BAD OMEN. There's a great moment near the beginning of the movie Tootsie, in which Dustin Hoffman and his agent are arguing about a play that Hoffman's roommate has written for him. In the play, Hoffman is to play a man who moves back into the toxin-poisoned neighborhood of Love Canal. The agent (played by director Sidney Pollack) finally explodes, "Nobody will pay to watch people living next to chemical waste. They can see that in New Jersey."
This came to mind earlier this afternoon when, while listening to Al Franken's radio program, he told me to stay tuned to hear from Howard Fineman.
Good god, Al. Howard Fineman?
Is there a broadcast outlet of any kind in America where I can't see Howard Fineman, so reliably banal a fount of conventionality that he makes David Broder look like Thomas Pynchon? I swear, last week, I saw Fineman marching in the Texas band at halftime of the Nebraska game, bidding high on a nut straight on the World Series of Poker, warming up in the Cardinals bullpen, chasing sharks off New Zealand, and being trussed up and stuffed into an oven on the Food Network so as to be served this season as the Christmas goose.
Nobody is rooting harder for Air America to succeed than I am. I like the new morning zoo crew, and Randi Rhodes is a hoot. (In Boston, we get lovable goofball Stephanie Miller at midday and stolid old deerslayer Ed Schultz on evening-drive, instead of the AA shows in those timeslots.) But the network's flagship program can't be giving me Howard Fineman. It just can't. Maybe, instead, it should just run the audio of Bob Corker's new TV ad from Tennessee.
--Charles P. Pierce
