Foolishness and Grace at the VMA's

Dictionary.com defines jackass as a stupid or foolish person. So when I refer to Kanye West as a fool, you'll know what I mean. Last night at MTV's Video music awards Kanye gave a very vivid visual example of a fool. What he did to Taylor Swift was not only rude to her, but to every person watching, and to Beyonce, the person he thought he was complimenting.

But let me back up in case some of you haven't yet seen the video clip, I'm sure its on YouTube. Taylor Swift, a country girl, and MTV outsider won the Best Female video award. As she was giving her acceptance speech the fool (Kanye West) grabbed the microphone from her, tells her that her video was good, but that Beyonce had made the greatest video in the world and should have won. Taylor just stood there in shock. Beyonce looked on from the audience in disbelief, and a large number of people booed.

Now you must understand that these are fan voted awards, and thanks to Twitter and MySpace, Taylor has a huge, voting fan base. She wins almost any fan-voted awards. And those fans started tweeting the minute this happened, and the fool has become the most hated man on the web. Rumor has it Kanye has been banned from all future VMAs, not sure if its true or not.

If this were a sporting event, he would have been charged with unsportsman like conduct. Unfortunately, the music business has no such penalties. And also unfortunately most of his fan base probably won't turn from him, although there were quite a number of upset tweets even from people who said they had been his fan. I can only hope he sees some consequences from acting the fool.

Another person I felt played the fool on the VMAs was PDiddy. When he was listing the nominees for best male video, and Kanye was on the list, and the audience began booing, He acted like he had no idea what was going on, and then he said, "hey, we're all family on this one." To me this was kind of a snub to Taylor as well. He seemed to be saying there would be no trouble with this award since they were all MTV insiders, while Taylor was a country girl, and not part of "The Family".

The saving moment of grace on the show came when Beyonce won video of the year and told the audience, "I remember when I won my first VMA at 17 with Destiny's Child, and what a great moment that was. Now I want to call Taylor up here so she can have her moment." And she gave up her acceptance speech to let Taylor give her's. So by trying to honor Beyonce, the fool actually stole not only Taylor's moment, but Beyonce's as well.

And lest you think that I'm just a crazy upset Taylor Swift fan, going a little overboard, you must consider what a huge breach of ettiquite it was to interrupt her speech. Imagine if you would an Academt Award ceremony and Martin Scorsese receiving a best director Oscar, but Tom Hanks running in saying, "Marty, your movie was great, but you know Spielberg made the bst film ever." Can you picture anything that crazy? Or imagine a candidate winning an election and some fool coming out and saying, "no this other candidate should be president, lets recount the votes."...I mean really could anything be more foolish?

Oh, and speaking of Presidents, it seems that off the record, President Obama thinks Kanye is a fool too (see definition at top of this post, in case you forgot).