So. The over-the-top outraged bloviating about Gregg Easterbrook's poorly-phrased but defensible comments has resulted in his employer firing him from his job. Firing him! Plus all his old columns pulled from ESPN's web site, as if he never existed.
This man now has a career forever smeared by people who say he got fired for "saying anti-semitic things," the kind of stain that follows someone forever, like the claim of being a rapist, a sexual harasser, a racist, or a wife-beater. I can't say I'm surprised, given the way the PC police work these days, but I am utterly appalled.
I also hope that those who led the charge on this over-the-top attack have the good sense to express equal outrage over this incredibly excessive punishment--and embarassed at their own excesses. But somehow I doubt it; too often, these are the kind of people who turn their backs on someone forever solely because they gave offense once.
As dipnut and others noted, and as Easterbrook himself noted in his apology, he was not attacking Jews more than any other group, merely holding them to standards that, like Christians, they claim to hold for themselves. It was poorly phrased, but he clarified what he meant and apologized for offending--and now has had his career quite possibly permanently damaged.
Which is quite a lot more outrageous than anything Easterbrook actually said.
I feel for the guy. I've gone through very similar over-the-top condemnation and outrage from the Perpetually Indignant. Now I'm indignant, and I'm going to stay indignant. This is wrong.
Just incredible. And scary. I'm convinced Easterbrook is no anti-Semite, but a victim of his own poor choice of words. His apology was sincere and quite clear. This is shameful on the part of ESPN and Disney.
One has to wonder if this is more about his scathing review of Kill Bill, rather than his wrongheaded remarks about Jews.
After all, Disney (Mirimax) owns ESPN.
What was that about censorship and "McCarthyism" we heard from the anti-war Hollywood crowd in
the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq?
If it talks like a duck...
Talk about Orwellian NewSpeak.
Fortunately, the ESPN gig was just a hobby. Easterbrook is a Brookings Fellow and otherwise pretty gainfully employed. My guess is Brookings will act with more class than ESPN.
Don't take your love away from me
Don't you leave my heart in misery
If you go then I'll be blue
'Cause breaking up is hard to do.
Pardon the copyright infringement. I find it hard to take seriously the huffing and puffing of the notoriously anti-Jewish crowd. If I believed they're sincere, it would be one thing, but, no, I think they're merely opportunistic and full of $#!+.
But, there I go again ...
Bill Dolley - what is your point? greg sure is no anti-semite. he probably got fired because he had the guts to criticise the Hollywood elites
I was critical of Easterbrook's comments. But I think ESPN firing him is outrageous and I sent them an e-mail telling them that.
Well, the good news, such as it is, is that the people attacking him for anti-Semitism seem to uniformly agree that firing him over this was stupid...but he's still fired.
This whole episode really leaves me deeply troubled. I'm unhappy about the development of an anti-Semitism PC Police that jumps all over people like Easterbrook, who seems to have been foolish rather than prejudiced. At the same time, anti-Semitism is becoming increasingly acceptable and fashionable; or at least, easily dodged with the old "it's not the Jews I hate, it's Israel" line, as Mahathir Mohammed helpfully showed us. I don't want to be a party to fanatical PC-ism, but I also don't want to be the person who said "Stop carping, there's nothing to worry about" when a head of state is calling for a "final victory" over Judaism.
This whole subject tires me immensely; reading Mahathir's speech just turns my stomach. I know people here are probably jaded by LGF's harping on "how much they hate us", but what can you *feel* on reading this: "They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so that they can enjoy equal rights with others." Got that? Human rights and democracy are inventions of the Jews, to save themselves from persecution. Because it's *right* to persecute Jews, and they don't have equal rights with others. These are words of our enemies.
But we're not going to treat him like an enemy. Diplomatically, there'll be a stern condemnation, and everyone will shake hands with him, anyway, as soon as it's of political importance for them to do so. Many people will skim over the headlines, assume he's a moderate Muslim who's just outraged by Israeli blah blah blah and write bitter letters to the editor about how the Administration's security measures are undermining human rights and democracy. Some of us reading this will be angry for a week or two, and then it'll get pushed to the back of our heads by some fresh enormity.
