This is Part 2 of the Aubrey O’Day
interview dealing with her controversial Hitler comments.
“Oh, I read
what you wrote and I would summarize that as a strong distaste [for
me].”
“I had distaste for your comments on Hitler,” I
replied.
This exchange was just seven minutes into my 40-minute
interview with O’Day. It was the key to why the interview had been so hard to
get. And she knew from her public relations team that I intended to ask her
about her Hitler comments and her previous explanation of them. In fact, I had
entered the room with a gift I had bought for her,
"Explaining Hitler" by Ron
Rosenbaum.
So if I had asked a question, she would have been expecting
it and been ready with her response. As it was, I did not get a question in at
the start before she offered her answer for 23 continuous minutes of her
talking interrupted occasionally by me attempting to get her to focus or clarify
something to which she responded repeatedly. “Can I finish?” or “Just let me
finish.” And so I was silent until she finished.
On her end, O’Day
says her PR team told her that I would take parts of what she said and use them
out of context to make her look bad or stupid. In my head my plan was to run her
unabridged answers on the topic here to allow her to explain things anyway she
chose. But given the speech-like length and the tangled syntax that occasionally
placed her words (a couple of times I had to ask if “him” referred to Hitler or,
say as in one case, Perez Hilton, who had been weaving in and out of her
monologue), that is not practical. So I will do my best accurately background
the behind the scenes and place her answer in that context as well as offer
substantial quotes to summarize it fairly.
Just before moving to Las
Vegas for her role in "Peepshow," Aubrey O’Day appeared on Fox News, where she
called Hitler “brilliant.” I called that comment praise, which was part of her
objection: “I did not praise Hitler as an intelligent person. 'Praise' is a strong
word. I would never praise Hitler. Now, unfortunately the word was used in a
clip as regards to Castro. I don’t watch [Fox News host Sean] Hannity, and so I was unaware that he
enjoys abusing certain guests in the sense that he will wrap you up real quick
and spit you out. I wasn’t scared of that, just like I wasn’t scared of doing
this interview with you. I got your threats. And I am not scared of my mind.
I’ve worked hard at being a smart person regardless of how I am portrayed in the
media.”
Her view of the Hannity situation is that the subtlety of her
answer was lost in the sound-bite world of television.
After the Hannity
interview she released this statement to TMZ:
“Murderers and dictators
generally are some of the smartest people out there -- they just use their brain
power for evil purposes. I don't condone any of their evil behavior, but I was
asked about their intellectual firepower ... and in my opinion you can't have a
low IQ and wreck [sic] that much havoc on the world.”
It was this
considered response offered as an after-the-fact explanation that I found appalling.
The reason why is that I considered her statement factually wrong (hence the
Rosenbaum book), and then wondered why she was stretching for a dishonest way to
praise Hitler.
To make my point on the Buffet, I interviewed a
leading scholar of Hitler’s Germany, Berel Lang, about the evidence for the
brilliant intelligence of Adolf Hiter. And as I suspected, that evidence does
not exist.
But rather than grasp that her explanation was exactly what
I wanted to question, O’Day’s PR people noted that she had already explained the
Hannity comment. In an e-mail, I was told by her PR people that they considered the
matter closed. Well, good for them. I did not agree. She was unavailable for
interviews, until she suddenly started doing them with other press. And so as
O’Day made her rounds interviewing to support “Peepshow,” I noted, she was not
making time to speak to me. So I did ask why this woman who likes to boast of
her intelligence would not face my questions.
Finally, her main PR
representative in Los Angeles agreed to an interview by phone so that the PR
rep could be on the line. But I live 15 minutes from Planet Hollywood, where
O’Day stays, and that seemed absurd. Otherwise, her publicist decided, I would
have to wait until the rep's next trip to Vegas to sit in on the interview.
Again, I questioned why O’Day would need the interview monitored that closely if
anyone around her had any confidence in her ability to answer questions.
Finally, the interview was arranged even without her PR rep being present;
instead a PR rep for the company that handles “Peepshow” sat in and kept out of
the interview. So kudos to O’Day again for facing the Hitler question
despite the desire of the people around her to declare it old news.
It
turns out, as with most things I learned talking to her, O’Day and I simply have
totally different ways of seeing the world. First, as to her going on
Hannity, it seemed to me that she was woefully unprepared, whereas to her this
was a challenge showing her courage and openness to any question: “All I knew
going on that show was Fox News: hate. Republican: ehh. And you are going to be
the only one of your kind: good. This is a challenge, love it. In my career I
take all the challenges, and I am not scared.”
