So Emily Rooney thinks it's funny to "smack the ish" out of gay men . . .

As you may have heard, CNN anchor Roland Martin was recently suspended for tweeting the following during the Super Bowl:

‘If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham's H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!’

His managers (quite correctly) surmised that what Martin meant to communicate to his many followers was something like, "If there's a gay guy at your Super Bowl party, you owe it to yourself to beat the shit out of him!"

Well, GLAD immediately protested, and Martin has been off the job ever since - even though he insisted that his tweets were only "a light-hearted joke."

Yeah, right.  But guess what - WGBH's Emily Rooney agrees with him.

Actually, Martin at least wised up and later made something of an apology on his website, where he wrote:

'To those who construed my comment as being anti-gay or homophobic or advancing violence, I'm truly sorry. I can certainly understand how someone could come to a different conclusion than the one I meant.'

But on tonight's edition of Beat Off the Press - oh sorry, Beat the Press (which I was only watching because I couldn't reach the remote) - when guest panelist Kara Miller hailed CNN's management for taking action against Martin, Rooney loudly disagreed, stating that she "would not have in a million years determined that to be somehow anti-gay."  (You can watch it all toward the end of the clip at top.)

To which I can only say -

OMG, it's an incitement to violence!  (The offending ad.)

Is she fucking kidding?

For the record, Callie Crossley seemed to agree with Emily; she felt the case "wasn't quite that clear."  Yeah, right.  Somehow I think if Martin had been tweeting about "smacking the ish" out of women - or people of color, Crossley would have had a conniption.  But the idea of a black man tweeting about beating up a gay man . . . well, maybe she's half-down with that.  Or at least, she felt CNN needed "a more consistent policy." Maybe one that named every protected group specifically, I suppose . . .

As for Rooney, she rambled on that the tweet was indeed "Dumb . . . " then added with a knowing leer, "But he was probably having a few brews!!"  Uh-huh.  Tell us about it, Emily.

Okay, so Emily Rooney gets a kick out of open anti-gay bigotry, as long as you're drunk when you say it.  And so does Callie Crossley, unless there is a specific policy in effect against it.  Good to know!  And it's certainly interesting that WGBH's standards of hate speech are actually lower than CNN's.  (Because if Rooney and Crossley were working there, they'd be out of a job right now, wouldn't they.)

Still, all I can say is - it's really too bad Jared Bowen wasn't on the show that night!

More from Don Hall! (You know you want it.)

Long time readers know that one of my flaws is that I simply enjoy belligerent stupidity too much to leave it alone. Indeed, I almost savor it. Yes, I know this is wrong - and I know someday I'll be in some circle of Purgatory blogging for Isaac Butler or something to atone for my sins. But in the meantime, the flesh is weak. And my inherent love of pleasure - even this perverse form of pleasure - is strong.

So I have to go back and make some more fun of Don Hall, a.k.a. "The Angry White Guy in Chicago" (above left), with my only justification being that he keeps sending me the material himself! I was good earlier today - you have to give me credit; I didn't publish the ridiculous comment that purported to justify his previous outbursts, but soon devolved into calling me a "douche." That's right. Ouch, that really hurt, Don! Stop it, you big bully! I did at least allude to the pointlessness of protesting one's reputation for homophobia by means of a slur against women. But somehow I think that was all lost on the Chicago blogosphere's answer to Einstein.

Because the funnyman is back! I got the follow-up below earlier today:

What a complete coward. And a douchebag.

I encourage you to admit openly that your argument about Tarantino/Thomas has nothing whatsoever to do with politics and that it has everything to do with your own Deadly Theatrical tendencies of artistic taste.

I understand that you are caught up in that conundrum of being so invested into [sic] an argument that you realize is false that it’s hard to admit your error. Do it anyway. The homophobe thing is a dodge and you know it.

This is pretty good, isn't it. Like so many commenters, Hall seems to feel that if he simply repeats himself he will somehow transcend his offensiveness, or the holes in his logic. And if that doesn't happen? Well, he just repeats himself again.

Also - note the intriguing capitalization of "Deadly Theatrical" (we'll ignore the misuse of "conundrum," and the ungrammatical "invested into," for the time being). Do I sense a theory of sorts banging around in that cute little pink tutu? Yes, I think I do!

But let's leave that hobbyhorse for another ride, too. In the meantime, let's simply savor the sheer blindness of the post - what I love about it most is Hall's claim, which sounds rather like a child singing to itself in the dark, that I "realize my argument is false but can't admit my error." Uh-huh. I hate to tell Hall that in fact, I'm just getting started. I've yet to really work out the parallel between Tarantino and Reifenstahl, or - better yet - the fact that Tarantino anticipates, even invites, the parallel himself, as evidenced by the many refs to Reifenstahl in Inglourious Basterds. In short, the meme has just begun, Bozo. You ain't seen nothin' yet.

As for whether you are aware of your own homophobia - please, who cares. Likewise your dependence on reverse class snobbery (and ageism!) as replacements for thought. That's how you run your blog, obviously - it's how you went so wrong on Under Milk Wood, for instance. How could I change you? I can't, and I'm not interested in doing so. You've served your purpose as Exhibit A, now move along.

