The History Channel's BRILLIANT Revenge!

If you visit the King Tut exhibit in NYC, at the Discovery Center, you exit the exhibit straight into the gift shop, where the first thing you will see is an enormous cutout of Zahi Hawass surrounded by an enormous display of hats for sale -- the sort of hat Indiana Jones wears, but which Dr. Hawass probably thinks is now identified with himself. Hey, kids, you too can look just like a blowhard grayhaired Egyptian antiquities Czar! If the hats are selling, it's probably to people who repose their confidence in the unlikelihood of anybody in the world to whom the name Harrison Ford means anything ever thinking they're trying to emulate Zahi Hawass.

It's no secret that you can't get access to a mummy or a pyramid in Egypt these days without kissing Dr. Hawass's fat ass, and unlike bureaucrats the world over who are content with credit and set access and maybe a few bucks under the table, Dr. Hawass demands to be made a STAR!!! Have you ever wondered why there is scarcely a western archaeologist to be seen on American television anymore poking around ancient Luxor who isn't merely scuttling around the edges of the Zahi Hawass Show and looking like his assistant? Before anybody dares disagree with him on camera, they have to do obeisance to his tremendous expertise as an archaeologist.

Well, he's credentialed, and maybe his expertise is tremendous, but one wonders. Whatever else he may know, Dr. Hawass imparts no information on any television show that isn't already known to any fourteen year old boy with an amateur crush on ancient Egypt and a National Geographic subscription. He is prone to state as fact (or to flourish as theories he dares you to disagree with) ideas that are at best unproven and at worst in considerable dispute, like his theory that the Egyptians demolished almost completely an intact royal pyramid simply because the particular pharaoh entombed there was thought (that they thought it, or that they were right if they did is far from established) to have murdered his own father.

But Zahi Hawass is somebody the networks are stuck with. It's a surprise when you see any of his assistants interviewed separately, but it's no surprise when Hawass is missing altogether, because it never happens. Every documentary on basic cable now focusing on Egypt is the Zahi Hawass Show.

So why not simply give him his own show? Well gee, everybody already is sick of the sight of him, so wouldn't that be a bit much? I mean, a show in which the old fart is in every single scene? Wouldn't that make the public even sicker of him?

You bet your sweet ass it would, and that's why I think the History Channel has now done it. Not that Zahi hasn't been hinting for such a show, or even demanding one. I think those things are entirely possible. But the real reason for the History Channel to do it is, I suspect, because they have all seen "Good Night and Good Luck" or the Army/McCarthy hearings, and recall how the cold light of day in sufficient quantities on Joe McCarthy exposed his true nature. Maybe they're remembering the scene in "A Face in the Crowd" where Patricia Neal keeps the microphone on so Andy Griffith's Lonesome Rhodes can he heard by the public saying what he really thinks of them.

One thing Hawass has been able to do up to now is seem genial on camera -- avuncular, grandfatherly. He smiles a lot, and says his crap -- no matter how unexceptional or dubious -- with bouncy enthusiasm. He has managed to look as much like the old Coca Cola Santa Claus as any well-connected member of the Egyptian oligarchy and servant of its one-party state is likely to look. Boy, not on this show.

Hawass insults, screams, pouts, browbeats, patronizes, snarls and otherwise shows his ass in ways the producers of antiquities shows have probably been editing out of other shows for years, and dreaming of including. They have a grand excuse to show the whole picture here. They almost have to. It would probably destroy the narrative flow beyond repair if you didn't see moments like Hawass coming to a fast boil -- zero to 750 degrees in ten seconds -- and screaming at a whole village worth of workers spontaneously celebrating the finding of a mummy to shut the hell up or he's leaving. Their singing is only a faint background sound while Hawass pontificates on camera next to the mummy, and certainly wouldn't keep his mike from recording him, but the only Golden Calf anybody's allowed to dance around when Hawass is around is Hawass.

This show is going to absolutely ruin any lingering delusions on the part of viewers that Hawass is in any understood sense a "sweet old guy." It's Payback Time at the History Channel. Oh, they'll still have to pretend he farts violets and turn every documentary into a gilded frame for his fame-hungry face, but never again will that face seem like a benign one we all just happen to be sick of from overexposure. Now that everybody is going to know Hawass isn't all over their TV screen because cable producers revere him or are fond of him, audiences are probably going to get wise to the real reason. You want mummies and pyramids, you gotta have Hawass. He's the the equivalent of those bisexual porn films in which a guy who wants to commit adultery with another man's wife has to get plowed by her husband too.

Well by damn, look who's getting effed on this show. For once it's Dr. Hawass. The joy in the editing rooms and executive suites, and in university archaeology departments in America and Europe, must be uncontrolled every time Hawass (like a Saudi princess whipping her Filipino housemaid) turns purple and screams at some respectful and unoffending underling whose own Ph.D. from Harvard is at least as good at Hawass's from the University of Pennyslvania. The wheels of justice grind slowly but they grind exceeding fine.

Health reform passed. Is your grandmother dead yet?