Anderson Cooper Can’t Get to the Bottom of the Chocolate Jesus
April 5th, 2007 by Menachem Wecker
Anderson Cooper interviews the chocolate Jesus creater, Cavallaro, and Catholic League president, Donohue, and a fight breaks out. The discussion is worth watching, with no thanks to Cooper’s questions, including his incorrect statement that nude Jesuses are rare. Effectively, the discussion boils down to Donohue echoing the sort of thing God argued with Job: power. Where Donohue tells Cavallaro that his middle finger was broken off after he waved it at the church and that he is lucky he isn’t beheaded, Cavallaro focuses on his right to express himself and on comparing Donohue to a child.
Were Cooper a better interviewer, he might have been able to use his great access to the two to present viewers with a discussion of the real issues at hand. Those are not whether Cavallaro and Donohue hate each other, but what exactly is at stake in making such a sculpture.