So, hey, you hear about this Paula Deen thing? Hoo boy. Ain’t that something?
Okay, so assuming you live under a rock, which you might, I don’t know. I’m not here to judge you, my rock-living-under friend. I know times are tough. You do what you gotta do. But here’s what happened with Paula Deen. Paula Deen is a celebrity chef, meaning that as a profession, she pretends to put a bunch of ingredients together in a bowl, shoves it into an oven that’s not plugged in, and magically five seconds later a completely baked food concoction comes out. She is paid millions of dollars to do this, because this is an unjust reality we are living in. But Paula Deen’s particular style of being a fake cook is that her ingredients are all butter. So she makes food items out of butter, like butter sandwiches where the bread is butter, the meat is butter, the vegetables are butter, all of them are assembled and slathered on top with butter, then deep fat fried and you digest it. That’s what Paula Deen cooks. Butter food. She is famous for this, because butter is delicious and nobody cares any more what we put into our stomachs.
So Paula Deen is a successful television creator of deep fried butter balls, and everyone loves her for it, but lately things have not been good for her. Because it turns out that when Paula Deen is not busy creating new food items out of leftover lard you might have lying around at home, she is occasionally being an oblivious old southern white lady on the subject of race. Because she is currently being sued by an ex-employee, who claims that Paula Deen kinda likes using the N-word in conversation, and also tried to arrange an antebellum style wedding for her brother Bubba (because of course Paula Deen’s brother is named Bubba, of course) with all black servants dressed up like plantation slaves handing out hors d’oeuvres, because wouldn’t that just be so classically Old South, and no, Paula Deen doesn’t understand why that would upset anyone. So Paula Deen admitted to all of this in a deposition in May, and now that word has gotten out about it, the Food Network (which is a channel entirely devoted to food, because we have those in America because this is a very good country) has cancelled Paula Deen’s butter cooking show, and Paula Deen has been dropped as the spokesperson for Smithfield Ham and their line of gourmet butter hams. This is all very sad, because it is a tragedy when a millionaire pretend cook is no longer allowed to make as many millions as she was previously because of some bad words she may have uttered 20 years ago.
Yes, I am being flippant. Thank you for noticing that. And here’s why. As usual, since I am a visitor from another planet, I am confused as to why anybody cares about this. I guess maybe if you liked watching Paula Deen’s “Cooking With Butter And Only Butter” cooking show (NOTE: Not entirely certain if that was the name of her show, but I’m fairly confident it was), then yes, I can see why you would be upset, as that show is no longer on the air. The rest of you people? Unless your name is Paula Deen, this probably doesn’t mean a lot to you. Personally, my view is this. I don’t really condone Paula Deen’s usage of the N-word in conversation, even if she said it only once, in the context of a big, mean black man robbing her at a bank one time, and then only when he wasn’t around to hear it. She may think that certain circumstances can explain away using that word, like the fact that other black people say it, or that she was joking, or that she grew up in the south when these things weren’t like they are today, or whatever other excuses you can think of. She and others think that sometimes you can get away with saying that word or expressing the sentiments behind that word in certain situations. I disagree. I’ve made it 34 years without using the word because it happens to be hugely offensive, and I think that it’s wrong under any context. She and I have a difference of opinion on that subject. But in my defense, I’ve never been fired from a multi-million dollar television deal over my stance, so I think I might be in the right here.
But beyond that, I don’t quite understand why it is that famous people get fired from their jobs being famous for reasons that aren’t related to what they are famous for in the first place. In this case, I’m not sure how Paula Deen’s casual obliviousness to black people has to do with her job preparing grossly unhealthy food stuffs for the masses. If you’re going to fire Paula Deen for anything, maybe it should be for putting a cheeseburger inside of a donut. I wrote about Paula Deen a while back and the fact that she hid the fact that she had diabetes for three years, most likely as a result of her diet that she markets to an unknowing general public, and then only came out with this news about her health because she was now marketing a diabetes drug to that same unknowing general public. That’s what I find offensive about Paula Deen. The racism, too. But also the grease balls and the diabetes.
So yes, I would have preferred that Paula Deen had paid her pound of flesh for being a hypocrite, before she ever had a chance to pay it for being a big ol’ racist. But when it comes to her losing her job, I’m a bit torn on the subject. I had recently been asked on Facebook if I thought Paula Deen should have to suffer the consequences for using a racial slur 25+ years ago. On the one hand, yeah, of course I do. Actions have consequences. Had we decided that Paula Deen is now the exception to that rule? If so, I would like a revote. The thing being, whether I or people like me ever liked it or not, by her having a TV show, she was given a platform and a voice, and with that came certain responsibilities, which she did not live up to, clearly. On the other hand, though, maybe she should keep her show. Because I’m tired of people thinking that the way to deal with racism is to just stop talking about it. Or excuse it away, because she grew up in a different time, or that we’ve all done it before (even if we haven’t), or racism doesn’t exist any more or any of the other dumb excuses people come up with. That’s why she was fired. So we can all just stop talking about it. It can all be just swept away. But like I said before, whether or not Paula Deen is or was a racist has nothing to do with her being a famous TV cook. So maybe they should’ve fired her. Maybe they shouldn’t have. We don’t get to make those decisions, and the people who do did. World keeps spinning. So on and so forth.
So, yeah. Paula Deen. That happened.
Bismarck resident Erik Hagen is the author of the SodBlog and originally claimed he wasn’t going to touch this story with a seven-foot-long butter-sandwich, but it turns out he’s a bit of a hypocrite himself. Send your demands for him to be fired to sodblog@me.com or visit his website at sodblog.com.