Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson are the same?

A few weeks ago I told myself that I was never going to read Mark Morford's columns again. The particular column that put me over the edge was titled "Porn Stars in my Underwear" and was a disgustingly vile piece of perversion.

Well, I got sucker punched into reading one of his columns again because it was listed on the main page (not the opinion section) and had an eye catching title: "The Great Tom Cruise Backlash. Will this annoying phase pass, or will Tom become the next super-rich, Mel Gibson-like nutball?" You can read it here.

I wrote him a letter that upon reflection I'm not so sure I should send. Is it the Christian thing to do? Well, you guys tell me! What do you think? Here is my letter to Mark Morford not yet sent:

Dear Mr. Morford,

I am writing in regards to your column printed July 6th titled "The Great Tom Cruise Backlash. Will this annoying phase pass, or will Tom become the next super-rich, Mel Gibson-like nutball?"

Let me start off by saying, what I find amazing about your columns is that you have an amazing amount of insight for a complete moron. To be clear, I'm not using the phrase moron lightly or just to put you down. I've been reading your columns for at least a year now and during that time I believe I've had enough exposure to you to make a reasonably accurate judgment of your intellectual ability. You are a moron.

At first I thought you were just misguided. Sometimes you'd come up with a good thought buried in a column or even an entire column that focused on a good thought. So I figured there must be a man behind the curtain.

Then I believed that a great deal of your odd antics could be the result of showmanship. This is common enough in the media because it catches people's attention and gets the public riled up. You see it in the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Howard Dean. To get attention they both exaggerate and make unreasonable and overly biased comparisons. As different as these two people are, they share this type of showmanship. So, for a while, I figured that you were cut from that mold.

But eventually my desire to be charitable couldn't escape the hard truth. You are a moron and for two reasons:

1. You have no ability to compare things
2. You have no sense of subtly or magnitude

Case in point, your most recent column. I completely agree that Tom Cruise has turned a corner in his life and is headed for a cliff that'll take him a long way down. Good insight! So in what way does that make him like Mel Gibson?

OK, so you didn't like the Passion of the Christ. But does someone making a movie that reflects their faith automatically make them a "creepy religious nuthead"? It seems pretty ludicrous to me to call him that when he is man who is still married to his first wife, cares for his family, gives bundles of money to the poor without proselytizing them and is generally a humble, quiet and well liked person by just about all accounts. From what I can tell, he doesn't seem to go out of his way to force his faith on anyone nor flaunt it in the face of the public. Even the Passion of the Christ reflects this mind set. It wasn't heavily advertised nor did he go out of his way to garner big studio support that would ensure that it got in lots of theaters. He was willing to accept that it might be a short running, small crowd movie. That it wasn't was a surprise to even him.

So, back to my original question, in what way is Tom Cruise like him? Is is it the fact that Tom is working on wife number 3? Is it the fact that he stuck two adopted children in the middle of a nasty divorce? Is it the fact that Cruise is heavily publicizing both his romantic life (which he seems to have always done to some degree) and now more aggressively his religion? What is it that makes these two people similar? In truth, Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise are remarkably different people, two that should never be compared. You inability to see that is a pretty strong indicator that you are indeed a moron.

As another example, OK, so you don't like the President. But does that mean you have to bring him up in EVERY single column (and I do mean 100% of them) you write no matter how distant to the subject of politics it is? Is he really the source and summit of all that is evil? I'm sure you'd answer yes to that question. While there is much to dislike about the President and it is reasonable to be very against his policies, he is not evil nor the source of it. Your inability to see ANY redeeming qualities (and I really do mean ANY) in him is further evidence that you are a moron.

So it's official: you're a moron. Without the ability to have any sense of scale or any ability to compare one thing to another you're going to be completely unable to have a logical thought.

Good luck with that.

Ken Crawford
Online reader in Roseville, CA

kencraw on 07.06.05 @ 01:50 PM PST [link] [No Comments ]