Late Night Lesson: Separating emotion from reality.
I hate guns. I feel like they’re dangerous killers and the fanatics who love them so much are creepy and awkward to me. I also know that that’s all emotion. I emote at a desire to have a large government apparatus to tightly restrict the use and sale of all firearms everywhere, but I’m not an animal – I’m more than just a sack of chemical causing emotions. Intellectually I have to observe reality and make an analysis from that, not my primal girly feelings, and that tells me that the 2nd Amendment makes a safer nation. More guns equal less crime. Which is one of the many blocks that pushed me into realizing more and more that I’m a Libertarian: I don’t ever want a gun, but I want everyone else on my block to have one… It’s not right for me to impose my illogical, baseless anti-gun emotion on others and that’s why it enraged me when Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine came out and I found out that it was a start-to-finish lie-fest. I saw the commercials for it on tv and thought “dude, this is AWESOME” and indeed it was – it was a very well crafted, interesting, emotional and most of all – persuasive film promoting a thesis I agreed with. So when I found out that nearly nothing in it was true (see BowlingForTruth.com for the library of staged scenes, factual misstatements, inaccurate statistics, gotcha interviews and truly despicable slander against Charlton Heston – from editing his speeches to editing the interview he was kind and open enough to grant Mr Moore). The point was that lying to your side is not only still wrong, but worse. because you are setting us up to be fools. Lying in service to push an agenda you feel is good is punishment in that it’s only a matter of time before those lies are exposed – and then what? you’ve done a disservice to both the cause AND it’s followers. You’ve hurt and embarrassed everyone for no damn reason.
This scenario is playing out again. and I hate it.
Here are the FACTS:
-Jay Leno was removed from the Tonight Show replaced by Conan O’Brien and moved to a new show at 10pm.
-Both the 10pm Jay Leno show and the 11:30pm Tonight Show suffered large ratings losses for NBC.
-In response, NBC asked Leno to cut his show in half, from an hour down to 30 minutes, and return to his own time slot, thus pushing Conan’s Tonight Show back a half hour.
-Jay accepted the change. Conan didn’t. as a result, Conan decided to leave NBC.
-Now left with a Tonight Show that has no host, NBC offered Leno his old position back. Leno accepted.
-Conan’s future in television has yet to be announced.
I watched the full hour of the Oprah edition with Jay where she asked him to appear (Conan got a separate invitation too, but he declined) and even went to him (the interview took place on the set of the Jay Leno Show in Burbank, not Oprah’s in Chicago).
He said everything right. Every. Single. Thing. Right.
Oprah, whom I’ve never seen so skilled and probing in an interview, tried to trip him up at every turn and nothing worked. Nothing. Jay won’t say anything bad about anyone. He said he was right to be fired from his 10pm show because he didn’t deliver for the network – a kind of responsibility acceptance you don’t often see in showbiz – but said he was heartbroken at being fired 5 years in advance from the Tonight show when he was #1 and remained #1 until his last show – and it’s a legitimate point.
None of the smears against Jay I’ve heard showed themselves as even being possible. The diabolical “he’s just painting himself as the victim so he can be the good guy” stuff makes no sense in context and the “he should have retired and stepped aside to let Conan in” is equally redonulous. The guy spends his vacation time doing stand-up comedy in Vegas. Why should he quit his one passion in life just because someone else wants his job? Answer: Because we like that other person better. Okay, fine – so support that other person. You don’t need to tear down the other guy with lies and tales of villainy to do it. Oprah’s only super lame moment was when she said Leno’s one joke about David Lettermans sex scandal with his employees was “beneath thim”. so… Sanford jokes and Clinton jokes and John Edwards jokes – but David Letterman is off limits? huh?
Stop lying about Jay Leno. There is no evidence that any of this debacle was his fault and just because you – like me – prefer the alternative, Conan Obrien, that doesn’t give you license to lie.
As Oprah noted in explaining why she thinks people are so anit-Leno: People don’t understand the way television works.
So stop it. You’re pissing me off. I’m sick of you lying to me.
TEAM COCOJAY.