Look to the cookie!" If only Michael Richards had remembered the advice of Jerry Seinfeld, rhapsodizing on his sitcom about the racial-harmony message of the black-and-white cookie. When Richards (Seinfeld's Kramer) called African-American hecklers in a comedy club "niggers" and joked about lynching them, it capped a season of celebrity lunacy. Mel Gibson had his anti-Jewish tirade during a drunk-driving arrest; actor Isaiah Washington reportedly called a fellow Grey's Anatomy cast member a "faggot" during an argument on set. News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, meanwhile, apologized last week not for bigotry per se but for cynically ripping off the race-and-gender scab of the O.J. Simpson trial by offering Simpson a book deal and TV show to describe how he "hypothetically" would have butchered his wife and her friend.
All this followed an election whose lowlights were the macaca incident, an ad playing off miscegenation fears and a radio host mocking a disabled man. It's as if the U.S. were experiencing collective Tourette's, regurgitating decades of dutifully sublimated hate--Borat, with real people. As disturbing as the bigotry was the role of the people expressing it. Politicians and entertainers, after all, succeed by knowing our hearts and minds. We are, in a real way, implicated in their achievement and their disgrace. So you'd think this explosion of public ugliness might spur some kind of national soul searching. Did we somehow encourage their bigotry, by ignoring softer forms of it in our pop culture? Did they think on some level, conscious or not, that they spoke for us? Were they right?
But the media have become so focused on the business side of show business--and the offense-contrition-comeback cycle has become so familiar--that the scandals immediately became dispassionate meta-stories about scandal management. After Gibson's outburst, we asked how rehab and apology could salvage his Mayan thriller, Apocalypto. We didn't look so hard at how his bile reflected on the millions who loved The Passion of the Christ, with its hook-nosed, despicable Jews. About Richards, we asked, Did he seem sad enough on Letterman? What do p.r. experts advise? How will the incident affect Seinfeld reruns and DVDs?
That last is actually the more interesting question, though not for business reasons. After Richards' slur, the analysis emphasized how "lovable" his character Kramer was. But Seinfeld wasn't universally loved. The most popular show among white viewers, it was a distant runner-up among blacks, and minorities criticized it for having all white stars and portraying people of color as stereotypes or buffoons (the Johnnie Cochran--like lawyer; Babu, the Pakistani restaurateur). Did the critics have a point? It's going to be hard to look the same way, say, at the episode in which Kramer inadvertently dresses up like a pimp.