Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
O’Reilly’s meltdown
Before viewing Bill O’Reilly’s four-letter hissy fit on “Inside Edition” (from, what? fifteen, twenty years ago? And why did it surface only now? Not that I’m complaining), you might want to chase all toddlers from the room. Unless, of course, you’re like Karen and me, and you consider it your God-given duty as parents to make sure your kids learn to swear with accuracy, and not shame you with embarrassing diction errors, such as
Mommy, I’m sorry I slammed the oven door and shitted up your souffle.
Back to Bill-O. His meltdown seems to revolve around his ignorance of the phrase, “to play us out.” As in, “And now we’ll welcome Sting to play us out with his new hit, Roxanne.” (Whatever. I’m guessing here.) Since he didn’t understand the words, he refused to say them. He eventually figures it out and that seems to make him madder still; especially since his producer has made him play the guessing game, and didn’t cue him in when he first expressed his incomprehension.
I’m not in broadcasting, but to me, “play us out” sounds like straightforward broadcasting slang. I would guess (correctly) that it meant, “end this segment on a musical number.” Indeed, if you google “play us out” and ignore references to the O’Reilly itty bitty baby tantrum, you’ll find straightforward examples like this or this. From that last link,
:51 – John and Jeff play us out of this hour with Blue Minor.
My suspicion? O’Reilly soon figured out what the words meant, but by then he had already betrayed his ignorance. He knew he had shown himself up as a dummy, and worse, he knew his producer knew it, too, as well as all the stage hands. And he had compounded the problem by getting a little angry.
Any sane man would have used self-deprecating humor to limbo out of the situation with a few shreds of self-respect. But not Bill-O. He has to turn it into someone else’s fault — namely, his writer. There’s something gravely wrong with these words, something so foul about them his tongue snags on them in take after take until, finally, he has to do it his way, with his words. At that point the video goes silent, but it doesn’t take a lipreader to see that the profane hemorrhage doesn’t stop. He throws his pen with a force that would do any scalpel-throwing surgeon* proud, rips off his coat, and storms away.
I’ve said before that at the core of every over-achiever there’s a little boy (or girl) with serious self-esteem problems. This O’Reilly video provides good support for that hypothesis, don’t you think?
This is a man whose ego is paper thin.
D.
*Me? Never. Ever. Not cool, and if there’s one thing I aspire to be, it’s the Fonzie of Surgery.
Edited to add:
Here’s the REMIX.
No points for subtlety: Triumph of the Twit.
Well, lord knows I think O’Reilly’s a jerk*, but I think I’d cut him some slack on this one. I think what happened was there were teleprompter problems, they were taping the ending during the commercial break, and O’Reilly lost it due to the problems and the time pressure. At the end he says ‘fuck it, I’ll write it and I’ll do it live’, and then a couple of seconds later that’s exactly what he does.
I think the only thing he’s guilty of here is being on camera. Lord knows I’ve had similar outbursts a time or two in my life.
* an arrogant, partisan, self-satisfied, deceitful jerk