I was looking for a diary about Bill Maher’s latest episode (2017-06-16) but couldn’t find one, so I suppose it’s up to me to get this ball rolling.
I don’t have a lot of creativity for a blistering bead-reading of Maher, so I’ll have to just lay it out plain and simple. I think Maher’s heart is in the right place, but his head is lodged firmly up his ass — which gives him a poor perspective for seeing things clearly.
In recent weeks, Maher’s Real Time show has gotten pretty weird. He used to have these attempts at balanced discussion panels, but now he doesn’t bring Trump supporters on for the panel. He’ll still have Conservatives on the panel, but they are now of the never-Trump variety. He does still invite deplorable characters on the show, but he gives them the spotlight segment so they don’t have to engage in discussion with the panel. I won’t go through the list of names, but it includes darlings of the alt-Right and other controversial, Conservative characters.
It’s hard to tell what Maher is trying to accomplish, beyond simply making money from his show. He’s positioned himself on the Liberal side of the American Divide, but he loves being a bad boy and tweaking Liberal noses too much to fit in with real Progressive politics. I think he’s sometimes helpful, but other times he’s just… not. My most charitable guess is that he’s trying to create dialog across the cultural chasm; I don’t see that he’s accomplishing that.
There are two topics where Maher will always put his foot in his mouth: transsexualism and Islamophobia. In the latest episode, there were a couple moments where he made one of his stupid semi-bigoted comments, and both times they fell completely flat. One was an anti-trans comment directed toward his guest Eddie Izzard, and the other criticized gay people for being against Islamophobia.
Maher’s transphobia is apparent any time he gets on the topic. I get the feeling he’s never had a trans friend sit him down and explain the basics. Like, transitioning isn’t about changing gender, but about fixing your body to conform to your actual gender identity. You aren’t born a boy and then turn into a girl — you’re born a girl in a mis-identified body, then transition into an appropriate physical form. I don’t mind Maher’s ignorance on the topic — that kind of ignorance is quite common, so he’s not really worse than average. But in his position, he owes it to himself and to his audience to study up so he doesn’t inadvertently hurt people by saying stupid things.
Maher’s anti-religion bent gets cranked up to eleven when it comes to Islam. But criticizing gay people for supporting Muslims because there are assholes who use it as an excuse to persecute us is patronizing beyond the extreme. We gay folk know who our enemies are, thank you very much, and we don’t need straight men to tell us who to fear. It’s not Muslims in general who are a threat — it’s bigoted homophobes of all sorts, and I worry a lot more about the KKK than I do about ISIS.
And the thing that was most frustrating in this episode was the discussion of the Julius Caesar play where Caesar was done up to look like our so-called-president. Maher trotted out the usual “If someone had done a production of Julius Caesar where someone who looked like Obama was killed on stage, we’d never hear the end of it from Liberals,” just like all the Conservative cranks. But we know that there was just such a production in 2012, at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and no one raised a stink about that. Just like there were a zillion times Obama was hanged in effigy, but Maher says Kathy Griffin crossed the line.
And then there’s Maher’s misstep with the N-word. He made a little gesture toward expiation, passed it off as an innocent mistake, and that was that. The discussion I saw around that seemed like folks were willing to accept his apology and move on because he’s a valuable voice.
But that’s kind of my point here. Maher has a popular show and provides a big platform, so it’s an appealing thought that he’s operating toward our advantage, and people seem willing to cut him some slack because of it. I have two things to say about all that.
One: There are other platforms. Maher is just a medium-sized fish in a very big pond. If he disappeared tomorrow the void he left would be filled in a matter of moments.
Two: We owe ourselves better than this.
I’m not a big hater on Bill Maher. At worst, I have mixed feelings. But this dude needs an intervention so he can stop saying stupid shit.