Are you ready for some stupidity?
Yet another celebrity has publicly put his foot in his mouth and lost some work because of it.
If on a Monday night you’re ready for some football, there’ll be plenty of pigskin available but you’ll have to enjoy it without Hank Williams Jr.
It seems Hank has been bounced from the Monday Night Football broadcasts on ESPN after making some ill-advised comments about – who else? – President Obama.
He did it during an interview with Fox News’ “Fox News and Friends.” The interview actually is amusing to watch in its entirety because Williams comes off as such a doofus.
For some reason, the hosts of the show started off by asking Williams whom he favored among current presidential candidates. He said he didn’t favor any of them, although he said later in the interview Herman Cain seems to make the most sense.
But Hank Jr. overstepped the bounds of propriety, as well as common sense, by comparing Obama to Hitler. He said the golf outing with Obama and House Majority Leader John Boehner was like Hitler playing golf with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He also referred to Obama and Vice President Joe Biden as “the enemy,” although he didn’t specify of what or whom.
All in all, Williams came off like the loudest, most obnoxious and dumbest redneck in the bar. He’s the kind of guy you avoid sitting with and fervently hope doesn’t approach you and breathe stale beer all over your face. A lot of Hank’s fans like his redneck vibe, but even if you agree with him in opposing Obama, you’ve got to be a little embarrassed at the way he came off doing it. He was so self-assured in his ignorance that he really looked like a clown. He quoted Fred Thompson, whose own presidential campaign sputtered out in 2008: “You don’t want to ask me a question because I’m gonna give you too straight of an answer.” Just goes to show you that straight answers can still be given incoherently.
USA Today quoted an ESPN statement about the dust-up: “While Hank Williams Jr. is not an ESPN employee, we recognize he is closely linked to our company through the opening to Monday Night Football. We are extremely disappointed with his comments, and as a result have decided to pull the open from tonight’s telecast.”
I find it hard to believe anybody would boycott Monday Night Football because of the comments of somebody who appears at the beginning of the game to sing a frankly silly theme song, but I guess that’s the network’s choice. They sign Hank’s paycheck, or at least did. Those of us who have been canned because of ill-considered comments that had nothing to do with their actual job recognize that. Your right to say what you want stops at your employer’s front door.
Of course, you’ve got to wonder why the people on “Fox and Friends” even interviewed him about politics. I suppose part of the Fox network’s demographic may be people who prefer to take their political advice from second-generation country music stars with a history of substance abuse, but I find it hard to believe that’s a big proportion of the electorate.
Fox isn’t alone in asking vapid celebrities their opinions on the big issues of the day. In his excellent book, “It’s Not News It’s Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News,” Drew Curtis devotes part of an entire chapter to the practice. He talks about how, often as not, a reporter interviewing a celebrity often will work in a question about the star’s political views. The practice makes no sense, it rarely yields an interesting quote and it just wastes everybody’s time – if it even makes it into the journalist’s final product – but it appears to be the thing to do. It’s proof that there are, in fact, such things as stupid questions.
While I’m a liberal, and thus generally find conservative celebrities’ political opinions less thoughtful, idiocy is not confined to right-wing stars. As much as I liked what the Dixie Chicks said about George Bush, if you were a Republican they probably were pretty personally offensive.
It’s not that celebrities don’t have the same free-speech rights as anybody else. There isn’t an exception in the First Amendment that keeps celebrities from expressing an opinion. But a lot of celebrities (and non-celebrities, for that matter) aren’t quite bright enough to recognize that speaking out can sometimes mean stuffing your head through a ringer. Somebody once said that the real virtue of the First Amendment is it allows every man to stand up in public and make a great, braying ass of himself. And one of the things that asses sometimes do is say impolitic things that get them in hot water with their employers. Believe me, I know. My own tongue has more than one set of footprints on it.
Maybe Hank Jr.’s learned his lesson, not that he really has to. In the first place, it’s not like he’ll be Dumpster-diving because he doesn’t get to sing the Monday Night Football theme any more. And given his demeanor when he made the comments, it’s a safe bet he’ll tell anybody who listens he was fired for nothing more than bein’ a straight-shootin’, honest good ol’ boy who was just speakin’ truths that were unpopular with the effete, lily-livered, cheese-eatin’ snobs who run Monday Night Football.
The problem with being dumb isn’t necessarily the dumbness itself. The problem with being dumb often comes when you can’t recognize when you’ve done a stupid, silly thing. Maybe the next time somebody wants to ask him about politics or stem-cell research or Keynesian economics, Hank will remember to keep his mouth shut. But I doubt it.