Star Jones, Danny Deutsch and Dr. Nancy Snyderman get on my nerves. They comprise a segment on the Today Show called "Today's Professionals," which basically is a three-minute-or-so group-rant that makes the three of them come off like a tri-headed hydra. A moderator hurls "headlines" at them and they state the obvious in a fashion that makes you feel like you are at a party full of starchy, big-mouthed, arrogant fools masquerading as The Supreme Zeitgeist.
Jones especially is hilarious. In one segment the moderator showed a clip from an anti-child-obesity ad campaign, and that gave Jones the inspiration to go all evangelical about her past struggles with weight gain and shame. But with Jones (and the other two) it's not the freshness of the message that matters, as much as the peacock-in-full-splendor delivery of it. In other words, Jones was only stating the obvious ("I was once morbidly obese, and now I'm not, so I know a thing or two about childhood obesity thank you very much"), but she did so with such horrible over-the-top aplomb it made me feel like I was in the presence of someone doing a parody without knowing it. She doesn't seem to have that interior voice many of us are blessed with, the one that allows us to know we are full of crap. Without it her "professionalism" becomes a megaphone for whatever she thinks people will find "stimulating." She's the crazy sherriff of Water-Cooler-Moment County.
All three utilize that special egotistical panache often associated with the word "professional." They sit in high-chairs like pedigreed babies and/or 16th Century Royalty spouting off bromides in a resplendence born of privilege and more than a little vanity. They do all this pontificating in a safe and scolding manner, like Fox News merged with Old-school Phil Donahue. My favorite moment so far with "Today's Professionals" was yesterday when the three were shown a clip of that new black and white and very boring Casey Anthony You-Tube video. Blond and sporting the librarian look, Anthony sits in front of her web-cam and talks about herself and her dog and herself. "Today's Professionals" went rabid on that acquitted murderer's ass. They diagnosed her as a sociopath and a narcissist and they just wanted to never see her again! That triple-rant went on for what felt like an eternity. Good use of a doctor, a lawyer and an ad executive's very expensive and very precious billable time.
"Professionalism" can be a word attached to any endeavor you choose. In this case, all their degrees and experience are being used to create a Board of Directors for a lynch mob. The main theme of the Anthony rant was that this woman is out of the public eye, let's keep it that way, but she just put a video up on You-Tube so we better take advantage of that while we can. The triple-headed Cerberus loves barking at the gates of hell, and then it's onto another segment about how men are biologically programmed to cheat and women are biologically programmed to put up with it.
Welcome to 2012 everybody.
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