"What Happened To You, Dennis?!"

When did Dennis Miller become such a Conservative Douche-Bag? I must have missed something, being that I’ve been living in a fog of common sense for the last couple of years, but the Dennis that I knew and respected was one of the most intelligent and eloquent comics in this country… so what happened? In his last HBO special, “The Raw Feed” he constantly sung the praises of a President that, in 2000 he had lambasted for his lack of intelligence and credibility as far as a being a Presidential Candidate was concerned. Here’s a sample, (from “I Rant, Therefore I Am”) “We live in a world where the scion of a rich, failed President can run against a man that spent 7 years in a Vietnamese Prison Camp and still win the Nomination… ah, fuck it. Where’s my Propeller Hat?”

Then September 11th happened, and an invisible line was drawn across the political spectrum in this country, the “You’re with us or you’re our enemy” crowd that blindly pledged allegiance to the President being on one side, and the “Sorry, but we can think for ourselves, thank you very much” crowd that was called “Anti-American” for having our own opinions on the reasons behind the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on the other. Dennis chose his side after those events, and guess which side he picked… gee, I wonder? Three years later, in “The Raw Feed”, Dennis said that he likes Bush 2, Electric Boogaloo because, “He’s not Bill Clinton.” As a comic, I go out of my way to say that I don’t endorse anybody, since I know that nearly all (99.9999992%) of politicians are corrupt, and endorsing a corrupt system would say that I myself am corrupt.

Most people that know me know that I’m a Progressive (that’s “Liberal” to some) but I’m generally willing to give most people a chance to prove themselves as far as being a reliable human being is concerned, but for a comic like Dennis, who went after every President we had, from the Nixon Administration to Bush II: The Sequel (at first), he never endorsed any of them, instead he opted to make fun of their failings and shortcomings… nothing wrong with that. Talk all you want about Clinton, but at least he could pronounce “Didn’t” like how it’s spelled, unlike Dubya, who pronounces it, “Dudn’t” and apparently doesn’t understand that he is one of the worst Presidents in the recent history of this failing pseudo-Democracy. But, this isn’t really about President Bush, it’s about Dennis.

Oh, what a difference an invite to hang out with the President at the White House and getting a couple of rides on Air Force One makes. Dennis went from “Dennis Miller Live” on HBO to his thankfully short-lived “Talk” show on CNBC… which he used as a platform to talk up the virtues of our Special-Ed President and his cronies in the Administration. He often peppered his conversations with a variety of guests with old lines from his monologues on HBO and his “Rants” book series, and his lack of originality, as well as his self-plagiarism, frustrated me, as I watched the slow descent of one of my favorite comics transforming into a mouth-piece for a self-serving, vapid regime. It would be like seeing Richard Pryor, George Carlin or Lenny Bruce walk up on stage and say that McCarthyism was just what this country needed, and that segregation was great for the Black population.

Comics, in my mind, are meant to come out on stage and tell it like it is, and not be P.R. men or women for anyone. Stand-Ups are supposed to be the voice of rebellion; pointing out when something is fucked up, and not lying to themselves and the audience because of political ideology. What has happened to Dennis is what happens to many firebrands in any field of Entertainment… he sold out for the sake of money; like the old phrase goes, “There’s not such thing as a 50-year-old ‘Rebel’ Millionaire”. He knew that he would make more bookings in the heartland by putting a Conservative spin on his established style of multi-syllabic rants and tirades aimed at specific people or topics. In High School, many of my friends didn’t like Dennis, being that his sense of humor was very smug, but what they really didn’t like was how erudite his perspective of the world was… in other words, he was smarter than us, and he let us know through his mastery of the language.

That was the Dennis that I admired, but that Dennis may be dead and gone… he has a new HBO Special on January 19th and I’ll watch it to see if the Dennis that most of us had come to know and respect has returned back to the fold, or stayed with the conformists. I still listen to the Audio Books on Tape that Dennis made in the past, since they’re still as funny as they were on the day that I bought them, but in the back of my mind, there is always the specter of who Dennis is now, versus who he was back then… and it creeps me out.