The Tea Makers

I’ve got the money and I’ve got the girls.

– from a feature article in the Sunday Star, where on Sundays they’re all feature articles

He began his career as a television director at the CBC, at a time when anyone could do the job if you had a university degree, and it took him only 40 years to become the most pretentious poseur in Canadian media.
He collects vintage television sets in the hope that people will somehow associate him with their creation.

He scored a TV broadcast licence with no real money of his own, at a time when the CRTC was in the business of helping business. He then proceeded to program it into failure, until better minds could rescue it and make it prosper, so that when it sold, he had enough shares to become a millionaire.
He is the biggest fake success story in broadcasting, next to Jim Baker and the PTL Club.
The real minds at CityTV could hardly wait to get rid of him and his vain pronouncements, and once they did, he took his loot and bought two radio stations out of fear of becoming a forgotten man, the nobody that he is at the core of his being.
He hired his sister Libby to provide daily lifestyle updates that ended with the cliche claim “living well is the best revenge.”
And it is indeed likely revenge that motivates Moses Znaimer to get back into the television game.
And back using the most unlikely venue for a self-publicizing hedonist – spirituality and religion.

When the religious channel Vision TV was in the throes of its last gasp, Znaimer stepped up to grab the useless licence with the most convoluted financial offer that only an accountant on meth could devise.
Because Znaimer is desperate to be on TV.
Not because he needs the money, just the cache of personal publicity to help him seduce women, dreaming that he’ll still be “banging them into the ground” when he’s a hundred years old.

He thinks he can program a New Age religious television station, when he has not once in his life shown the slightest inclination toward or understanding of, the spiritual dimension of life.
But he’ll probably get the chance, simply because no one cares anymore about having a television licence.
And though he hasn’t a clue about creating anything of substance or meaning, as with MuchMusic, he can always hire someone who does.

Though God has tried to make His presence known to this Moses, he just never got the message.
“As my pal Leonard (Cohen) used to say, it doesn’t matter what or who you worship, as long as you get down on your knees.”
And “blow me” is the odds-on probable conclusion to any sermon from Moses Znaimer.
(And to attribute such a statement to the great, wise poet is highly suspect.)

An even more appropriate summation of the insights, about media and life, offered up by the “Zoomer” man, is a line that comes to mind from the brilliant speaker of truth, Amy Winehouse…

MOSES: “There’s nothing you can teach me.”

And, dear Jesus, please continue to keep him as far away from the CBC as you possibly can.