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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, July 17, 2009

And That's The Way It Was 

...there are moments that you mark in life, markers in your own personal history that that are planted in your brain like some sort of organic waypoint on the GPS map of your life. The end-of-file marker for the trace of my upbringing was cast tonight with the news that Walter Cronkite passed away this late afternoon...

The Record shows that the The Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC was the most-watched evening news program from the day that Cronkite first settled into the anchor's chair on April 16, 1962, until the summer of 1968, when The CBS Evening News began to make inroads. But even in those years before Uncle Walter became the preeminent evening news anchor in terms of viewership, the truth in my life was simple: Cronkite was the voice and face to which to which my extended family turned for news. Walter Cronkite told me one cold, clear snow-blanketed school day in 1963 when I was home for lunch (I only lived a couple of blocks from school and always went home for lunch because that's what Mom wanted) that President Kennedy had died, and that glimpse of emotion he showed - as Mom tried to shove me out the door to get back to school - was a strangely raw episode that created a connection to the power of that historic moment in my third-grade mind. I was sitting in my grandparent's living room in Bremerton, Washington, just three days shy of 40 years ago today, shouting at Mom and Dad and Grandma and Gramdpa to step away from the kitchen table to watch as Cronkite described and became verklempt in the moments after Neil Armstrong's descent down the ladder of the Lunar Excursion Module "Eagle" to put the first human footprints on the Moon's surface...

In the ugly 15 months before that powerful high of Apollo 11, Walter Cronkite told me about the murder of Martin Luther King, the murder of Robert Kennedy, the crazed loss of control by both the Democratic party and the City of Chicago at the Democratic National convention, and how the outcome of the Tet offensive in South Vietnam (for which he donned his older persona of "war correspondent", complete with helmet and flak vest, in order to visit the scene) spelled the end of any chance for anything looking like "Victory" for the American commitment to that conflict. What he didn't tell me and my family in that last instance, because nobody outside the White House could understand it at the time, was that he was describing the final cruel puzzle piece that demonstrated to President Lyndon Johnson that it was time to step back and pull the plug on a long, storied political career by announcing that he would not stand for reelection...

Walter Cronkite is the epitome of 'the life well lived'. He operated at the pointy edge of the journalist's spear as a war correspondent during WW II, flying in B-17's over Germany and dropping into into swampy openings in the Netherlands in a glider full of 101st Airborne troops during the much-debated Operation Market-Garden, and covered George Patton's Third Army as it marched to the relief of that same 101st Airborne division surrounded by a portion of Hitler's last-gasp offensive at the Belgian town of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. He was a sailor and had a taste for high-performance race cars, and did work that isn't even being talked about tonight like his narration of "The 20th Century". I will remember till my dying day the pitched battles between a prepubescent me and my not terribly supportive parents over what we were going to watch in those hours before the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights, with me refusing to understand why they didn't want to relive through "The 20th Century" - one more time, with the comfortable baritone voice of Uncle Walter leading them through it - all those difficult times that formed their lives but that were the subject of textbook history to me...

A couple of weeks ago, we were unwillingly indulged in a seemingly neverending reflection on the life of Michael Jackson. For those of us of 'a certain age', the far-too-soon passing of Jackson had a particular bit of interest because he was a contemporary. Walter Cronkite won't get the same sort of acknowlegement that Jackson received and that's a shame on all of us, because Cronkite mattered to any pure understanding of what American culture and society is about in a way that the Jackson 5 or Michael Jackson in that same period of time (or even later, for that matter) could never hope to connect with...

He hasn't had much of a public profile over the last few years, but just knowing that Walter Cronkite was out there somewhere has served as a comforting influence over the years since his retirement, as if there might be some chance that he would come storming out of the background to go after a subsequent failed Administration. That won't be happening, however, so it is more than appropriate to honor him with that final sign-off:

That's the way it is...and that's the way it was....
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:58 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

All That Needs To Be Said 

...lots of chatter today at the Sotomayor confirmation hearing about Ricci v. DeStafano. Bits of talk about the newest political confirmation battle that could be characterized as Frank Ricci V. People for the American Way. It's all gripping stuff, guaranteed to stir the juices of Beltway insiders and Village People...

There's only one thing wrong with that whole kerfuffle: somebody screwed up on the directive to follow the script and let some people loose where the steno-pad minions of the MSM could accidentally stumble across them and commit unfortunate moments of unplanned acts of journalism:
"I hope she doesn't get confirmed, rendering those types of decisions," said (Rene) Archambault, a white firefighter in a heavily Hispanic city. "If you were an astronaut, would you want to fly on the shuttle built by the lower bidder? ... I think you would want the best candidate."

