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A courageous, articulate, intelligent champion of free speech since his rise to fame two decades earlier, Maher’s initial setbacks came in 2002 with cancellation of Politically Incorrect after being compelled to apologize for comments about 9/11 attackers and jokes about handicapped children. His show was cancelled anyway, leaving Maher scarred.
Maher regrouped and re-emerged seemingly healthy in 2003 with Real Time With Bill Maher, however his compromised system finally buckled in the summer of 2017 when he devoted an entire show to accommodating the smug and self absorbed, like Ice Cube, profusely apologizing for offending anyone who may have been offended by use of the “n” word in a previous broadcast. It was an embarrassingly pathetic gesture surely motivated by the HBO gun directed at Maher from off screen. Not willing to lose another show, Maher did the needful, obliging those on duty in the cultural critic’s ICU to confirm recurrence of Political Correctness Syndrome.
Maher’s condition elevated to critical a few weeks ago when he advised Millennials, a group he so frequently satirized for being perpetual adolescents and has characterized as the last to be revolutionary, to not be scared in this COVID time and instead take it to the streets, bars and beaches to have fun and make it “their time” while leading the march back to a healthy economy. And taking it to the streets, bars and beaches they certainly have been, while in turn COVID has taken it to them and whoever else has been run over by the Millennial COVID party train.
The end for Maher finally came on the broadcast of June 26th, the last show before the summer hiatus. In an astonishing dictate to those who have chosen to sloganeer “All Lives Matter” Maher suggested that some groups have privileged claim to words and phrases and thus they should not be mocked, and that subversive wordplay should not comprise counterpoint discourse - no “cultural appropriation” - and no free speech - just free politics. Appropriation of language, only, should stand tall and be given space, not grief.
And so we have it, another one bites the dust and is lost to the political pandemic of our time, the egg shell walking, infantilizing, super-sensitivity to the Other, political correctness to the point of cancelling dialogue and dialoguers. Bill Maher was for the longest time a truly inspiring and singular public figure - funny, intelligent, articulate, courageous and creative - the fashioner of a manner of discourse that reached a common denominator without it being the lowest. However, the championing of immature, reckless behaviour and of oppressive, radical politics, the sort of pandering Maher so often despised in others, unfortunately figures as the lowest denominator and is conclusive evidence that he has fallen victim to a pandemia fuelled by tribalism, regression and anti-intellectualism, a scourge that began long before COVID and threatens to remain long after.
I will miss him.
