Bob Herbert: Conan O’Brien laughs of poverty-stricken, run down city

[johan helge]

Herbert (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/opinion/13herbert.html?src=tp):

"Conan O’Brien has been making some pretty rough jokes about Newark (...).

He did a video bit in which he praised the city’s “thriving arts scene” (while showing a graffiti-scarred wall); its “four-star lodging” (shots of abandoned, gutted, rusting vehicles); and its “world-class live theater” (a peep show).

He threatened to form an alliance with the mayors of nearby municipalities, thus “creating a geographic toilet seat around the city of Newark,” making it possible to flush the city down the figurative bowl.

(...)

Conan seems like a nice fellow, and I doubt that he harbors any malice toward Newark. But he and his audience are having fun taunting a city that, like many others across the U.S., is in a desperately tragic situation: poverty-stricken, run down, often unsafe, its children and teenagers in too many instances going nowhere fast."

My comment: My impression is that some areas get poore and poorer, others richer and richer. Taunting the poverty-stricken areas is heartless and disgusting.

[LisaM]

1. They do it about Detroit, too.

In my opinion, knocking someone when they are down is not humor. Humor should be directed upward.

[johan helge]

2. From a comment to Herbert's article, describing Detroit:

From http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/opinion/13herbert.html?sort=recommended:

I don't know about Newark, but in college I had the opportunity to live four months in Dakar, Senegal, a city which we like to define as "third-world." Back then I had this idea that I needed to see what "poverty" looked like. However, upon returning and moving to metro Detroit, I can see that there was no need to go half so far. Dakar is far better off than Detroit, with a comparable literacy rate (60%), fewer drugs, and far less violence. In parts of Detroit, poverty/unemployment/crime rates are through the roof, streets are abandoned, every other house is burned or falling in, every window broken, and empty sky scrapers crumble, condemned and overgrown with plants. You can't believe it until you've spent time there.

Detroit is in appalling condition. I would never have believed that the United States of America, which brags and blathers so hard on the world stage, would allow such unthinkable destitution. The country that offered me so much privilege and even led me to assume that poverty was always elsewhere, that children were hungry in China and Africa but never here five minutes away, offers neither safety nor opportunity to so many children in Detroit.

[butterfly77]

That is what the rightwing wants for the rest of the country..

[johan helge]

5. This laughter is part of the right's war against the poor

Those who can afford to move out of poor areas, do so. And these areas get poorer and poorer.

And the right wants this poverty to be not the nation's problem, but these poor areas' problem. That way the nation doesn't have to do anything about it, the nation can just laugh of it.

[Captain Hilts]

3. About Detroit. Utica. Toledo. Sheffield, UK. Burlington, Ont., ...what's so funny about it?

[damntexdem]

4. Unfair article: everyone has a right to laugh at Newark.

;-)

[gauguin57]

6. I have a feeling that the upshot of this "fake feud" between Conan and Cory Booker is going to be...

... something positive for Newark. Conan will certainly come to visit ... and I'll be he winds up donating money to a community center or something.

I just have a feeling. Conan will josh, but I'll bet Newark comes out the winner in this situation.