Do you remember them?

Jerry Lewis and whatever semblance of celebrity he could cobble together, would entertain the hell out of you for 24 hours straight, and in return you would pledge money to help fight MD.

The shows always took place on Labour Day weekend– when absolutely nothing else happened– and since it was the only thing on TV we watched it like it was a seasonal tradition. Staying up with Jerry was a both a dare and a way to extend the summer. Still, the telethons felt like artifacts from another era, something that was owned by a generation previous to mine.

The Academy Awards have this feel, too, and I watch them mostly for the comforting, predictable sense of nostalgia they always conjure, but I found this year’s edition to be, well, confused. Was it a self-congratulatory ad for a dying industry, or was it stationed at the forefront of a social revolution? Was it about fashion and beauty or was it about it not being about fashion and beauty?

It proved complicated to decipher.

Host Jimmy Kimmel made an opening #MeToo friendly joke about the absurd irony of Mel Gibson starring in a movie called What Women Want.

It was a safe joke, one that picked a target everybody could agree upon, and it got what was almost relieved laughter. It might be hard to imagine now, but Mel Gibson was once a beautiful dream of potential.

Now he is an unredeemable laughing stock.

What was ironic was that in 2000, the year What Women Want came out and made tons of money, Jimmy Kimmel was co-hosting The Man Show. At the time, the slim and woke Oscar host was less slim and less woke, and The Man Show was all about tits. It was about grabbing them by the pussy. It was a white boy frat party.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl3wioLmNNY

And yet there was Jimmy Kimmel on Oscar night making jokes about Mel Gibson’s pernicious attitude toward woman while a bejeweled and admiring audience laughed their approval before him.

These moments of dissonance happened throughout the broadcast, the most vivid occurring when Wes Studi, a Cherokee actor you probably recognize but could never name, introduced a montage of military movies.

Clearly the depiction of violent masculinity in this particular climate was considered iffy, and as if to soften that potential for controversy and loss of market share, the production team got a member of an under represented community to introduce this unpopular, but tactically necessary segment. It was calculated, and when Studi opened by saying he was a proud veteran of the Vietnam War, the crowd’s confusion at how to respond was palpable. They no longer knew whether Studi stood for something good or bad, they could not interpret the symbol they were being shown. After the montage ended, and Studi uttered a dose of Cherokee– which at the time could have been either a blessing or curse– the audience opted for a shallow, incoherent applause.

You could also see the once unassailable Meryl Streep– who many believe did not do enough to stop Harvey Weinstein—giving way to the meme-friendly Francis McDormand as moral force and American exemplar. When once beloved comic Dave Chappelle came on stage to a spattering of applause, he found that the comedic power he held as an oppressed minority had been overshadowed by his criticism of #MeToo. The omnipresent and eager Ryan Seacrest, who somehow manages to emit a vibe that simultaneously suggests a Bro and a gay man, found himself snubbed on the red carpet by all the stars in response to an accusation of sexual misconduct levied against him. They were only too eager to nourish themselves on his fawning, promotional interviews before, but now?

And when Annabella Sciorra, Ashley Judd and Salma Hayek took the stage, glittering and beautiful and gazed upon from so many different points of view, it was hard to interpret all the mixed messages that were being sent out into the world.

Were these women brave activists or part of an exploitive one percent? Were they complicit in creating unrealistic expectations for women by  opting for cosmetic surgery, or were they victims of an industry that demanded it from them as if it was a tax for being a woman? Could everything be true at once?

The Jerry Lewis Telethon ended just a few years ago. Over the course of it’s lifetime it raised over 2.5 billion for those fighting MD, but it also did so in an often self-serving and patronizing, if not wholly lurid manner.

In the end, were all those telethons a good released into this world or an evil?

It’s impossible to know, I guess, but it strikes me that nobody is all good or all bad. Each one of us is a riot of contradictions, often engaged in actions that elude our articulation or even understanding. Our lives and character are much more circumstantial and precarious than most of us would care to admit, and we would all be well served to save a little empathetic space in our hearts for those we don’t necessarily understand or agree with.

Everything, really, depends on that.

I didn’t have much of an appetite for the Oscar’s this year.

