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Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Likability

Sen. Smilin' Norm Coleman (R-MN) is not particularly likable. There's no way to scientifically measure likability, but we know this. Smilin' Norm went nose-to-nose with George Galloway, purportedly a good buddy to be both Saddam and Uday Hussein. Galloway left the hearing room smelling like a rose. Coleman had to set about scrubbing the Senate website to minimize the permanent damage to his reputation.

Next, Coleman tried to take a bite out of Brownie, the face of the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. The guy who wrote those whiny emails during the resignation watch. The guy who has to come to represent the dangers of cronyism in the Bush administration. Just like the Galloway hearing, Michael Brown came out of his joust with Coleman looking like a wronged man. Coleman has yet to emerge from whatever rock he crawled under to sob himself to sleep.

Who, then, couldn't Coleman help redeem? Hannibal Lecter ate people. Coleman would probably turn him into the new Dr. Atkins. Raskolnikov murdered an old woman just to prove his superiority, then crumbled immediately under the pressure of an investigation. If he shared a spotlight with Coleman he'd probably end up with a nightly call-in show on Court TV.

Coleman is, in fact, the anti-Oprah. While Oprah can redeem anyone by embracing them within the aura of her own invincible likability, Coleman proves that no matter how close you are to the bottom of the barrel, he is sliming about underneath it.

George Carlin famously wondered whether God could create a rock so large that he himself could not lift it. I wonder this: if Oprah gave Coleman a hug, would reality collapse upon itself like the tallest building in South Dakota? I should know better than to doubt the power of Oprah, but I don't think even she could make Coleman likable. My fear, though, is that if Oprah ever testified before a Coleman committee, she would instantly become as popular as a drunk porn star unloading a beer truck at a frat party. Or even more popular than that. So popular, in fact, that reality would bend in upon itself so far that before you know it, everyone she knows has their own radio show.

3 Comments:

would reality collapse upon itself like the talles [sic] building in South Dakota?

Interesting choice of metaphor, since that building was notorious solely for not collapsing.

By Joseph Thvedt, at 4:06 PM