How can anybody run a country where there are over 600 different kinds of cheese?
The late French President Charles de Gaulle is said to have asked that question during France’s student-worker uprising of 1969. Americans of the 21stcentury might ask: How is so much chutzpah crammed into a country already filled with nearly 300 million people?
America has chutzpah aplenty; that’s been the case for years. There’s so much of it that I started a tradition as far back as the mid-1990s of handing out what I call my Annual Chutzpah Awards.
Before getting to this year’s deserving winners, a brief definition of chutzpah might be in order, for those who’ve never heard of the term. It’s a Yiddish word that describes nerve and audacity so brazen and so bold that it almost can’t be conceived. The classic example is supposed to be the guy who murdered both his parents and, at his trial, threw himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he was an orphan.
None of 2009’s winners match that kind of chutzpah, but they come darned close. So without further ado, on with this year’s deserving awardees:
Tenth place: Michigan Rep. John Conyers admitted that he didn’t read the House of Representatives version of the health care reform bill. Then he had the nerve to continue being a congressman, instead of resigning, as he should have. I’ll bet he hasn’t read the Constitution he’s sworn to uphold either. Ditto for many of his colleagues.
Ninth place: Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who played the victim card after getting arrested by a white cop. Gates compared his plight to that of thousands of other black men in America’s jails and prisons?
Yo, Hank, how do you think things would have turned out if you had gone home and found one of those black men burglarizing your house, instead of a white cop?
Eighth place: Sgt. James Crowley, the man who arrested Gates, tried his best to play the victim role himself. Too bad his version of events altered drastically from that of the woman who made the 911 call that led to police showing up at Gates’ home.
Seventh place: President Obama, who crammed his foot deeply down his throat about the Gates-Crowley mess, instead of dummying up like he should have.
Sixth place: Hollywood supporters of Roman Polanski, the director who pleaded guilty to drugging and sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl in 1977. A memo to these people: The French might celebrate “Be Kind To Child Molesters Week,” but we don’t do it in America.
Fifth place: Whoopi Goldberg, who defended Polanski with her infamous “it wasn’t rape-rape” gaffe. Goldberg’s the same person who tried to defend Michael Vick’s yen for dogfighting, and that leads me to …
Fourth place: Michael Vick, who accepted an Ed Block Courage Award — given to athletes who display “sportsmanship and commitment,” according to one news story — in December. Vick has expressed many mea culpas for running his dogfighting ring, but I still think he should be working in an animal shelter — without pay — and not playing on any National Football League team.
Third place: Vick’s Philadelphia Eagles teammates, who voted to give him the award. Too bad the dogs of America didn’t get to vote.
Second place: In a continuation of the football theme in this year’s awards, the winners here are author Malcolm Gladwell and the editors of the New Yorker, who must have paid Gladwell a pretty penny to write a piece comparing professional football to dogfighting.
How such a silly idea came about is anyone’s guess, but I’ll venture my own. At a wine and cheese party in which both Gladwell and the editors had imbibed way too much wine, someone said, “Malcolm, why don’t we have you do a piece comparing NFL players to dogs forced to fight to the death?”
Suggestion for Gladwell: Next time just say, “Let’s not and say we did.”
The winners: Editors of the New York Post did editors of the New Yorker one better: They hired a former prostitute as a love, sex and relationships columnist.
Really, is any further elaboration needed here?
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