Of course, it never
occurred to me a TV personality would be scared to go on television. The issue
to me was judgment: Going on news television to discuss real issues means you
should be totally well versed in those issues first. O’Day does not share that
perspective on what happened:
“The Hitler comment was a hard thing for
me to go through. I represented a very liberal side of the sphere [on Fox News].
I stood on my own up until that Hitler comment. Hannity tossed Hitler in. Now
what I understand is that I am 25. I have had the life experience that I have
had, and I have opinions about everything until now. Could my opinions change
after reading a book [she points at "Explaining Hitler"]? Absolutely. I don’t
claim to be the world’s top understander of Hitler out there. I just know some,
a little bit.
“The only statement I was trying to make is knowing what
I know at this point in life is that I don’t think you can do as many atrocious
things as any dictator has done without having a high intellect. I don’t
believe you can take control of that many people without being smart. I don’t
make it my job to offend people. I don’t condone anything horrible he or any
other mass murderer or dictator did. I don’t use smart in the same parallel as
having a moral compass. I did not just have to answer for that interview to the
entire world but to my own family, who matter more to me. Half my family was
telling me he wasn’t smart at all, and half were saying kudos for having the
courage to say what I thought. I was sick over all of it. It really hurt me a
lot. I just wanted to make a correlation between being able to make that much
havoc and being smart.”
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Charles Manson or insert
name of favorite butcher. In other words, O’Day did not mean Hitler was
individually brilliant, but in fact has an epistemological view where for some
reason she thinks it requires intelligence to control people through murder,
fear and intimidation.
The problem of course is that connection can not
be made, not only at the top level of evil but in everyday life. If someone
points a gun at you and gives you orders, do you consider them smart while
obeying? Have you ever seen an idiot rise to the top of an office environment
where you work? Idiots can do most anything if they are willing to lie, cheat,
steal and -- not that this happens so much at the office -- murder.
The
ability to destroy does not necessarily require intelligence. I hope
“Explaining Hitler” will help O’Day see that, because the “evil genius” myth is just that --
a myth, and one that ultimately glamorizes serial killers, Hitler and, I guess, the Dear Leader using his intelligence to starve and torture the people of North
Korea, a job inherited from his dad.
Huge and horrible destruction can
be caused by the brilliant and the idiotic. O’Day would say she is 25 and will
one day learn that as true, if she decides it is true. Of course, at that
age Einstein was working on his Theory of Special Relativity, one of many works
that Hitler, who was threatened by anyone smarter than him, would later have
burned.
But on a deeper level, there is a big difference between
informed opinion and what O’Day admits were comments derived from little
familiarity with the facts and details of what she was speaking about. This is a
terrible deficit for someone who repeated over and over how people underestimate
her intelligence.
Perhaps, one reason she finds herself in
media storms (and she told me Hitler was not the first) is her failure to know
the difference between letting your mind play freely with ideas among friends
versus appearing on news programs to pontificate. It does take courage to have an
unpopular opinion, no argument, but there is strength in admitting to not
knowing enough about a situation to have an answer. That is the trap
Hannity set for her. She was unwilling to say that she did not know enough to
answer, and so he was able to get her to agree Hitler was “brilliant.” It is my
hope that Ron Rosenbaum’s book will help her grasp the details of how Hitler did
what he did without being an evil genius but by brutality, appealing to hate,
and murdering anyone who stood in his way. Then after seizing power he was a
dictator ruling by gun. Again, it takes no intelligence on an individual or a
mass level to murder your enemies. This is evil that can be practiced by the
smart and dumb alike. And so I hope the book teaches this one example of that
to O’Day.
O’Day got herself into this situation because she desperately
wants to be taken seriously. She complained six times in her more than 20 minute
talk that people saw her a certain way because she appeared in Playboy (a fact
I did not know until she told me). But by having no filter between her passing
thoughts and expression, where she is able to consider the meaning of her words,
the level of her knowledge and the context she is speaking, there will continue
to be questions about her intelligence.
As for myself, after listening
to her long lecture, I agree O’Day is not dumb, and she is certainly not a lover
of Hitler. The reality is that from the moment she made that comment about
Hitler on Fox until I spoke to her, she demonstrated no judgment about how
much she should know about a topic before expressing a public opinion. A choice
to praise the brain power of murderers and dictators in a news format is a poor
one unless she has plenty of evidence to back that opinion up. Yet when I met
with her more than a month later, she still admitted to knowing little about
the topic of brain research into dictators and killers yet has not altered her
opinion one bit. That is poor judgment in the extreme.
Photo: Ethan Miller/Courtesy Peepshow