For Those of You Scoring At Home: Truths, Dares, and Consequences

Grab a blanket, sister, we’ll make smoke signals

Bring in some new blood

It feels like we’re alone

Grab a blanket, brother, so we don’t catch cold

from one another

Oh, I wonder if we’re stuck in Rome

- Nickel Creek, "When in Rome"

So: The Keith Olbermann book.

I know it's kind of weird for an apolitical centrist like me to wring my hands over a man who's old enough to be my father - but that's to be expected, isn't it? I mean, how on earth does a guy go from coming up with the SportsCenter catchphrases of my generation to becoming famous for, as the subtitle of Truth and Consequences suggests, "Special Comments on The Bush Administration's War on American Values" ? More so, how does he get off on willingly playing the role of liberal pariah in an ocean of conservative talking heads?

I mean, I get the comparisons to Howard Beale - I can't even watch those clips of Countdown without throwing my fingers over my eyes, as if that would protect me from the blistering content of every newscast. I get that he's just as confused as I am over the turn of events - that a regular person like him or me should care about yellowcake uranium or Valerie Plame, but not in the shoddy, sloppy way that these stories have been shown by all the major news channels.

And, hello: I know that Keith Olbermann graduated from Cornell. It's one of those factoids I'm supposed to know about him, as a fangirl - no different from knowing that, say, he once rushed home late from Shea Stadium and ended up faceplanting against a subway car, resulting in a permanent loss of depth perception that has rendered him unable to drive for the rest of his life.

(...What? He did admit it once before, on-air.)

What I don't get, however, is why on earth he has made this - the whole "liberal-voice-in-the-wasteland" role he's playing for MSNBC - his particular cross to bear.

Reading the written, transcripted versions of his anti-Bush jeremiads in Truth and Consequences still doesn't make them any less vitriolic. Most times he sounds too much like Captain Ahab, casting his net too far and too wide to bring down the bloated old Republican beast - and, in case you've had doubts about his objectivity, he even tears down a few Democrats in the process as well. Sometimes he sounds like the people I knew in college - the ones who were so fired up by their idealism that they're always on the verge of totally diving off the deep end.

And sometimes, even when I know that he could be on to something, I fear that, unfortunately, he has fallen off the deep end. Which is where the hand-wringing begins, and I find myself muttering, as Mary has done in The Passion of the Christ: "When, where, how... will [y]ou choose to be delivered of this?"

But then, there are moments when the harpoons do hit the target where it truly hurts.

Consider, for example, the devastating introduction, where he starts with the announcement of David Bloom's death, and subsequently sought comfort - as he only knew how - in a baseball game, "where I could dial back the pain through the simple ritual of folding up my scorecard and then filing out of the ballpark to the subway." Consider his prefaces to the first Special Comment on Katrina - which, in retrospect, was actually buried in the hype by Anderson Cooper's no less subtle emotional response - and his speech at the very site of Ground Zero on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Consider, even, this blistering critique of a speech delivered by Newt Gingrich (really!) in, of all places, an event celebrating the First Amendment:

What a dark place your world must be, Mr. Gingrich, where the way to save America is to destroy America. I will awaken every day of my life thankful that I am not with you in that dark place.

And I will awaken every day of my life thankful that you are entitled to tell me about it. And that you are entitled to show me what an evil idea it represents, and what a cynical mind. And that you are entitled to do all that, thanks to the very freedoms you seek to suffocate.

Come to think of it, for all the sound and fury about the Special Comment, what I appreciate the most about Keith Olbermann - and, if Truth and Consequences is an indication, what I fear he might lose - are those moments when he realizes that he doesn't have to play the prophet. He does, after all, note "the unavoidable symbolism provided by the reality that [Mr. Gingrich] answers to the name 'Newt.' " His skewering of Rudy Giuliani is prefaced with a hilariously dishy story of "America's Mayor" introducing him at the banquet by promptly forgetting his name. He even admits that he includes camera placement and blocking to the list of considerations for his Special Comments.

Perhaps my own favorite moment of Truth and Consequences, however, happens to be the one that tells the most about Keith Olbermann, the person: the preface where he talks about his own fake-anthrax scare, which began with an envelope and a letter covered in "grainy, shiny, powdery stuff" - and ends, one sleepless night later, with Hazmat suits, decontaminant showers, widespread police investigations, and a maliciously gossipy piece on Page Six of the New York Post that threatened, if anything else, to expose him as the hysterical ninny - even though the culprit's arrest, a few days later, revealed that similar letters had been sent to his fellow "demagogues" David Letterman and Jon Stewart.

Amidst the gallows humor and the possibility that the suspect was a loser who "lived in his mom's basement and thought Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, and Katherine Harris were the three hottest women in America," there are glimpses of humanity. He's worrying over his girlfriend, who was about to move in with him "into the very room where the powder had spilled..." (And here's the part where I sigh in relief, knowing that my longtime brain-crush has finally fallen in love - who woulda thunk it?) He's worrying about his neighbors, and whether or not they too may have been contaminated if the powder was, indeed, what he thought it was, even as he hoped that "nearly all the contents" of the envelope had been sealed and remained intact in the Ziploc bag where he'd sealed it: "But nearly, of course, only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades and threatening letters with white powder in them."

(Ironically, this anthrax scare "nearly" echoes, in my mind, another life-changing event for a TV personality: David Letterman's coronary bypass. Knowing how that bypass affected Dave, however, I can't help but wonder if there are plans to get cracking on bringing about an Olberspawn...)

Somehow, lest any one of us - even Keith himself - would actually believe all the quasi-Messianic comparisons to Howard Beale, the words of Oliver Cromwell continue to ring true:

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.