From left: Stanley Crouch, Molly Ivins and P.J. O'RourkeFresh blood at "60 Minutes" riles "Pops" Rooney
By GARY KAMIYA
Trying to shake itself out of a doldrums that has plagued the entire CBS News organization, "60 Minutes" has added commentators Stanley Crouch, Molly Ivins and P.J. O'Rourke to accompany cranky ol' gosh-darn-it exhibit Andy Rooney. Crouch and Ivins debuted last night, and if their brief exchange seemed a bit canned, it contained enough wit to promise good future intellectual food-fights on the venerable news program.
The choice of Ivins, Crouch and O'Rourke as debaters would appear to be inspired, certainly by the standards of network TV. For one thing, they cover the political spectrum far better, and more interestingly, than most TV talking heads. (Take "The McLaughlin Group," for example, where the "range" of opinion runs approximately from Genghis Khan to Attila the Hun.) Ivins is a non-doctrinaire liberal who brings a refreshing good-old-girl feistiness to her politics. O'Rourke is a gloating reactionary/libertarian with a keen eye for the numerous fatuities of the ortho-left. Crouch, the most iconoclastic and interesting thinker of the three, is a brilliantly unpredictable African-American culture critic who rejects conventional racial pieties.
Equally important, all three are performers who give good sound bite. They not only have something to say, they say it fast.
The subject of the Crouch-Ivins exchange, filmed in separate locations, was the hot racial topic du jour, the civil judgment against New York subway gunman Bernhard Goetz. Crouch, up first, blasted the verdict, which awarded $43 million to one of Goetz's victims: "What they got (i.e. being shot) is what they deserved." He acknowledged that Goetz had made some stupid comments about race, but denied that the case was about race. "If I was on the jury, these four young men would represent criminality first, race second."
"The fact that he was a racist is irrelevant," Ivins agreed, implicitly rejecting the interpretation that plaintiff Darrell Cabey's attorney, Ronald L. Kuby, had placed upon the verdict. ("It sends a very clear message to all the bigots out there who think black lives are worthless. Those lives are worth a lot.") Instead, she made her stand on much narrower ground, zeroing in on the ethical implications of Goetz's final shot, when he walked over to the already-wounded Cabey, said "You don't look so bad -- here's another," and fired again, paralyzing him. "Where I come from, you don't shoot a man who's lying down and call it self-defense," Ivins said in her rich Texas drawl, cagily invoking the Lone Star state's frontier-justice tradition to make her argument less bleeding of heart.
Crouch's riposte featured the best one-liner of the exchange: "I don't believe somebody should get worker's comp just because he had a bad crime day...The real problem is thugs."
Ivins closed by pointing out that Goetz didn't have to shoot: he could have simply handed over the $5 and called the cops.
Fans of the Shana-you-ignorant-slut school of on-air disputation may have been disappointed by the exchange, in which the opponents actually agreed on as much as they disagreed. (Ivins' argument, if pursued to its logical conclusion, would seem to imply that it was perfectly OK for Goetz to have shot the four young men in the first place -- just not to have shot one of them again.) In fact, the subtlety of the argument, its avoidance of received ideas, was what was most refreshing about it.
A more juicily hostile exchange can be expected when O'Rourke, whose radical anti-government position and Clinton-hating would do the most slavering freshman Republican proud, squares off with staunch progressive Ivins. But the most intriguing matchup may well turn out to be O'Rourke versus Crouch: it's hard to predict how that one will play, but it should be entertaining.
The hour's weirdest moment, however, came when Andy Rooney "welcomed" his new colleagues to the show. Rooney's persona is hard to read -- is it his real personality, or just his shtick? -- but recently it seems to be listing a bit more towards the dog-kicking old grouch than the lovable Everyman. He was so stung by a recent AP story gently suggesting he step down that he used his "60 Minutes" pulpit to denounce the story and its author, Frazier Moore, and urge viewers to call AP to register their opinions. Commenting on Bob Dole's reputation for meanness in a recent piece on Presidential candidates, he said, "I like that in a man."
In light of those incidents, and his public expressions of unhappiness with the new commentary team, it was most, uh, interesting that Rooney chose this particular moment to look back upon all those earlier commentators who are no longer with "60 Minutes."
"Tonight '60 Minutes' is a little different," Rooney said. "It's been on for 28 years -- we're all used to how it goes... It's as if it's always been thus. But it hasn't." As clips rolled, he proceeded to recall such earlier luminaries as Billy Graham, Art Buchwald, Shana Alexander ("Jack, you shock me"), Cleveland Amory, Bill Moyers and Nicholas von Hoffman. "So welcome to '60 Minutes,' Stanley, Molly and P.J. O'Rourke," he closed. "Just don't give up your day jobs."
Beneath the amusing film clips and the light, ironic tone, viewers may have discerned an irascible old coot standing triumphantly on his porch, cackling, "Yup, I've seen a thousand young punks like you come -- and I've seen a thousand go."