Program scripts from week of March 19, 2012
My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Charlie Is Winning!
So tell me. Have you noticed? Have you noticed whose smirking face has recently started showing up in commercials on TV? Have you noticed that Charlie Sheen is back?
The Sheen story should be well known enough that it requires only a very brief re-cap. Charlie Sheen has a long and varied career in movies and TV. It was just a year ago that Sheen’s life finally seemed to come completely off the rails. A long standing battle with alcohol and drugs combined with what can most generously described as a tempestuous love life finally exploded in March of 2011. The highest paid star in series TV was canned from his program by the network. Sheen would then go off a truly weird journey of tweets and public appearances that left everyone scratching their heads over just what we were watching. A collapse of epic proportion or an equally epic publicity stunt. I’m not sure to this day what the answer is. It’s probably a bit of both.
But it’s only been a year literally. Yet there on my TV the other day were not one but TWO brand new commercials that feature Charlie Sheen. DirectTV has been running a series of very clever spots that connect staying with cable TV to people’s lives coming apart. In this new one not cutting your cable results with you in a Turkish bath re-enacting scenes from Platoon with Charlie Sheen. The other spot comes from the folks at Chrysler as they push their new partnership with Italian automaker Fiat. The “bad boy” version of the Fiat 500 known as the Abarth is seen careening around inside a beautiful mansion filled with beautiful female models. In the end we discover that this is supposedly how Charlie spent his time while under “house arrest”. For the record he was never under house arrest but why quibble over details.
So where does this leave us? Charlie Sheen’s life over the last decade at least has been a train wreck. Just ask his dad Martin Sheen who lived through a similar train wreck early in his career. Is this a sign of the ability of the American people to forgive? Is this just another example of our acceptance of bad behavior excused by celebrity? Is it just the latest chapter in Charlie Sheen’s masterful manipulation of us all?
As with so many things about the troubled star it’s just not clear. But can’t you just see that bad boy smile spreading across Charlie’s face as he gives us wink and leans into our ear to whisper “Winning!”.
The Final Encyclopedia
Wow, it’s the end of an era, an epoch. It’s hard to even imagine what the future is going to be like. You knew it had to happen eventually but the reality of it is still hard to grasp. The folks at Encyclopedia Brittanica have announced that they are no longer going to print the massive compendium of knowledge.
A world that will never see another new edition of what many of us considered the ultimate encyclopedia is kind of hard to wrap your head around. Well hard for those of us who grew up with encyclopedias as a vital and common resource for learning about the world. If Encyclopedia Brittanica can’t make as a printed version then the age of the printed encyclopedia has come to an end.
That’s not really surprising of course. When I need to look up research material for this program or my work I go on line. I can’t even remember the last time I opened a volume of an encyclopedia. If you’re the tiniest bit careful you can find anything that you might have found in an encyclopedia and then some online. The sum total of human knowledge, or at least a goodly portion of it, can be carried around in a tablet computer or a smartphone. So a couple dozen huge, heavy books are really old school just about any way you cut it.
But I must admit that part of me will mourn the passing of this great institution. Once upon a time an encyclopedia was a new and cutting edge method of spreading knowledge.
In the Phillippi household we couldn’t afford the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Ours was an early ‘60’s edition of the Colliers Encyclopedia. And yes yours truly would take a rainy afternoon or cold winter weekend and grab a volume at random and just begin to read. I think as much as anything those volumes jump started my lifelong love of learning. It was fascinating to know that someone had figured all these things out, that someone had looked at some strange object and given it a name. The heavy binding and the thick, glossy pages covered in words and pictures took me places far from the Pittsburgh suburbs where I grew up. It was a intellectual and sensory experience that stays with me to this very day.
With all the information at our digital fingertips I’m not sure we’ve re-created that wonderful adventure of learning that you got from flipping open a volume of an encyclopedia.
And I think the world will be a lesser place for that.
Doonesbury Rant
I’m going to warn you right up front that this is a bit of a rant.
This past week a fair number of newspapers around the country chose to not run the Doonesbury cartoon strip. The story arc for these strips involved a controversial move in some states to mandate an physically intrusive medical procedure on women. This is NOT a political commentary program so I have no intention of getting involved in that discussion. In support of transparency I should note that Doonesbury is one of my all time favorite comics.
Having said that we need to note this about Gary Trudeau’s work. It IS political. Always has been. Hanging in my office is the February 9, 1976 cover of Time magazine. It features Mike and Mark and BD and Zonker among others. The headline reads “Politics in the Funny Papers”. In other words this is no big surprise. Yes there are stories of the lives of these characters. We’ve seen Mike’s child grow up and seen Zonker’s refusal to do likewise. But in the end this comic is about politics.
So why so newspapers inevitably react like a maiden lady in the presence of a mouse when comics like this do what they do? They act like they are going to faint dead away if they actually have to print them.
Now of course the papers will say they do this because WE the readers are the ones getting our knickers in a twist. We might be offended. Newspapers print stories about war and murder and rape and dysfunctional public institutions. Somehow we survive the exposure to this but a four panel comic strip is going to send us over the edge. The reality is that newspaper is placing itself in the role of parental censor deciding what is best for us. And it makes me ill. If the strip is controversial (and this series certainly was) then move it to the editorial page. Or do what some papers have done and permanently move it there. Or just don’t carry it at all. But stop this pretense that this is somehow responsible behavior. They run the comic because people like it. Shouldn’t the assumption be that we know after 42 years of the comic that it comes with an edge sometimes?
And before I’m done let me add that the readers who quite likely ARE going to have a conniption over points of view that disagree with theirs don’t impress me much either. Skip the comic or use your Constitutionally protected right to express your dissenting point of view. But stop trying to insure that difficult issues are either not discussed or that only your point of view is heard.
Neither groups behavior is in the highest traditions of our nation.
Call that the View From the Phlipside.
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