2022 October Blog by Chuck Peek
There are conditions of blindness so voluntary that they become complicity. (Paul Bourget)
I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it. (Edith Sitwell)
True patriotism springs from a belief in the dignity of the individual, freedom and equality not only for Americans but for all people on earth, universal brotherhood and good will, and a constant and earnest striving toward the principles and ideals on which this country was founded. (Eleanor Roosevelt)
(Always indebted to Anu Garg’s Word-A-Day for its well-chosen “thought” each day.)
When Dad was off serving in the Navy in WWII, “the news” meant what I overheard from the kitchen radio out of a Denver station as it was broadcast while Nana and Papa fixed breakfast. If memory serves, they listened to KOA—which is all I remember from anything I heard. I had no more idea about news media than I had that the breakfast was probably determined in part by a wartime commodity ration booklet.
I first became aware of news as what preceded or followed the radio comedy and police show episodes, and only at about age 10 during the Eisenhower / Stevenson campaigns of 1952 did it start to mean information about what was going on in the world. After all, until a certain age (apparently never reached by some people!) the world is little more than “my world.”
I vaguely recall certain names—Edward R. Murrow, Gabriel Heater, and H. V. Kaltenborn—and later recall hearing Walter Winchell broadcast nightly to America and “all the ships at sea,” and still later listened to Paul Harvey as I loaded and unloaded trucks at R. G. Stevens’ Seven-Up Bottling Company.
Like Winchell, Harvey became something of a phenomenon …enough so that my pledge father Mike Flanagan took me to hear Harvey when he spoke at Lincoln’s Pershing Auditorium during the 1960-61 school year. I think Mike could feel the first vibes of me slipping the moorings of my Republican past as the party slipped its own moorings in traditional conservative values. That’s been a long and increasingly steep slide over the past 50 plus years. The Republican Party’s, not mine!
I thought at the time that I’d been beached on a small island from which I would soon be rescued; instead, decades later, it’s looking like I’ve been stranded there for good. Nowadays, people who call themselves Republicans are a dime a dozen, people who resemble the Republicans I grew up around are not so plentiful.
We got our first television set in the mid-1950s, whereupon the news became a daily feature of the evening about supper time, and soon thereafter a new star arose named Walter Cronkite, now the subject of a wave of nostalgia for the good old days. The Huntley-Brinkley pairing at NBC were close runners-up.
The body count became a staple of news during Vietnam, and among others the Bush family learned the cautionary tale of the Nixon presidency—don’t let the news near the bodies! Meanwhile, to borrow a lead-in from Colbert, the networks “disestablished” the news department…ever after, the news had to hew to the bottom line just like every other department, so news gravitated to what would gain viewers.
Now the anchors are bigger stars than ever—each trying to top ABC’s Peter Jennings?—not as journalists but as glitzy entertainers. Some manage to squeeze news into those narrow straits, but news in depth, news followed up on—sorry, that’s not what the advertisers are paying for. Real journalists of the old school are as rare as rural Methodist circuit riders.
And then, guess what, viewers lost their faith in the news. Surprise!
I shouldn’t have been surprised, then, at the shift from WWII to a recent week—August 28 to September 3—and maybe surprised isn’t nearly the right word. Aghast might be more like it. Or maybe that’s too dramatic—just deeply saddened would be better. Imagine, in the time of “the greatest generation,” the networks not carrying a presidential speech denouncing fascism because denouncing fascism was deemed a political issue! Apparently, so far as the networks are concerned, a moot issue at that.
A sad marker of how far the “orange party”* has been able to distort our political spectrum. In WWII, the media could recognize a fascist when they ran into one. Listen sometime to the recordings of Edward R. Murrow from London during the war! Fascism wasn’t a moot subject to Murrow.
The same dynamics at play when it comes to national news also play out locally.
When our “off-orange”* party Governor took office, his first anti-government work was to render both our health and human services and our prison system unmanageable. Then he brought in Scott Frakes as head of the Department of Corrections—by then the department’s title was deeply ironic—to preside over the mess he’d made. It has been his consistent policy to hire foxes to put in the hen houses.
