which the Brits take attention away from the real blood and guts in the Middle East and replace it with the possibility that Americans or Europeans might be killed, in a plot right out of a James Bond movie. All that was missing was someone stroking the big white cat.
So this is what we saw on our tube this week, a kind of crazy Science Friday quiz: What do you get when you mix hair gel, baby formula and the click of your digital camera? According to the Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff, you get something close to kryptonite that will explode planes in mid-air. Holy incredible terrorist plot, Batman!
Now we realize it's summer, but isn't this a rerun from a few seasons ago? We had that creeping sense of deja vu as we watched Chertoff's bizarre press conference, in which he looked like he was going to burst out laughing as he described the foiled hair gel/baby formula/digital camera plot.
And you were worried about exploding shoes! It was hair gel! Remember what happened to Michael Jackson when he was filming that Pepsi commercial? You thought the worst thing that could happen was your hair catches on fire and you turn into a white woman. It's far worse.
The threat level was raised from orange to red, then lowered to orange again. If only DHS had worked that fast last year when Katrina was impending, perhaps New Orleans would still exist. The so-called terrorist plot had the fastest spin cycle in the history of the tube. Obscured by the whirlwind plot, Iraq and Lebanon were relegated to the crawl on CNN. Sweet.
But as the terror plot began to unravel and the Middle East started to slither back into the news again: Huzzah! Another breaking story!
The most famous murdered blond child since the Lindbergh baby, JonBenet Ramsey hit the headlines just as she would have celebrated her 16th birthday. On August 16, John Mark Karr, a creepy convicted pedophile from Atlanta, was arrested in Bangkok for allegedly murdering the six-year-old beauty queen on Christmas night, 1996.
The Ramsey story blanketed the news with Karr's pretty-boy-sociopath face staring into the massive bank of cameras, in a reprise of Gloria Swanson in the final minutes of Sunset Boulevard. Do killers usually hold press conferences?
ABC's Nightline dragged Barbara Walters out of the wrestling smackdown that The View has become to comment on the arrest. Walters interviewed John and Patsy Ramsey back when they refused to talk to police about the murder of their daughter, but just had to talk to the media.
Walters was stunning in a black silk outfit as she interviewed John Ramsey about whether or not he felt "vindicated" by the arrest of Karr, who within 24 hours would appear to be a less likely suspect. Ramsey was utterly emotionless. Not quite as creepy as Karr, but close.
Alas, Walters has lost not just her edge, but possibly her mind, from her stint at the treacly View. We were underwhelmed by her "analysis" of the case. (When 87% of people polled said they didn't think Karr did it, but Walters believed it, you have to wonder at her journalistic credibility. More people believe Suri Cruise actually exists.) Perhaps Geraldo has some room for her over on Fox.
Ramsey did a perfect OJ Simpson imitation as he talked about the "real" killer, Karr. (Ramsey "found" his daughter in a crawlspace in a locked room after police had been searching his house for hours on the day of her murder.) Who knows, perhaps Karr killed Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman as well.
This story has legs: first the pretend arrest and confession, then the deconstruction, not to mention the e-mails about Karr's obsession with JonBenet and stories about Karr's ex-wife, who is his alibi in the case, as she says he was with her celebrating Christmas when JonBenet was murdered. This should play right past Labor Day.
For all those who call queers "degenerate perverts," we would like to note that Karr is a married man with children and his predilection is for little girls, just like the majority of pedophiles. We would also like to remind parents dressing up their little girls to look like high-priced call girls that they might as well be making kiddie porn. Watching little JonBenet prance around like a hooker makes Lolita seem like a fairy tale. What her parents did to her was quite a crime in itself.
There was a teensy story obscured by the JonBenet fest when it broke on August 17: a federal judge found the President had utterly overstepped his authority in authorizing the NSA wiretaps of millions of Americans. Yawn. Who cares about erosion of civil liberties and tampering with the Constitution when there's a fraudulent sex-offender posing as a murderer? ABC senior White House correspondent Martha Raddatz told Gwen Ifill on the August 18 Washington Week in Review that this was a huge story for Washington. Maybe for Washington, but not for the networks. Raddatz proclaimed it would be the story that truly tests the Administration on the war on terror. Perhaps, but not if the only play the story gets is during prime time on PBS on Friday.
Millions die
Something else that just got the crawl treatment on TV was the XVI AIDS conference held in Toronto August 13-18. Apparently, Stalin was right: the death of one means more than the deaths of millions (65 million have been infected, 25 million have died). Thus few saw the interview with Bill Clinton about his AIDS work, in which he slammed the Bush Administration on AIDS. Fewer still saw Nightline's indictment of South Africa, the AIDS capital of the world, which banned UN special envoy on AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis from being in the country in his official capacity until he apologizes for saying HIV causes AIDS. Without BBC and CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corp.], we wouldn't have seen anything about the conference, almost as if the disease no longer exists.
According to Clinton, who has his own charity (www.clintonfoundation.org ) to facilitate getting anti-retrovirals and diagnostics to the poor in Africa and elsewhere, the Bush Administration needs to ease conditions on HIV programs. Clinton asserted that many people are dying unnecessarily due to the conditions BushCo has placed on funding for HIV/AIDS programs in developing countries. Bush's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief requires that recipients adopt a policy of opposing prostitution to receive funding. A full third of the program is devoted to abstinence-only prevention campaigns.
Clinton was succinct: "I wish they would just amend the law and say, 'We disapprove of prostitution, but here's the money, go save lives,'" since the sex trade is a major factor in HIV's spread. He added, "They [prostitutes] deserve a chance to be empowered, to save their lives and to keep from infecting others."
Clinton told the BBC that abstinence programs should not apply in countries where many teenaged girls are forced into sex. Bush's plan needs a more comprehensive prevention strategy.
Speaking of Republicans making bad decisions, another news story you might have missed involved Sen. George Allen (R-VA), who during a re-election campaign stop focused his attention on the only non-white person in his audience, calling the young man "macaca" and saying, "Welcome to America."
Macaca means monkey and is an ethnic slur for East Indians. S.R. Sidarth, the man targeted by Allen, is a volunteer for Allen's Democratic opponent and a native-born Virginian. Allen was forced to meet with very unhappy leaders of Virginia's large Indian community. Allen says he didn't know macaca was a bad word, to which we can only say, if it has caca in it, common sense might tell you not to use it. Plus, such a "slip" might not hurt Allen's chances with his base.
Finally, for comic relief, there was another sighting of Leonid the Magnificent on Jimmy Kimmel Live and the Aug. 17 season finale of America's Got Talent. Leonid, the biggest drag queen in America, landed in the spotlight during the first season of NBC's AGT . With more feathers than a flock of flamingos, Leonid appeared with (wait for it) PeeWee Herman on Kimmel, spreading his legs on the desk and flouncing his pink feathers and shiny pink Speedo in PeeWee's face. It was a moment.
We aren't sure how Leonid got out of Siberia (although we do know why), and we aren't sure what he does for a living in Brooklyn, but we want him to appear regularly on prime time TV. He's our new obsession.
Meanwhile, the primetime Emmy show is August 27: dish-worthy. Go, Craig Ferguson! And Katie Couric hits CBS on September 5. Stay tuned.