Boston mourns beloved racist homophobe

Awww, you gotta love him - if you didn't, you'd throw up.

Well, we can finally ring down the curtain on Albert "Dapper" O'Neil, the "crusty" Boston pol whose act depended on an implied war between the poor, freckled Irish family in Southie who only needed a free turkey to make their little Christmas bright, and the unwashed hordes of women, blacks, gays and lesbians with evil designs on said bird. O'Neill's last, wackily finest hour, I suppose, was his crazed opposition to the Robert Mapplethorpe show at the ICA some years back. I still remember the photo the Globe appended to its article on the show's eventual opening - of "Dapper" himself closely inspecting a photo of a half-clothed young boy. At the time, it seemed like a hilariously po-faced nod to the rumors whispered in the gay community about O'Neil's own sexuality (rumors being repeated these days about another major Boston cultural figure). Needless to say, "Dapper" never married - although he "dated" the same woman all his life. Uh-huh. Now before you say it, do I have any proof that "Dapper" was cut from the same cloth as Representative Foley, Senator Craig, and the many conservative queens who've been tripped up in their hypocritical pumps over the last few years? No, I don't - but it seems likely, doesn't it? And why can't we simply discuss its likelihood? And why do beloved, conservative Irish pols always seem to be drunks, or have murderers for brothers, or are rumored to be gay trolls? (I'm asking that as an Irishman myself.) Isn't there some Irish Mitt Romney out there, who's merely a bland control freak who ducks his religion's former racism? Sheesh.

More Notes on a Scandal

The idea that Notes on a Scandal is homophobic - as outlined by yours truly here - has been gaining ground; you can tell because the dead-tree critics have begun huffing about it. In last week's New Yorker, David Denby sniffed that moviegoers shouldn't deny themselves the movie's "pleasures" merely because "some reviewers have priggishly complained . . . that both women behave badly." (What people have complained about is that the straight woman has the film's sympathy, despite behaving rather more badly than the lesbian.) Of course having David Denby, of all people, call you a prig is a little funny, but his review itself is far funnier: "the suspense is nearly Hitchcockian in intensity . . . will Barbara succeed in gaining control of the younger woman?" I'm on the edge of my seat! And how about this doozy: "Sheba is . . . a careless demigoddess . . . she knows that having sex with a cheeky pale boy in a damp train yard is crazy, but she can't stop herself - she's thrilled as much by her own desire to transgress as by Steven . . ." (Funny, somehow I almost replaced "Steven" in that last line with "David"!)

Meanwhile, in the New York Times, Caryn James (draping herself over what looks like a TV tuned to the Statue of Liberty) makes a more sophisticated excuse for the movie's tone: it's not the results of the women's actions that should count, but their intents. To her, Notes on a Scandal is "deliciously wicked" and "avoids creating unintentional distate" over its May/December (make that March/September) romance because "the film is so lucid." This lucidity seems to amount to the fact that "Notes gets what . . . other movies don't: the difference between predatory sexual attention (unsavory) and mutual sexual attraction (very savory)."

Yummy! Are you sensing a trend here? James is quite repelled by such recent May/December pieces as Venus (with a Cryptkeeper-like Peter O'Toole drooling over the luscious Jodi Whittaker) and History Boys (with its tubby, repressed gay schoolmaster - played by Richard Griffiths - tentatively groping 17-year-olds). Note that even though both men are sexually powerless (O'Toole is even impotent), James finds their desperate sexual gestures repugnant.

Unlike these films, though (and okay, maybe weakness is a rather lame excuse for their heroes' excesses) Notes on a Scandal has "a strong undertow of morality," even though the young man in question this time (left) is only 15. The difference, of course, is his intent: "He comes on to his beautiful teacher," James points out; "He even dupes her with a false sob story to get her sympathy." Well, who'da thunk. Meanwhile, poor Sheba is "struggling under the weight of a long marriage to an older man and two children." Poor thing - a looong marriage, to an icky older guy (plus two kids)! No wonder she falls for a 15-year-old's line. Who wouldn't?

Sheba's self-indulgence, of course, destroys her family and marriage; still, according to James, "Notes places creepiness where it belongs: not on sex and age themselves but on a predatory impulse." Odd, however, that these "predators" tend to be aged and/or gay, and that James un-self-consciously describes marriage to an older man as a burden. She gets even weirder, however, in her closer: "Barbara demonstrates that icky attention from an aging character can be bracing for a film, as long as the ick is intentional."

Uh - what? Methinks it's Caryn James who's getting a little icky - she seems quick to label Barbara Covett as a "predator" (when the only real predator in the movie is that 15-year-old). Of course Barbara's no saint - but as she stumbles on Sheba's affair, her "blackmail" is offered on the requirement that said affair must end, and as her sexual needs are unspoken even to herself, her machinations are more pathetic than menacing (as is the case in The History Boys - and even in Venus). Surely any subtle moral judge would see that. Yet Notes on a Scandal is structured as a stalker movie, and Caryn James, who seems to have kind of a thing about aging masculinity (and yes, Barbara Covett fits under that umbrella!) still applauds its "strong moral undertow."

Hmmm. Does James realize, one wonders, that reciprocal sexual attraction isn't actually the highest moral good? And that self-righteousness about such an ideal might make her seem like - well - a prig?