Just when we thought the Royal Wedding was going to be the only TV news story ever again, along comes the only news story capable of eclipsing America's wistful (and so misplaced) yearning for a monarchy: the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Surprise! And it's not even October 2012.
Ding dong, the mass murderer is dead. Or so read one of the placards being held by students outside the White House the night of the announcement. If bin Laden is indeed dead, it's a suitable end for a mass murderer who isn't just responsible for the 3,000 innocents murdered on 9/11, but also for all those killed in Afghanistan in the years since. That said, for a drama so long in the preparation (August 2010, according to the President's own speech), it seems odd that the Obama team couldn't get the story straight from the outset. Watching the evening news is like viewing the next installment in a soap opera written by too many people who haven't checked their storylines with each other.
Here are the questions that should have been asked by every TV journalist until there were answers: Why was bin Laden executed summarily, then dumped in the sea? Why wasn't he captured and held for trial like, you know, all the Nazis up to and including Eichmann in 1961? The job of TV news is not to regurgitate the White House (any White House) spin. It's to ask questions and keep asking them until substantive answers are provided. That's why the media is the fourth estate, not part of the first or second.
On 60 Minutes on May 8, Obama said, "Justice was done." One would be hard-pressed to find any American who didn't want bin Laden dead. We certainly did. But justice as defined by American jurisprudence involves an arrest and a subsequent trial, not vigilantism. Otherwise, you know, we look kinda like the people we are killing. So the news on May 7 that we had tried to assassinate a Yemeni al-Qaeda operative, then also tried to assassinate US-citizen-turned-Muslim-extremist Anwar al-Awlaki was a bit disturbing. And yet, still no questions. Just imagine this is 2005 and George Bush said, "After 10 months of strategy and planning which included manning a safe house in Pakistan and creating a replica of the compound bin Laden was living in for Navy Seals to train in, we caught and killed Osama bin Laden with two shots to the head, checked his DNA in less than 12 hours against, you know, something, then tossed his body in the ocean within 24 hours of death in accordance with Islamic tradition so as not to rile up Muslims and cause mayhem, and we aren't releasing the photos for the same reason. But we do have them. You just have to trust us on this." Think there wouldn't have been questions?
Perhaps more info will come out. Perhaps some reporter will push Jay Carney until he gets testy again by asking probing questions that go to the rule of law rather than the contents of bin Laden's medicine cabinet. We'd like to know when it became legal for the President to authorize assassinations. But for now, the bin Laden story is not unlike the Royal Wedding. Lots of glitzy, effusive repetition, and not much attention to the facts. What really happened the night of May 1? Hearing ABC's Martha Raddatz intone, "And then the Navy Seals looked deep into [bin Laden's] deadly brown eyes and shot him" is not what we think of when we think of award-winning journalism.
SNL head writer and Weekend Update anchor Seth Myers may have gotten in the last "Where's bin Laden?" joke at the Correspondents Dinner the night before the bin Laden take-down. He opined bin Laden was hiding out on C-SPAN. Myers also got in some very funny jokes about Donald Trump, who has dropped right off the radar and TV screen since it became all bin Laden, all the time. Trump lost any chances of the presidential bid that was never serious when he failed to laugh at either Myers or Obama's jokes about him. Voters can forgive almost anything – assassinations, wars, torture, unemployment, tax cuts for the rich, killing off the poor – but humorlessness is the death knell. And Trump left fuming so much his hair was on end.
Obama was smart enough to hire a comedian to write his jokes, and we all know how good he is with a Teleprompter. Imagine how much more fun it was sticking it to Trump knowing that 24 hours later Obama would be announcing the murder of bin Laden? Sweet.
Trump's presidential aspirations were suddenly as dead or deader than bin Laden. That joke was put to rest, and there was no coming back. That humorlessness will kill Gingrich, too. And Santorum, both of whom were cut from Fox News last week since they are allegedly running for president, despite numbers in the low single digits. And who says only bad news comes in threes?
Oh, and speaking of pundits who were cut for politicizing, Keith Olbermann, now referred to as The Keith (by himself), is back on the tube. Sort of. He's been hired by Current. What's Current, you (may well) ask? That's where old and disgraced pundits (yes, we're talking to you, Dan Rather) go to die. It's the Al Gore network. They may do good work, although the hiring of The Keith does not bode well, given he lied to his audience repeatedly about being fired from MSNBC to gain sympathy, then acknowledged that he'd been in negotiations with them for months to leave. We used to think that was scummy. But that may have been back when we thought presidents giving assassination orders was illegal and kinda dictator-y.
Speaking of which, Carney did tell reporters on May 6 that there would be no change in the Afghanistan situation. So anyone thinking that killing bin Laden (the reason for invading Afghanistan 10 years ago) would end the war there is mistaken. The President reiterated this in his 60 Minutes interview. (Check that out at CBS.com, and also the Oprah interview with Obama and the First Lady, which was taped prior to the killing of bin Laden, but is still interesting.)
