REAL TIME?

 I used to enjoy Bill Maher's "Real Time" on a Friday evening. It gave me the opportunity to have a laugh at the end of the week about all the absurdities that had taken place in the preceding days. Recently, though... is it I who have changed? Or the comedian/satirist? Last night was awful. It has reached a point where I think I won't watch it any more.

The opening monologue had its usual tiresome share of adolescent jokes about smoking weed. I haven't done it myself for years but I really have no objection about others choosing to get high. But with Maher it's a fetish, as though the habit were still some daring, law-breaking act of defiance by the hippest of the hip. It isn't. It's just ordinary. And dull. To pretend otherwise is just childish. Worse, his tasteless and patently misapplied jokes about Joe Biden. Yes, Democrats deserve satire too. So does Joe Biden. But to put the words "Whatever gets your pussy wet" in his mouth is so wildly off-target and out of character as to be thoroughly unfunny. 

I do believe that the left wing needs and deserves satire too. Even the not-radically progressive left that dominated the party convention this past week. But what convention had Maher and his two guests been watching on their television sets? Not the one I watched. Led on by their remorseless host in his resolute attack on Democrats who failed to meet his (I guess libertarian-ish?) requirements, his guests dismissed the entire convention as, first, deathly dull (it wasn't, not the one I watched) and otherwise disrespectful of the poor and underprivileged. Again, what had they been watching? There was, of course, a good deal of well-earned savaging of the current occupant of the White House and the corruption his presence there has permitted, if not encouraged. But there was also a great deal of ardent venting about the neglect of the disadvantaged and the urgent need to address the attendant problems of poverty, injustice and racism. Maher freely attacks the far left for their "political correctness" and the circular firing squad that threatens the party unity that's especially needed at the moment in history. Last night, he chose to join the firing squad.

And lastly, his special guest, Oliver Stone. Bad enough that this hugely successful Hollywood (yes, sorry, Hollywood!) director should spend his air time (and ours; but we all chose it) whining about how badly he has been treated by, um... Hollywood. A sad spectacle. More appalling, though, was to hear Stone's barely disguised defense of the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, and his servile ally in our White House on the grounds that the American intelligence services are out only to deceive us, and that all that Russians want is to be left alone to get along peaceably with their lives. As though they were not living under the oppressive thumb of a ruthless tyrant who has no trouble resorting to the murder of anyone who dares oppose him--most recently, it seems likely, the opposition leader Alexey Navalny. Bill Maher, meanwhile, sits by and nods with (somewhat uncomfortable, I thought) approval. He gives air time to precisely the conspiracy theories that he mocks.

Now I ask myself, am I reacting in this way because Maher is milking my sacred cows rather than someone else's? As much as anyone, it behooves me to have my values and assumptions questioned, even held up for ridicule. Are tastelessness, inappropriateness, disrespect and incivility not needed weapons in the satirists quiver? Well, yes. And I'm still angry at Bill Maher, for all the reasons I've laid out above. And, actually, more.