Careening Toward Irrelevancy

The wheels continue to come off as Mark Hyman careens toward the end of his career as a media figure. He’s abandoned any attempt to make a sensible argument—or to make sense at all.

The latest example is the series of wild rhetorical haymakers he throws at the entity he refers to as “Hollywood.”

The commentary, which is apropos of nothing, imagines what a Hollywood treatment of Saddam Hussein’s life would be like.

For reasons known only to him, Hyman thinks Hollywood would create a loving ode to the former dictator. He imagines that . . .

The movie would tout his classrooms, in which textbooks referred to
Jews as pigs and gorillas, as the model for an educational system.

Well, only if Mel Gibson was directing. Actually, I’m sure Hyman’s right. After all, there aren’t many Jewish people in Hollywood in positions of power. It’s quite the hotbed of anti-Semitism.

Hyman’s other musings are just as nonsensical:

It would view his ambitions to invade Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and to
bomb Israel as statesman like.

No doubt it would characterize U.S. servicemen and women as criminal
terrorist thugs, the killers of women and children.

He ends with a gratuitous and ugly attack on Ted Kennedy:

After all, Hollywood is where Ted Kennedy is viewed as the conscience of
America and he left a woman to drown in the back of his sedan in 1969.

Unfortunately, Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.

Classy.

Life’s too short to bother with such drivel. This isn’t simply pandering to the right wing, but to the most woolly-headed, dunderheaded of far right wackos, and I’m not sure how many of them would actually buy it.


This is simply a ritualistic display of a right wing tenet: those who create the media are against us. This tenet flies in the face of all evidence, including the corporate ownership of so much major media outlets and the need for commercial media to appeal to a wide audience to succeed.

Precisely because of its absurdity, it’s a tenet that must be invoked on a regular basis. It’s part of the conservative creed. It’s not intended to actually persuade anyone; it’s meant to invoke a sense of community among those who already believe it.

After all, the only people thickheaded enough to buy Hyman’s assertions in the first place are already right-wingers.

And that’s The Counterpoint.