- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
HH,
I don't usually bother to write messages about this kind of thing, but you are so wrong on the Cliff thing I have to say something. Sure, Marcel comes off a little fussy and he can complain too much, etc., but what exactly is the basis for you and everyone HATING him? He's just a kid! The middle-aged bearded guy (forgot his name) threatened him with physical violence for moving his toiletries, and Sam-who-can-do-no-wrong screamed at him that he was a "piece of shit" in a store --in front of strangers, friends, and, oh yeah, a tv audience. He's been a collective pinata since he got there. Now he gets dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, headlocked, humiliated, rugburned by a drunk guy twice his size who he knows hates him . . . Have you noticed that he's actually friends with Elia? Maybe because she doesn't have a testosterone-driven rage to smear the queer. (No, I'm not saying Marcel's gay, I'm saying that the Mob loves to abuse the weakest person).
No one needs to love or even like Marcel, but the idea that it's common sense that everyone should hate him to the point that he deserves constant verbal and, hey, why not, maybe a little physical abuse, is ridiculous. You do remember this is a cooking contest, right?
All that's well and good --we can agree to disagree--but to suggest that Cliff's ejection was somehow racially motivated is really gross, like some kind of creepy neo-con defense of violence that exploits race as a justification for violence. Do you honestly think that if a large, drunk white man had pulled much smaller, younger black contestant out of his bad, dragged him around in a headlock while the crowd egged him on, etc. that that would have been fine with everyone? On the contrary, it would have felt like a lynching and Top Chef would now be experiencing the kind of issues facing the British Celebrity Big Brother.
It's really sad to me that even the pages of Salon have adopted a pro-bully attitude; this goes into the file of little bits of pop culture representing the Bush-era Zeitgeist.
