{"id":5637,"date":"2017-10-05T09:58:10","date_gmt":"2017-10-05T07:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=5637"},"modified":"2017-10-05T10:02:04","modified_gmt":"2017-10-05T08:02:04","slug":"jimmy-kimmels-crocodile-tears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/5637\/","title":{"rendered":"Jimmy Kimmel&#8217;s Crocodile Tears"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A day or two after the massacre in Las Vegas, American talk show host Jimmy Kimmel went on stage with a passionate plea to &#8220;do something&#8221;. Political commentator Ben Shapiro <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/news\/21908\/watch-shapiro-fiercely-shreds-kimmels-gun-control-daily-wire\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">took issue with this<\/a>, and made a video dissecting Kimmel&#8217;s words. Below is Shapiro&#8217;s video which includes clips of Kimmel speaking. I&#8217;m not going to ask anyone to watch the whole thing unless they&#8217;re really interested, but please look at it between 1:10 and 2:30.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/qxJWVWXOHPA?start=65\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Shapiro says he believes Kimmel is sincere, but I think he&#8217;s being rather generous: to me it looks like bad acting, hamming it up for the camera.<\/p>\n<p>Since I&#8217;ve been living in Paris there have been two gun-massacres: Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan Theatre. Both were shocking and induced a numb, almost surreal atmosphere in the place but neither reduced me to tears. Now Kimmel was raised in Las Vegas since the age of nine, but still, I don&#8217;t think news of a shooting in Pembroke would have me blubbering in the office. Now if Kimmel lost close friends and acquaintances in the attacks, I would understand. I&#8217;d also understand if he was there at the time: the trauma of being involved in these things can reduce ordinary people to a gibbering wreck. Now perhaps Kimmel listened to or read the accounts of the survivors just before walking on stage: they can be both harrowing and heartbreaking, even decades after an event, but even then I doubt they&#8217;d make him cry in the middle of doing his job.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s not to say men don&#8217;t get emotional. I lost my best friend last year and talking about him still brings me out in tears, that&#8217;s just the way it is. And I occasionally find myself choking up at a particularly moving scene from a film or book: the writers of the <em>Toy Story<\/em> sequels had an exceptional talent for this. A scene where Woody&#8217;s horse is told he can&#8217;t go with his master is emotional manipulation on a scale that ought to banned outright. My point is not that men don&#8217;t get emotional, it&#8217;s that men don&#8217;t get all teary over the murder of people they don&#8217;t know and didn&#8217;t witness. Women might, but then women cry over damned near anything. Men, when faced with news of a terrorist attack or mass murder, get angry not upset. They want to go out and exact a terrible revenge, not weep in public. Kimmel has gone on stage without deciding whether he wants to be upset or angry which suggests he&#8217;s neither, he just wants to score political points and virtue-signal.<\/p>\n<p>Earlier this year Kimmel&#8217;s newborn son received life-saving medical treatment, which he used as the basis of his <a href=\"http:\/\/www.elle.com\/culture\/career-politics\/news\/a44981\/jimmy-kimmel-newborn-heart-disease-surgery-trump\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">opposition<\/a> to the Trump administration&#8217;s healthcare reforms:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"body-text\">During his opening monologue on\u00a0<em data-redactor-tag=\"em\" data-verified=\"redactor\">Jimmy Kimmel Live\u00a0<\/em>on Monday, host Jimmy Kimmel cried openly.<\/p>\n<p class=\"body-text\">His eyes welled up first, as he described the recent birth of his weeks-old son. And then Kimmel struggled to speak, as he recounted how, within hours of Billy&#8217;s birth, a nurse noticed that he was purple and whisked him away for observation.<\/p>\n<p class=\"body-text\">&#8220;Now more doctors and nurses and equipment come in, and it&#8217;s a terrifying thing,&#8221; Kimmel said, the emotion obvious in his voice. &#8220;My wife is back in the recovery room, she has no idea what&#8217;s going on, and I&#8217;m standing in a room full of worried-looking people\u2014kind of like right now.&#8221; The team discovered Billy had a congenital heart defect. He was rushed into emergency surgery.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Now it is perfectly normal for a man to get emotional and cry when talking about the near-death of his newborn son. Whether it is appropriate to do so on national television in order to make a political point is less certain. I&#8217;d say no, frankly. That sort of stuff should be kept private unless specifically related to the subject at hand, and especially not wielded as a political club.<\/p>\n<p>I reckon after the episode about his son, Kimmel thought it made him look better &#8211; more\u00a0&#8220;passionate&#8221;, &#8220;vulnerable&#8221;, and &#8220;human&#8221; &#8211; and so he&#8217;s decided to make it his shtick. Now it might be popular among women and the legions of rather wet men that inhabit the modern west, but most men ought to be retching over the back of the sofa at this performance. I wanted to slap his silly face and tell him to pull himself together. Men don&#8217;t cry over this sort of thing, and if they do &#8211; well, God help us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A day or two after the massacre in Las Vegas, American talk show host Jimmy Kimmel went on stage with a passionate plea to &#8220;do something&#8221;. Political commentator Ben Shapiro took issue with this, and made a video dissecting Kimmel&#8217;s &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/5637\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[78,44],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5637"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5637"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5641,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5637\/revisions\/5641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}