Open Letter to Dennis Miller

Dear Mr.. Miller,


I will preface this with my heartfelt thanks for saving my ass a few years ago while I battled a particularly nasty endometrial tumor and subsequent chemo and second surgery. I taped your HBO shows and brought them to oncology to try a little edgy Norman Cousins thing. I left them behind at St Vincent's because so many of the aides in the unit said that they were in nearly constant use by other chemo patients.

So Dennis, I have to say I can't for the life of me understand how in the heck you managed to get your head so far up your ass that you can't see the Dockers for the Men's half yearly sale. I'm not giving you some half-cocked liberal rant after 12 minutes of watching your show... No, I have been watching you since you came on the air. I like the new monkey a little bit better, but even the first chimp was a witty nod to a pioneer of the infotainment genre. So why is it that the Rorschach bit and the ape are the only times I even smile anymore. I've actually thrown the remote at my television on more than one occasion! Look, for a guy who used to make my remote drop to the floor from the physical force of my guffaws, you've plummeted down the cosmic comedic food chain my friend to somewhere between Bill Safire and Soupy Sales.

For a guy who used to regularly insult everybody and everything you've gotten as pissy as menopausal debutante having a hot flash. The NFL gig was fantastic and I personally enjoyed the patter, but dude, your latest take on what passes for political humor seems more Leni Riefenstahl than Mark Twain.

This week while patronizing Scott Ritter you got indignant and freakily Rumsfeldish when Ritter used the term "illegitimate" to describe our invasion of a sovereign nation based on what turns out to be the whisperings of some guy named Chalabi who jerked off Jordan to the tune of $300 million or more. As cute as it was to see your dander get up and see you all flushed in the face when somebody insulted the honor of an imaginary casualty of war, you were so far off in right field I think even the hot dog vendors couldn't find you. Your customary wit and scathing assessment of reality was so skewed and so devoid of who and what I thought you represented I was actually enraged, but not in the way you used to enrage me. I'm really pissed at you. First I find out Santa is some commercialized co-opted religious icon and now you go partisan on my ass!

Since you seem to have let your subscription to anything but the Christian Science Monitor lapse I'll try to put Ritter's comments in context for you. You can go on about children kept in prisons in Iraq as long as you like, and you can scoff at the suggestion that equally evil bastards are enjoying not only the free reign of their country but in many cases favored nation trade status with our own country! The leaders of the former Soviet bloc nations are thugs at best and murderers at worst, but Halliburton hasn't figured out a way to leverage the situation to feather Cheney's nest yet I guess. Do you have any idea what is going on in the Sudan, Dennis? Do you know about what goes on, right now, in the Congo? Have you once chastised the politicians for blocking the international ban on "conflict" diamonds or even the CURRENT slave trade that generates huge capital for many nations we do business with on a regular basis? Do you know about the Rwandan civil war between the Hutus and the Tutsis? or is it just provocative enough to invoke a child's suffering provided that he or she is an Iraqi? Do you really want to take the position that Iraqi children are more deserving of our help than the North Korean, the Angolan, the Columbian or any other race or nationality of infant or child?

I used to live on the Left Coast and then, after I was well enough to travel we moved back to where my husband is from, New York City. His sister had friend who had a close call when the Pentagon was attacked; his family is all over Brooklyn, Long Island and Westchester. The attacks took place, literally, in their back yard. That's not to prove that my opinion counts more than anyone else's but it certainly doesn't count for less. My husband goes to work managing Manhattan skyscrapers every day and I know that he and everyone he works with is a target. The days he spends at One Penn Plaza are the worst. My brother in law jokes that since his office is above the twentieth floor he is high enough to die on impact. You see, Mr. Miller, we've learned from men like you to find even the darkest humor in the most horrific and unfair shit life dishes out to us. We can't take any of it personally.

I don't pretend to like this President or the way he moved his administration into the Oval Office but I like to think that the fact that I spend time reading has quite a bit to do with that. I don't pretend to like the pork-barrel politics that continue to dominate Congress, but at least the neo conservatives found a way to actually surprise me by outspending any other Congressional body in the history of the Republic. I don't pretend to respect a President who, for the first time in our nation's history actually ran away in fear as the nation was under attack. Every other occupant of the White House stood their ground bravely. Not one had to retrofit some cave in the Carolinas to sweat out the danger. In fact, Dolly Madison was the last American to leave the White House while under direct attack and even she stuffed all the historical artifacts she could carry underneath her dress and left out the back while the attackers entered from the front!! Yes, W. is a brave National Guardsman indeed. And every single night you beat this partisan drum of yours in a way that isn't even comical, let alone cogent.