Sometimes I want this war to go hot, just so we can make an end of it. It might take five years; it might take a decade. But I'm sick of the duplicity, the equivocation, pretenses of friendship with people we know will stab us in the back as soon as they think they can get away with it, and everything else that's accompanyed this "war". And it'll be even worse when the "Islamobomb" finally happens, and we can sit around wondering how long it'll take one of them to show up in New York Harbor. I'd rather get drafted and take my chances for the length of a hot war that would crush millitant Islam as thoroughly as we crushed National Socialism and millitant Emperor-worship than spend my lifetime reading about little brushfire wars with jihadis in Lower Trashcanistan and waiting for the Saudis to "lose" part of their nuclear arsenal. Maybe we'll avert this. I hope so; the world keeps getting darker from where I sit, and I don't know how long it is until sunrise.
robroy -
Pardon me for being so obscure. My point was that many of the people pretending to be anti-anti-Semitists are actually enemies of Israel, and I don't buy their crap for a second.
Bill
How dare you criticize the free market for operating the way it was designed to. This is clearly not censorship, as you yourself have argued in other contexts. If media is a product, then popularity and reputation are coins of the realm. Easterbrooks ideas are unpopular, and he jeopardized the reputation of his employer. Ta-da: that's freedom at work, Dean. Pure democracy. Like it or move to Cuba.
Well John, I would never suggest that the government needs to get involved in this situation. I merely say that Freedom of expression includes the freedom to criticize others for their free choices.
I don't say ESPN has no right to fire Easterbrook and remove all his articles. They do have a right to do that. Just as I have every right to say they're buttheads to do so.
I was pleased when MSNBC fired Michael Savage, and said so very publicly. I'm very displeased with the treatment of Easterbrook. Because it's completely over the top. So I'm saying so.
I mean, isn't that what liberal democracy is all about?
Hey, maybe he was fired for toxic levels of snot-nosed presumptuousness.
I just love it when non-Christians (or Jews) tell Christians (or Jews) how they're supposed to act, based on the non-Christian's (or Jew's) oh-so-gifted understanding of scripture.
Hey, everybody, believers and non-believers, guess what: whenever I hear you tell somebody how to live their faith, three words come to mind: you first, buddy. I guarantee you that almost any non-believers' efforts to throw scripture up to believers is not well-received. In fact, it's juvenile in the extreme and is the very definition of Not Helpful. It reveals you as one who regards scripture as a handy tool to smack believers over the head with, and not much else. You know, kind of like Pat Robertson.
I feel bad that Easterbrook was fired but his apology really tells me that he wasn't thinking when he wrote his posting and he wasn't thinking when he wrote his apology. I'm also struck by the fact that Rush Limbaugh got fired for less because he attacked the play of Donovan McNabb not McNabb's moral character, at least from what I could tell.
The main problem with his apology is that he holds Christian values as being the arbiter as to how to judge movie executives. Fair enough. At least show enough respect for the Jewish religion to ask RELIGIOUS Jews if they support movies like that. Why invoke the Holocaust? Its pretty strange thinking. What I am most interested in though is why Easterbrook invokes the Disney brand name rather than QUENTIN TARANTINO. I mean the guy went to a movie by the director of Pulp Fiction, From Dusk Till Dawn and Jackie Brown. Why he's shocked by the content I'll never know. What's next visiting www.seriousdisgustinghardcore.com and wondering whether the producers of the content are professed Christians or had ancestors victimized by the Holocaust. The guy is apparently a professional writer. I'm not impressed.
I had never given any thought to the name "Greg Easterbrook" and probably would not given much thought to him at all, had his name not come up for destruction because of some insensitive remarks about Jewish Hollywood movie producers that he made, on ESPN TV, I suppose. (I say "suppose" because I have access to cable only at the fitness center where I exercise, and then only whatever's on the six channels the Princeton Club in Madison subscribes to.)
Anyway, the story peaked my interest and I googled up his name in connection with something of interest and found Greg Easterbrook, Atlantic Monthly, Aug 1988, "Are We Alone", which proved to be a masterfully researched and interestlingly written article on SETI, the search for extraterrestial intelligence. I read it end to end was impressed from end to end.
I filed all this away in my head and got to remembering another name -- John Strugnell -- that popped up in my memory from some PBS stuff on the Dead Sea scrolls. Strugnell, apparently a Brit professor of divinity at Harvard, was overall editor of a major project dealing the scrolls in Jerusalem. Then one day, apparently under the influence of some strong spirits of the type that inhabit bottles, he gave an interview to HaAretz, one of the leading Israeli newspapers.
