In Defense of Kathy Griffin

Ever notice how incredibly easy it is for the White House to bring down — even destroy — any woman who becomes a problem for the President and his administration?

Funny, we’ve gotten so used to politicians throwing other politicians under the bus that we’ve come to ignore what The Oval Office does whenever “contrary” women exercise their freedom of speech.

When it comes to political retaliation, there’s a longstanding tradition of using lies to attack these women whenever their honesty begins to tarnish the President’s image. When Nan Britton accurately claimed Warren Harding was the father of her baby, she got shunned as a lunatic. When Martha Mitchell(wife of AG John) started spilling accurate details about Richard Nixon’s involvement in Watergate, she actually got institutionalized. When Eartha Kitt allegedly “insulted” Lady Bird(LBJ’s First Lady) at a White House function by truthfully speaking about her work with young people and their concerns over Vietnam, she got so shunned as a crazy that her career almost ended for good.

Never mind if the targeted female was telling the truth. Never mind that she never actually did or said what The Oval Office claimed. Everyone believed the lie from The White House, anyway. Everyone accepted the exaggerated, highly biased version from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, even if it wasn’t true. The truth just didn’t matter here. Everyone, it seems, wanted to believe the worst about the offender and punish her — even if she wasn’t guilty…Just because the President of The United States decided, in retaliation, that she WAS guilty.

How incredibly easy it was for the powers-that-be to cry witch. How incredibly easy it was to deride women as mentally ill simply because they opposed the most powerful man in America with their honest words. Remember, they’re only women, and women must continually watch what they say and do when powerful men are involved.

That’s pretty scary for a nation that so highly values its freedom of speech. It certainly became a nightmare for actress/comedienne/performance artist Kathy Griffin when she proclaimed herself critic of then President Donald Trump. For her, it all hit the fan in May, 2017, when she aired her photo shoot — in progress — online. In no time at all she became vilified as some deranged Salome holding the head of Trump(and not John The Baptist).

Of course, this is old news. It happened over four years ago, when Trump was President. He no longer occupies The Oval Office. But like all things from TrumpWorld, the stink of his injustice lingers on.

Now four years later, Kathy Griffin has been broken.(Mission accomplished.) After her thrashing from Trump’s Administration and the GOP machine’s smearing, she found herself shunned and chronically unemployed. During this period, she also had to deal with the death of her mother, and her own lung cancer(despite the fact that she herself had never smoked). Am I asking you to pity her because she’s been besieged by unfortunate calamities that so many others have faced? No. Not at all.

What I am asking you to do, dear readers, is to recognize Kathy Griffin’s smearing and subsequent blacklisting as a cautionary tale. Not only could it happen here, it DID happen here…And it could happen again.

And it could have easily happened to you or me…or anyone else who dared to criticize or ridicule Trump.

The real problem here was that so many Americans respectively traded in their own personal subjective perceptions for knee-jerk sensationalism. That is, they didn’t really see what was actually aired online. They perceived instead what Trump and his minions described and wanted them to see. Then they subsequently interpreted these guided perceptions in the way the powers-that-be had wanted.

In other words, they actually believed they saw Kathy Griffin holding the bloody, severed head of Donald Trump when there was no blood, no head, no severed head. They didn’t see a sheet of paper. They saw Trump, even when the existence of his likeness, image, or actual resemblance was highly questionable.

This guided manipulation resulted in a misperception that ruined her career and life.

Psychologists have long been studying this phenomenon: people can AND DO SEE what they’re told to see by experts or authority figures. They can even perceive images that don’t actually exist if they’re “instructed”(or manipulated) to “see” them. So it’s not a matter of seeing is believing; it’s more like believing what you think you see.

In the audio narration of her photo shoot, Ms. Griffin did mention Donald Trump’s name. She did not, however, specifically identify his image as being the one on the paper she was holding. In fact, if you had actually looked closely and dispassionately at this video, you could see that no drawing or photo of Trump on this paper was clearly visible. Or identifiable.
Now if you use computer enhancements, you could enlarge this paper and bring details into sharper focus. You could even argue that these nondescript features look like Trump’s face because you see what looks like bangs. So? The Beatles had bangs. Xena, Warrior Princess, had bangs. So did Florence Henderson. I haven’t heard anything lately about The Brady Bunch Anti-Defamation League filing any lawsuits on Flo-Ho’s behalf, though. Have you?

Even if this flat sheet of paper was intended to represent Trump, the vagueness of the image makes decisive identification impossible. Too bad we can’t go back and view the original images, though. The video I studied(and distinctly remember) is no longer legally available for viewing. Why? Because Kathy Griffin herself took it down, hours after the initial airing.

As Ms. Griffin later recounted, her classic posing — what looked to me like an archaic stance of a patriot holding up an effaced writ — didn’t resonate well with her fans. They didn’t get it. They also didn’t get that they were viewing a process of changing and rearranging during a photo shoot, not the finished product itself. Then too, maybe the smeared ketchup on the paper confused them.

Maybe it required too much interpretive input from them. Was the red smear on the paper designed to create aesthetic balance between her flaming red hair and the paper? Or was it paying homage to a dangerous fast food habit? What did it really mean? They didn’t know. They just thought it looked too gross and gooey. They didn’t like it and told her so in their tweets and e-mails.

So Ms. Griffin took it down. She also apologized for any misunderstandings about it, reassuring her supporters that her intention had never been to upset them.

Unfortunately, this removal wasn’t enough for Trump and his GOP machine. They — not Kathy Griffin — managed to keep her video up(along with accompanying still photos.) No doubt they also photoshopped or manipulated images to make it appear she was insulting Trump in the worst possible way. They — not Kathy Griffin — were the ones out for blood.

