The worst thing about boycotting CNN is not watching Anthony Bourdain.
After some punk at the network decided to blame third-party voters for The Election, I decided I was going to boycott the network from that point on, because it only confirmed to me that CNN is the Ideal of mainstream liberal media: Smarmy, determined to define a “standard” of acceptability, both snotty at the people who voted for the “wrong” candidate yet all too willing to accommodate this country’s long slide into authoritarianism for the sake of their own business.
Smarmy, mainstream and accommodating: These were all things that Anthony Bourdain certainly was not.
He was hardly a conservative, or even a libertarian, but he wasn’t exactly a liberal, and he sure as hell wasn’t politically correct. More than anything, Bourdain was HIMSELF. And being yourself seems to be very difficult to do these days.
I don’t know if anyone else is deliberately not watching CNN (if they are, it was probably long before 2016). But I’ve been told that you can watch Parts Unknown on Netflix, and there are other places to search out the episodes. All the episodes are good, but the first one that always comes to my mind is “Tokyo Nights”. The show has some focus on food, as Bourdain has an evening with his favorite sushi chef. But this episode more than most focuses on a lot of other cultural angles, and Bourdain’s particular love of Tokyo. However wacky and exotic modern Japan might seem to be, Bourdain focused on it because he responded to something within himself. At the end of the piece, he said: “Our own obsessions, arguably, are at least as crazy, violent, and lurid as Japan’s, and we tend to actually carry out our violent fantasies more frequently.”
The only other time I’d mentioned Bourdain, I disagreed with his apparent need to fat-shame James Corden after his flippant comments regarding Harvey Weinstein. But that’s because he was exactly the sort of person who should know better. He certainly wasn’t afraid of having an opinion that would piss people off. He was an asshole. But Bourdain’s saving grace was that he was perfectly aware that he was an asshole, and as others have pointed out, he used his position and his personal drive to agitate for his favorite causes, even the seemingly passive choice to go to a foreign country and learn the cuisine and culture. It’s just another way of seeing the world.
In his signature book, Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain said a lot of things, among them this:
“Assume the worst. About everybody. But don’t let this poisoned outlook affect your job performance. Let it all roll off your back. Ignore it. Be amused by what you see and suspect. Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious and corrupt asshole shouldn’t prevent you from enjoying their company, working with them or finding them entertaining.”
Words to live by.