His interview fairly simmered with hatred of the Jewish religion, the right of the Israelis to have a state, and much of whatever else is expected in diatribes of this genre. Upshot: Bye-bye professor Strugnell. Further upshot: Turns out there wasn't a single Jew allowed on the international committee of bible scholars studying the scrolls. At least until June 1967, when the Israelis conquered the Qumran caves, east Jerusalem, the Rockefeller Museum in that part of the city, and the selectively-chosen non-Jewish committee studying Jewish and Christian origins. (All this is hardly surprising, considering that Transjordan, then in control of east Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, would not allow any Jew into the country for any reason.)
My wife and I did some graduate studies on fellowships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1973-1974, and as chance would have it, her specialty was in archaeology. So she was in position to confirm for me some of the shenanigans described above.
Anyway, Easterbrook gave off some bad vibes about Hollywood's money-grubbing Jewish producers. But apparently he was cold sober. Strugnell, who had far nastier things to say, did it while feeling little or no pain, so they say.
Well, there's something I learned on the streets of Chicago a long, long time ago. And also in some of that toddlin' town's gin joints. Which is this:
"In vino, veritas."
So I think that if you really want to find out what is deep inside somebody's gut, get him or her just a little drunk. Not totally plowed. Just enough so they open their yaps and start hammering away. Judging by his biblical Roman Catholic priestly scholar friends, with their not-quite so hidden antisemitic policies (Among other things, they didn't want the scrolls to show that Christianity might have begun as some sort of King David Koresh or Reverend Jim Jones freak cult, even if it might have been the truth.)
So I think this guy Strugnell was the real McCoy, even if Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge or wherever made him a doctor of divinity, whatever the hell that is.
But Easterbrook? I can't trace something as silly or malignant as Jew-hatred to the mind that postulated the thoughts behind that essay in Atlantic Monthly.
And I kind of think that if that man were sitting with my wife and me at a table, downing shots of good Croatian slivovica (Madraska plum brandy, $18.95 if you like good stuff), his mind would be on anything other than the folks who bring you slice/dice/chop movies such as Quentin Tarantino's latest.
(By the way, I kind of liked that film, and I could hardly take my eyes off Uma Thurman, all 5'-11" of her, for the whole two hours or whatever. Talk about the new American Garbo! But I'm just a damned philistine, anyway.)
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I am looking forward to seeing "Kill Bill" myself. I don't give a damn that it's very violent. I'm a huge fan of Quentin Tarantino's work. I love his stuff, and from everything I hear about this movie, it's vintage Tarantino. I'm looking forward to it, and wholly expect to enjoy it.
"Kill Bill" is wonderfully executed, highly stylized, and lovingly casted. There are going to be people who think it's too violent, but there are people who think football is too violent. If you view the film in the context of history -- Hong Kong action, kung fu films, anime -- it's clear what a good-humored homage "Kill Bill" is.
About Easterbrook: he was out of his league. You don't come out on topics like whether "no" means "no" and whether Jews can justifiably peddle violent media unless you're somewhere between 250% and 500% credible. He thought he was writing in a sports-world vacuum, and he also misjudged what sports culture is about, and he got burned. Boo-hoo. The term "PC police" and other such monikers are selective at best. The guy was tone-deaf and paid for it.
He thought he was writing in a sports world vacuum? Hardly. He was writing on The New Republic, a center-left outpost.
As for his argument about money grubbing Jews, I'm pretty sure that text followed a comment about money grubbing Christians. As in algebra, money grubbing Christians = money grubbing Jews, cancel each other out.
The essence of the argument is that he was surprised that Jews in Hollywood aren't more sensitive to the depiction of indiscriminate killing of the innocent and guilty alike. Easterbrook didn't exactly write this out clearly, and the use of the term money grubbing was a poor and inflammatory choice of words, but no more so than if I accuse my attorney, Mr. Acosta, for being lazy and running off to Vegas for a party before he finished drafting a contract for me. The poor choice of words doesn't make me a bigot, and the poor choice of words doesn't mean that my attorney is not lazy. In Easterbrook's case, I doubt you'll find a Hollywood exec of any ethnic or religious stripe who isn't money grubbing. As for the merits of the other part of his argument... well, you'll have to visit here:
http://www.coldfury.com/Sasha/archives/004332.html#004332
A little aside to explain to Bloggerrabbit about Rush:
Rush's statement was NOT about McNabb. It was about the "liberal media" (aka any media that doesn't agree with the right wing) saying McNabb was better than he is. And the media was supposedly saying this because McNabb is black and they want blacks to succeed.