Roger Ebert: As caustic as a hotdog
Hearing the news today about Jackass star Ryan Dunn’s untimely passing was distressing enough, but then I read that one of our own Chicagoans, film critic Roger Ebert, dissed Ryan Dunn and his fellow Jackass compadres mere hours after Dunn had died. Ebert tweeted,
“Friends don’t let jackasses drink and drive.”
It would have been tasteless enough that Ebert was disrespecting the memory of someone who had just died, but Ebert did so while assuming Dunn had been drinking and driving.
It was reported from several news outlets that Dunn’s last tweet pic was of him and some friends drinking in a bar. Dunn reportedly had 3 light beers and 3 “girly” shots (meaning not hardcore shots) between the hours of 10:30 p.m. and about 2:30 a.m. So that’s about 4 hours of time. The average person can metabolize about a drink an hour (or perhaps in less time if they have a high metabolism or are simply drinking beer and not hard alcohol) and we don’t know if he drank those drinks over a period of those 4 hours, or if he consumed them in 2 hours, or what. Yet it was assumed by Ebert (and some other utterly repugnant people leaving comments on TMZ, and in the comments sections of several articles) that Dunn was inebriated. Well, you know what happens when you assume don’t you? You make a jackass out of…well, mostly just you Roger.
I wonder how Ebert, who lost his jaw due to complications from throat cancer, would feel if someone tweeted about him that it was his fault that he almost died of cancer and was now disfigured because he used to eat hotdogs (since, you know, everyone knows hotdogs are carcinogenic). In other words, how would Ebert feel if someone just assumed that Ebert himself was in some way responsible for his own near-deadly cancer? What Ebert said about Dunn and the additional grief he unnecessarily heaped on Dunn’s family, fiancé, and friends was just as thoughtless as if someone had blamed Ebert for his own throat cancer.
No really, how far should Ebert go in his victim blame? At this point, Dunn’s accident is just that: an accident. An autopsy hasn’t even been done and the full toxicology report probably won’t be released for weeks, and yet Ebert is slandering a dead man. And think what you will of the Jackass boys and their pranks and stunts, no one, and certainly not Roger Ebert, has the right to devalue a human life. Shame on you Roger Ebert. You set out today to blemish the character of a dead man and in the end, you only ended up blemishing yours.
Remember, there but for the grace of God go any of us. Even you Roger Ebert.
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