"A new flavor"

The confluence of religion, 9/11, and television news readers who can barely think on their feet created a perfect storm of banality when the pope visited ground zero in lower Manhattan yesterday. There were too many idiotic comments made to record here, but the one that stood out for me was uttered by one of those dim-witted Fox News Stepford wives. She said that the pope's visit would "add a new flavor" to ground zero. This comment segued into an equally moronic comment that it was a good thing that the Iranian president's visit to ground zero had been blocked (presumably because it would have added a bad flavor to ground zero, I guess). Equally awkward was when the pope knelt down on his comfy-looking portable kneeler (wouldn't it have been more impressive to kneel down on the ground itself?) and prayed. The pope's people missed a real opportunity here by not having the pope's prayer come in as a voice over on the television broadcast. Instead we got an old guy in a gown kneeling and lots of dead air. At one point I thought I was able to read the pope's lips as he prayed: "One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi..." He must have been a little slow on his Mississippis because one of his lackeys had to jostle him as if to say, "That's enough, let's get this show on the road." And after another comic moment where four men in dresses struggled to light a candle ("How many papists does it take to light a candle?"), that's exactly what they did.