Meanwhile, there was actually more happening than bin Laden as May began. The economic numbers came out on May 6, and ABC, which has gone right off the rails since bin Laden was killed, opened their evening newscast with "Winning!," believe it or not. (Are we channeling Charlie Sheen now?) According to George Stephanopoulos, who was sitting in for Diane Sawyer who was exhausted from her rabidly enthusiastic bin Laden coverage at Ground Zero, although unemployment was up 2/10ths of a percent, that was actually good news because it probably meant people were encouraged to look for work again. Okay. Time to stop reading directly from White House press releases, folks.
One tidbit of news we didn't hear about because it doesn't mesh with that "winning" or "winning the future" ideation from the White House is this: A May 5 report from the Department of Agriculture finds that one in seven Americans are now receiving food stamps. Mississippi and Oregon had the highest number of residents getting food stamps: one in five. So let's review this news you're not seeing: Somewhat over 14% of the American population needs and is getting food stamps now – except for the two states in which 20% are getting them. One can kind of see how this wouldn't engender the same chanting of "USA! USA!" as the murder of bin Laden. Geez, remember when you could turn to the tube for escape? Not in this reality-centric world.
Shades of 'Grey'
After all the bin Laden and economic news, we needed something romantic to lift our spirits. We hoped that the wedding of Callie and Arizona on Grey's Anatomy would make us feel more human and less, well, icky. What it made us feel is that homophobia is still rampant, but so is true queer love.
Not everyone is a fan of this show. It may take a lot of estrogen to watch for extended periods. We've heard Chaz Bono had to give it up. But the wedding of Callie and Arizona was lush, beautiful and tear-jerking in all the best ways. Arizona's father walked her down the aisle. Mark walked Callie down the aisle. Callie's mother flipped out before the wedding and said that she was so sad that her daughter would never be with her in heaven because all of this was a sin against God, but Callie's father came back at the last minute to dance the first dance with her because he loves his daughter more than he hates her being queer.
We so love Miranda, the small, black spitfire who has been the team's leader since they arrived at Seattle Grace. Miranda talked Callie up off the sofa after her mother decimated her, and said that her mother hadn't caught up to God yet. Right, because as our Lady Gaga says, God doesn't make mistakes. So the wedding went on and was lovely, and we could cry for something meaningful and positive, like queer love stories, rather than murder and revenge.
Grey's did an interesting juxtaposition of Callie and Arizona's lush wedding sans legal imprimatur and Meredith and Derek getting a quicky marriage certificate at City Hall so they could adopt an African baby with serious health issues. It pointed out with deliberate poignancy how excluded queers are, and how straight people don't even have to think about marriage unless it has legal ramifications for them, and then it's a split-second event, because, you know, straight privilege. Brava, Shonda Rimes. She's really got this queer thing and its civil rights elements down this season.
Speaking of getting it down, we love Glee. Other than the Religious Right, who doesn't love Glee? We regularly laugh, cry and wish there had been a Mr. Schuester at our school, especially since we had that bullying problem ourselves. The "Born this Way" episode was The Best Episode Ever. Perhaps the most heartbreakingly beautiful song ever performed on Glee was Kurt's return with an exquisitely nuanced rendition of the Andrew Lloyd Weber hit from Sunset Boulevard, "As If We Never Said Goodbye." Sometimes an episode of a show is so pitch-perfect that it does indeed sing. There were some truly brilliant moments in this paean to being one's true self, no matter who says what about you.
We loved Santana, the gorgeous Latina closet lesbian conspiring with the closeted gay bully David to woo Kurt back to Glee Club for Nationals. We loved the outing of the perfect-looking Quinn as a former fat girl with a big nose. We loved that Rachel decided against plastic surgery for her big Jewish nose. We even loved that Sue's sometimes tiresome one-note meanness was absent from this episode. Santana's plan was both tragic and amusing. The outing of everyone was both poignant and affirming.
We also loved the blatant homosexuals-do-have-an-agenda subtext. Let's face it, Glee is a super-queer show on a real network (sorry Logo, but let's not pretend, shall we?), which makes a nice change from the gazillion straight shows on the tube. It can be challenging watching straights flaunt their straightness in your face night after night after night. It's enough to drive one to reading.
Only a few episodes left before the season finale, but hey, you can Netflix the series over the summer, catch up on what you missed, and fall in love all over again. If you missed this episode, however, do watch online. Kurt is a dream, but the group rendition of La Gaga's "Born This Way" is spectacular and deeply moving.
The morning after, we found ourselves e-mailing friends about the episode. Then we caught a story about a Houston Fox affiliate that had used the episode as a platform for targeting the show's "homosexual agenda." Apparently watching Glee is tantamount to taking crack: one hit and you're spending your nights by the glory hole. Because, apparently, TV is too gay. Yeah, and the media is too liberal. Seriously?
For once, GLAAD actually stepped up and demanded an apology (which they are not getting). But you can check out the scenario at GLAAD.org and file your own protest at MyFoxHOUSTON.com.
Finally, our friend e-mailed us this telling note last week: The subject line was "I don't want to worry you, but –" The e-mail continued: "Last night on SVU, neither the victims nor the bad guy nor the suspects, nor any characters at all were gay, or lesbian or transsexual! Doesn't this mean the end times are here?"
One never knows when the end times are coming. After all, bin Laden is dead, the Royals are finally married and so are Callie and Arizona, and Kurt is back in Glee Club. So anything can happen. Which is why we implore you to stay tuned.