Is Charlie Rose Zelig?



Yes, we know of Charlie Rose. Exemplary interviewer of the powerful, blahblahblah (though, we cannot fail to note, slightly in love with the sound of his own voice). Plaything of the tea-and-cucumber sandwich set. Catnip to the socialites.

And, yes, Charlie loves sitting next to the powerful. It stirs those Rose-ian juices. He revels in the air they breathe; he laughs a little too hard at their unfunny imperial anecdotes. The late night fawner has made something of a career out of loving the rich and the powerful (bankrolled, to be sure, by the rich and the powerful Bloomberg). Remember when Brooke Astor -- at the time in her 90s -- had a crush on Rose? Fifth Avenue sparkled with Brookie's blush at Charlie's rose. Cougar (hear her mrow)! The professional chatter must have loved that as silently, in the quiet of his soul, he probably wondered: If only I had met her a half-century ago. But it was all for naught.

But did you notice last night as he interviewed Bill Gates that Rose (see above), disturbingly, wore nearly the same goddam outfit as his quarry? A crisp shirt tucked into a blue sweater of no doubt the naturalest of fibres. Positively weird. Oh, Charlie ... desist!

Is Charlie Rose metamorphosing into Leonard Zelig? Do we need an American artist like Woody Allen to concoct a mockumentary in 1920s newsreel style to untangle the Freudian subtexts of Charlie's Herculean conformity? Or was the proximity to "the ultimate capitalist" too much for his ambitious soul to take without some sartorial testimony to that lust.