Forget "missing the basic point". In fact, forget all of the issues the City of New Haven thought they might be facing because of their promotion test results. All that needs to be said is 'be sure to focus on the comments of a white firefighter in a heavily Hispanic city'. It's an amazing corollary to the sense of white male exceptionalism that permeates the questions that Republican Senators seemed intent on focusing on all day long today in the Sotomayor confirmation hearing; "white" is the norm and "white" is the benchmark, and any commentary that suggests there is something other than "white" out there that could be considered to be a part of the 'norm' is simply reverse racism in full bloom...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:52 PM 0 comments

Sunday, July 12, 2009

When "Newsmakers" Aren't 

...today, apparently, you couldn't swing a road-kill possum on the set of any national TV political gabfest without hitting a Republican Congressional leader insisting that the Obama stimulus program, officially known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, was a big ol' floppy failure and swearing that they would drink their own bathwater before they would support further stimulus efforts. Whether it be Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona on ABC's This Week, future presidential candidate Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia on FAUX News Sunday, or the ol' Maverick McCain hizownself on Press The Meat, the message was consistent: No More Total Like Really Fail Stimulus...

It's almost hard to pick a place to start with all of this, except to mourn - right up front - the tragic waste of so many brave American electrons in such a needless exercise. Of course none of these Republican spokesmen think ARRA is successful. Of course none of these Republican spokesmen support further stimulus spending. The ink recording their actions with regard to the first stimulus package is still drying on history's pages; it documents that, of the 218 Republicans currently taking up wasted space in the 111th Congress of the United States, not one of them in the House of Representatives voted for the ARRA and only three of them in the Senate - at the time of the vote - supported it (and that was back in those heady days of wild optimism for the future of the party when there were actually 219 Republicans because Arlen Specter hadn't yet fled down his own personal ratline to supposedly safer, more firm footing in the Democratic majority)...

They wanted - and want - tax cuts, not spending, for the same reasons that Republicans have always wanted tax cuts instead of spending except when they are actually running the whole show and decide to go with tax cuts and spending (said spending usually in the form of budget earmarks that look remarkably just exactly like the sort of appropriations found in the ARRA, and usually for the same stated reason of economic stimulation). They wanted - and want - tax cuts because they know that the idea of more money in the paycheck sounds powerfully attractive to the average voter, even though that component part of the usual Republican tax cut proposal pays mere lip service to such nonsense while lavishing an embarrassing largess of increased wealth on those Sugar Daddies of the corporate world who actually pay the bills that keep Republicans on the stage...

It's all nonsense, of course, and it doesn't take an economic SouperGeenyus with a Nobel Prize on his resume to get to the bottom of all this. Tax cuts aren't any sort of stimulus in times like these. Tax cuts aren't going to stimulate spending by people who are behind on their mortgage payments and facing the loss of their homes. Tax cuts aren't going to stimulate spending by people who are living in homes that are worth less than the principle on their mortgages. Tax cuts aren't going to stimulate spending by people who fear that they may be the next recipients of a layoff notice or letter announcing the closure of their place of employment. Tax cuts aren't going to stimulate spending by people who have seen their 401(k) investments diminish to the point where they won't even be able to afford store-brand catfood for dinner if they retire. Tax cuts aren't going to stimulate spending by people who don't even have a job (which, depending on which measure of actual unemployment you pick, could be up to 20% of the available workforce). And, given the usual target of the bulk of Republican tax cuts, those tax cuts aren't going to stimulate investment spending and employment creation by businesses because there isn't going to be any demand for their goods and services for all those other reasons and a few others...

The AP story includes the sort of crude, twisted observation that explains just exactly why the MSM is clinging desperately to its tenuous grip as the Fourth Estate:
Republicans lined up Sunday in opposition to a second economic stimulus package, a rare demonstration of unity from an out-of-power political party in search of a rallying cry against President Barack Obama. [emphasis added]
No, seriously; that's what it says. The actual truth of all those disturbing Republican heads floating around on your TV screen is that there has been a remarkable amount of party unity; "The Party of NO" is not a DFH slogan created out of whole cloth, but is in fact a reality-based assessment of the Republican strategy that crawled out of the smoking wreckage of the '08 election. There is nothing newsworthy about Republican Congressional leaders elbowing aside makeup artists and shoving interns to the floor in their rush to get out in front of the klieg lights and studio cameras to assert their insistence that another stimulus package Will Not Stand. If there was any news at all about Republicans with regard to the stimulus package, it happened a couple of months ago and was all about the irony of the manner in which those same Republican naysayers by and large employed those same sharp elbows to take claim for the distribution of ARRA funds once the Democrats had put the money into play without their help. The MSM doesn't really have the skillz to do 'irony', though, so we are left with the "sky=blue/water=wet" non-news that Republican leaders are opposed to further stimulus funding. I'm pretty sure that Edward R. Murrow would not be proud...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:30 PM 0 comments

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