Thursday, November 24, 2005

Worth a second look



Maurice G. Dantec’s appearance on Thierry Ardisson’s goofy program is worth a second look now that Les Cités are in their "no fly zone" state of armistice. It dates to 3 September 2005, and has that usual multi-culti pedantry as a background which Dantec kicks down in short order. Ardisson does his best to chit-chat by talking down to Quebecers because of their accents, now that Dantec has moved to Quebec. He then ends up dragging in the wrong counterpoint-point-man (Malek Chebel) to make the argument Ardisson’s… An indignity to Chebal and Dantec likewise, it ended up where it always does: a cherry-picked set-up that leads to a TV-land history scholar rattling on about the 16th century as if it was just yesterday.

Dress it up and call it anthropology, even "peace studies" if you must - it makes no difference. It's driven by tokenism replacing the concept of a thesis. That’s the generic and intellectually lazy Ardisson formula: when one point is made, set-up a counterpoint that really doesn’t have anything to do with it, but is loosely related due to a few shared adjectives, and maybe the occasional noun.

The viewing audience that’s had its’ brain softened by years of this tripe ends up thinking that they witnessed some kind of greatness. Sometimes this stuff can be as torturous to watch as Katie Couric doing yet another interview with yet another victim of yet another overlooked malady.

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