No, I can't say that I even comprehend your position at this point, defending war profiteering and imperialist rhetoric, but that isn't why I decided to write you this evening. I'm writing you as a person who is in your debt. I am writing because you made me angry enough and disgusted enough every single week to fight to stay alive so that my children would inherit a world that was a little less corrupt than the one they live in now. I'm writing because every time I plugged in your tape or watched one of your concerts I got energized, I felt like I wasn't the only nerd out there with my Utne Reader and my bootleg copy of 'the grand wazoo' shaking my head in disbelief.

Yeah, I'm stronger now. The doctors here in New York make the docs in the Northwest look like Voodoo witchdoctors; they run tests and actually find things that are wrong that they can fix before they find a band of rebel cells that are the size of a small toaster and require a week of hospitalization, mega doses of Chromagen Forte and an anesthesiologist to excise. My boys have breakfast on the table by 7am and dinner on the table by 5:30 at night. I even clean up the apartment from time to time. Bending and walking sometimes feel like I'm being forced to do a triple lutz spin off of the high beam after bench pressing 350 pounds in ballet slippers, but the gang gives me a solid 8.5 for effort and my cane is only necessary if I have to take the stairs. I'm going to live in spite of myself, dammit, and I'm going to make this world a better place somehow. I'm still breathing, so that must mean I have at least one more act to perform, one more good idea to pass on.

Dennis, this letter might fulfill my divine purpose. I doubt it, but I have to try. Be as opinionated as you want, be as offensive as you want, but for God sakes stop taking sides. I'm serious now, you little prick - if we can laugh at the stupidity and the random tragedy and the soulless greed and the indignities that we've had to endure, then so can you. Buck up there Dennis, and start making fun of all of it. The stuff you agree with, the stuff you think is stupid, the stuff you think is sacrosanct, all of it. You're wired in a way that few people are, you're in a rarefied club inhabited by people like Frank Zappa and Gore Vidal and the smartass that my sister dated in 1981. You have the ability to make people laugh at things that otherwise would eventually cause them to snap and go out into the streets and start to burn the city to the ground.

Stop being such a fucking apologist for the right. We were attacked. It sucked, we all feel like walking targets. My best friend from Portland, Oregon, thinks Al Quaida is trying to poison her town's water supply. Her town doesn't even have a MALL it's so goddamn small but she spends like $10 bucks a week on bottled water. Now that's a story I can all laugh at because I get scared too and yet I know I am not so important that Al Quaida is going to launch a grenade at my doorstep tonight. The world is a big bad scary place, but more people died in car accidents the week of 9/11 than did casualties of the terror attacks. Death and life, politics, health care, religion, the military, race relations, AIDS, sex, drugs... once upon a time you used to play on those fears of ours and make us laugh out loud at them.

So hey, if you aren't going to start being Dennis Miller and start being funny again, I'm taking my whole wheat nachos and pomegranate juice over to 'Countdown' with Keith Obermann. You'd like him - at least the "you" I knew in chemo would - he's offbeat, he talks about the news in a faintly snide way but there are no sacred cows with him, he loves to be self deprecating, doesn't take himself too seriously. I laugh out loud every time I watch him, but I tape his show for now. You see, there's this guy I know. He kind of helped my family out by getting us to take life a little less seriously when we really needed to chill and smell the roses through the manure. And so, I am nothing if not loyal. Eventually you'll either pull your head out of your ass and get your sense of irony back or you'll sign up to man the Mars Mission and your show will tank faster than Michael Moore in a "Survivor"swimming challenge.

Your choice, Dennis.

Me? I'm going to fight for that country I know my kids deserve. And I'm going to do it with a smile on my face because I am a survivor and I know every day is a gift. And they are going to learn that anyone in the public eye is a total buffoon more often than not, and the peculiar joy one can derive from such public stupidity is beyond euphoric, it often reaches the sublime.

See you at Nine.


the curmudgeon