Two weeks ago, Michael Moriarty attacked me in his Enter Stage Right column. “A journey down the River Stix: The flirtatious dances of fascism.” As “Hubie” would have said, I was pleased as punch. What an honor, to be personally attacked in print by one of my favorite TV actors. I used to watch Moriarty all the time on Law & Order, where he originally co-starred opposite George Dzundza (and later Paul Sorvino and Jerry Ohrbach, respectively) as Executive Assistant District Attorney Benjamin Stone. I loved the way with Moriarty’s Ben Stone, moral gravitas was inseparable from that third-generation (which meanwhile has gone on unto the fourth and fifth generations) Irish nasality, smoother than the nasality of a New York Irish cop, but nonetheless a first cousin to it.
Moriarty still acts, plays piano, sings, and is currently running for president of the United States of America from his home in British Columbia, Canada.
I don’t watch the L&O reruns on TNT (yet), but as the years went on, I started noticing increasingly that the “ripped from the headlines” quality that NBC long used to sell the show in its ads, was fraudulent. Law & Order would routinely take crimes committed by blacks, and change the murderers into whites, or invent crimes that had either never been committed in New York, or not committed in the last fifty years, such as a white man murdering a black man for getting a taxicab ahead of him.
And so, I’ve written some articles exposing the show’s dishonesty (here and here).
The odd thing about Moriarty’s jeremiad, is that it suffers from the sins of his old L&O boss, Dick Wolf. Moriarty makes empirical statements about life in New York and elsewhere that have no factual basis, and then draws moral conclusions from those false statements. Bad facts, bad logic, bad morals.
Based on a few essays of Moriarty’s that I had read in the past, his Giuliani essay, and another I just read for background on him, his method is: 1. To have a basic attitude (“So-and-so is evil”); 2. To engage in stream-of-consciousness writing; 3. To occasionally come up with a good line — the man has a touch of the poet — which unfortunately, has no logical connection to what precedes or follows it, and may be mere rhetorical nonsense; and 4. To freely associate between the object of his ire and certain other despised characters from central casting.
In the context of the essay in question, Moriarty says: 1. Rudy Giuliani is a fascist (Boo! Hiss!); 2. Blah, blah, blah; 3. “Mussolini saved the Fuhrer's bloody paintbrush with that deal in Rome” (nonsense, but it sounds great); and 4. Rudy = Hitler (Boo! Hiss!); Rudy = Mussolini (Boo! Hiss!); Rudy = wheat or straw (Boo! Hiss!); Rudy = NYPD = sodomizing black, illegal immigrant suspects (Boo! Hiss!); Rudy = LAPD (Boo! Hiss!) … You get the picture.
Article comments
1 - Ruth Hudson
Truly enjoyed this article regarding Michael Moriarty's writing. The call for accountability and lack of some research for statements he makes was excellent. I'm not a writer, but I'm glad you are. My opinion of him as an actor; he's the best, and a favorite of mine.
Thanks, Ruth