Oddly enough, the fact that no bloody, severed head of Donald Trump had ever existed in this video didn’t stop The White House or the media at large from obsessing about it. Oh, the bloody head! The bloody, severed head of President Donald Trump! How dare she! NOT FUNNY! NOT FUNNY!

What’s especially bizarre here is how the media perpetrating this myth never agreed on what Kathy Griffin actually did or said. They just kept mindlessly repeating the visceral sensationalism of the narrative. As if grossing out readers and viewers alike would give the lie more credibility and reliability?

From an op-ed that appeared in “USA TODAY” on Thursday, June 1, 2017: “Kathy Griffin has apologized for going ‘way too far’ on a performance art project, where she held a model of a bloody, decapitated head, designed to look like President Trump.”
(Again, with the blood and decapitation! But what she was holding was too unclear to identify as Trump or anyone else.)

From a Faces/newsmakers column in “The Minneapolis Star Tribune” on Saturday, June 3, 2017:
“EMBATTLED: Comedian Kathy Griffin said Friday that she’s not afraid of Donald Trump and plans to keep making fun of him but mentioned that she’s sorry for a video that depicted her holding a likeness of the President’s severed, bloody head…”
(Is everything red considered “bloody?” If so, then Nancy Reagan’s favorite color to wear wasn’t “Reagan Red,” it was just plain “Bloody.”)

From a “WHEN THEY MET” column that appeared in “The New York Times” on Thursday, December 28, 2017:
“…And on New Year’s Eve, Mr. Cohen will join Mr. Cooper to host CNN’s telecast from Times Square replacing the comedian Kathy Griffin, who was fired in May after posing for a photograph while holding a Donald Trump mask bloodied with ketchup.”
(“Bloodied with ketchup?” Really? Oh, like February 14th is chock full o’ bloodied valentines because all hearts are bloody red, even when they’re not heart transplants on the operating table? Did anyone ever think that maybe the ketchup wasn’t a simile or metaphor for blood but just ordinary ketchup — like the kind you’d find at McDonald’s, The Donald’s favorite snack shack?…Apparently not.)

From “10 Cultural Battles that Rocked 2017,” a feature that appeared in “The New York Times” on Sunday, December 31, 2017: “When Kathy Griffin tweeted out a photograph of herself holding the bloody, severed head of Mr. Trump, she faced few defenders and was promptly fired from her gig cohosting CNN’s New Year’s Eve Special.”
(Maybe there’s no way to defend anyone about anything when you’re such a lemminghead that you actually believe whatever you’re told without investigating on your own. Where were you, Me Too, when a sister really needed your help? Sounds like you can’t— or won’t — believe what you saw with your own eyes … or even what you didn’t see with your own eyes. Also, did anyone consider that maybe CNN had wanted to get another host for their “New Year’s Eve Special” and were looking for a quick, hassle-free way to ax her?)

*From the Faces/newsmakers column that appeared in “The Minneapolis Star Tribune” on Monday, March 12, 2018:
“Kathy Griffin is embarking on her comeback, nine months after she provoked outrage — and lost much of her work — by posing with a fake severed head that appeared to depict President Donald Trump.”
(Now it’s “a fake severed head?” Now it “appeared to depict President Donald Trump?” Wow. Is that some kind of journalistic progress? Or, did some free spirit sneak in the newsroom?)

From a featured report from “The New York Times” on Tuesday, March 30, 2018: “…This will be Ms. Griffin’s first television role since the incident last May in which she posed in a photograph while holding a blood-smeared representation of Mr. Trump’s head.”
(So now, nine months later, it’s not a head but a representation of Mr. Trump’s head. It’s not just a bloody head but a blood-smeared representation of Mr. Trump’s head. But a representation of a head isn’t the same as a head…)

No one can really describe what it was…or responsibly “kill” the story, either.

A model. A head. A severed head. A bloody head. A face. A mask. A drawing. A photo. Reproduction, representation, or effigy. Blood? Ketchup? Bloodied with ketchup? Which one? Which one(or two) of these things was it? It can’t be all of these things.

Make up your minds, O Noble Denizens of the Media Horde. If you want to go along with Trump and destroy his enemies — AKA, anyone who disagrees with him — at least be accurate.

If you want to destroy someone’s life, at least try to get the facts straight.

But if you continue ignoring facts, sooner or later you’re going to have to address the inherent injustice of Ms. Griffin’s treatment. You’re going to have to come up with some plausible excuses for the political double standard you’ve long ignored. Like, why was she so mercilessly ostracized and blacklisted as Spawn of Satan because of a skewed visual from a photo shoot while rocker Ted Nugent publicly threatened President Obama ’s life and only got a few giggles?

Back in 2012, Ted Nugent actually made this veiled threat at the NRA Convention in St. Louis: “If Barrack Obama becomes President in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.”

Nugent also advised beheadings for(who else?) Democrats:”We need to ride into that battle and chop off their heads in November.” The Secret Service investigated Nugent and questioned him about his remarks. Of course, nothing bad happened to Nugent or his career. Why? (Is it me or is this obsession with decapitation getting way out of hand?)

Oh, wait. Ted Nugent was — and still is — a Republican. He supported Mitt Romney and Donald Trump. Come on, Barrack Obama was just a Democrat and a black guy in The White House. (Sigh) So Teddy gets a wink and a shrug; Kathy gets eternal vilification for a crime she never committed.

Life really is unfair. And don’t ever tell me — or Kathy Griffin — that it isn’t.