Normally I’d be all in, enjoying the glittering and flimsy spectacle as much anybody, but this year felt different, and whatever spirit or anticipation I’d typically bring to the affair was just not there. In fact, I was dreading it, imaging it another long– really long– continuation of all the sneering, bitter arguments that were ceaselessly looping through my media feeds.

Social media has begun to feel like tuning in to some late-night AM radio call-in show. The voices, disembodied and angry, fire from the dark, each one inveighing some furious certainty. There is no complaint too small or too large, and each one comes obsessively detailed by the over-confident sender. There’s an urgency to all these declarations, too, as if impulse more than thought, and the momentum always moves forward– retreat or rumination, let alone a kind of sympathy, utterly unthinkable.

To willingly step into this each day, as I do, is an act of madness. To me, it feels like being closed in a room with a hundred growling dogs while the unmediated grievances of the world strobe in front of you. It colours your mood, this, so even before something of “actuality” happens in your physical life, you’re already tense and combat ready– you’ve already become somebody you don’t want to be. And I swear, if we could somehow tap into the cataract of doomed energy that feeds this monster, we would be masters of the universe.

Initially I had imagined the Internet as something almost utopian. It would be democratizing and unifying, kind of like The Force, and united by the millions we would be able to destroy evil Death Stars. Instead, it’s proven to be infinitely divisive, revealing that the Internet itself might be a horrible Death Star.

The limitless options presented by technology have moved us away from what had been commonly shared. Whatever our interests may be, however perverse, remote or idiosyncratic, we can find a subculture dedicated to that passion or hatred online. We are never alone, but our channels never seem to be open, either. Living in gluttonous echo chambers of our own devising, we now customize our experiences, changing them to suit our needs rather than adopting to the mean. In this way, popular culture is being eradicated, with each person becoming a hermetically sealed culture unto themselves.

Naturally, the idea of compassion or empathy withers in this climate of radical tribalization. It’s now completely normal for people to proudly boast of de-Friending somebody who disagrees with their politics or to happily live within the paradox of being tolerant of everything but intolerance. If you step into Twitter, far from finding a marketplace for the free exchange of ideas, you find a war zone. Every once in a while you pop up from your trench, fire off a few salvos at the enemy, and then duck down again—kind of like a shooter game.

The Internet in the age of Trump ( who I believe saw and exploited this rather than created it), is a grim landscape lacking in kindness.

Full of hall monitors ready to pounce on anybody not adhering to the common orthodoxy, it’s a place you go to confirm your certainties and your enemy’s idiocies. It is a place where fighting, where aggression is the entertainment, and it is perhaps the loneliest place on the planet.

I grew up in the Age of Letterman, and I have to say that I view his pending retirement as good news. Over the years my encounters with the Late Show have become sporadic and accidental. It wasn’t just the format that seemed dusty, but Letterman himself looked a little bit old, sometimes even disheveled, and his performance recalled a different era, the man having somehow morphed from being the smartest, edgiest guy in the room to a beloved uncle repeating jokes after Christmas dinner. It wasn’t pathetic, just a little bit sad, like noticing somebody you love age and becoming a smaller, more vulnerable version of himself.

Once a revolutionary who brought irony into the mainstream, he now seems lost in time, usurped by all his competitors who have an organic sense and mastery of social media. Of course, when Letterman started, he was the undisputed champion of improvisational videos, bits that would have played brilliantly on the Internet, but the fact that he was both before and of his time, is no matter,

Back then he was a jolt of electricity into very calm and predictable weather and as a teenager I immediately related to him. He had an anarchic, Frat Boy sensibility, and liking him as opposed to another, lamer option, was a defining tribal characteristic. You wanted to wear the Late Night t-shirt the same way you wanted to wear the t-shirt of a super-cool alt band– it meant something about who you were and how you saw the world. Every night, we all gathered in our university residence to watch Late Night before heading off to our parties. It was a cultural drawing point and it sincerely brought us together.

Letterman has had a massive influence on our cultural landscape, his style and intolerance for the pieties and hypocrisies of celebrity culture– even though he lived within it– have pointed the way for so much of the comedic culture we currently revere.  Now in his late 60’s, it is time for him to go, and it’s very bittersweet. He was a giant, one with a unique gravitas and ability to cut through the bullshit, and I will miss him– as I miss the days of my youth–more than I can say.