So, this past week, Frakes called it quits. One of our better news media sources, the Nebraska Examiner (and full disclosure, I have a friend who writes very fine columns for them), introduced their coverage of Frake’s resignation with a quote from Lincoln attorney Gary Young, who said, “I don’t know anyone who had to confront more alligators from so many directions as he did.”
(I’ll skip the grammatical point of as versus than.)
Both Young and the Examiner neglected to point out that the biggest alligator was the man he worked for, the Governor whose politics created most of the problems in the system in the first place, just as he had with health and human services. It was the same old scenario: criticize government, render it unable to function, and then use the dysfunction to prove your criticism.
If that sounds like the Steve Bannon play book, then don’t let the Nebraska Republican Party’s “official” criticism of Donald Trump lead you to miss how their own policies are simply “rickety trumpery.” This goes for Senator Ben Sasse, too. Outspoken in his criticism of Trump, Sasse nevertheless seldom saw a Trump administration proposal he didn’t want to vote for.
Now, in a just recently developing scenario, DeSantis has plugged in Sasse for President of the University of Florida, and on his resignation, the person Ricketts thinks will succeed him as Governor, Jim Pillen, will then appoint Ricketts to the unexpired Senate seat. Around here the power shenanigans never cease.
And don’t forget that the champions of unbridled capitalism are the same people who presided over the transformation of costly news departments into profitable entertainment branches of the profitable networks…perfect examples of how profits, without community-friendly boundaries, are the enemy of moral conscience and good sense…of failing to recognize a fascist as a fascist, an idealogue as an idealogue, a menace to the “broad democratic middle” as a menace, a drug store cowboy from a real folk, a Bannon who by any other name still smells. No, Virginia, what’s good for General Bull Moose is not always good for the Country!
Some of you will recall the wood figures of cowboys or Indians that occasionally adorned the entry to the drug or department store, but the phrase drug-store cowboy was a forerunner of derogatory descriptions such as “all hat but no herd” or “all boots and spurs but no cattle.” Our current candidate is all hunter shirts and shotguns but too scared to debate.
Alexander Pope coined the phrase, “Be not the first by whom the new is tried, nor yet the last to lay the old aside.” (Hope I have that right, or numerous teachers will be mighty upset!) While the MAGA muggers are waning nationally, it will be a while before the waning is felt by the networks—just recently CBS bent over backwards to get a mugger on the staff—, and a while longer before it’s laid aside in Nebraska, where Charles Herbster is still trying to make Jim Pillen look good. Well, set the bar low enough and…!
For a while, we had enough sense in our legislature to avoid the pitfalls brought on our neighbor Kansas by the Brownback baggage…but the damage done there was apparently too alluring to be resisted, and here resistance now hangs on a slender thread…one or two votes at the most. If there is any good news, it is only that the ability and willingness of the sitting governor to buy seats in the legislature may be coming to a close. Oops, premature celebration—he just put up big bucks to pack the Board of Regents. Lame Ducks die hard.
Still, for the most part, under a very odd understanding of “fairness,” our national media seldom call out the lies or look behind the façade the liars hide behind. Can you hear the carney barking, “Ladies and Gentlemen, pay no attention to what’s behind the curtain”? Even as our local print news prospects are dim, our HUB has done much better than the national networks such as ABC, CBS, and NBC, the latter still anchored by someone who allowed Trump to make a mockery of what a presidential debate should be.
So, falsehood parades as “the other side that also deserves a hearing,” and what many people sacrificed to defeat in WWII becomes legitimized as a political viewpoint, and the news starts to mean not much more than it meant when I was a young child—noise from the kitchen as breakfast was being prepared.
If it is saddening to me, a bystander, how much sadder it must be to the few journalists who still try to carry on the grand tradition as best they can, even as they see so much in shambles around them. We’re lucky to have a couple hear-abouts. If you want to kill off liberty and democracy, you start with eroding the press and the schools and confidence in the government itself. Sound familiar?
Time, however, is on our side. A friend jokes with me that the candidates for whom I have yard signs don’t have much chance of winning. Maybe not, but as they say: that’s why we play the games. But he won’t have to wait too long because I’m convinced the tide is turning. Witness for instance that, on the third try, our commission to name those in our hall of fame has named Malcolm X. And we couldn’t go wrong on this round, other candidates being Nebraska educator Louis Pound, composer Howard Hanson, and the heroic Episcopal Priest Hiram Hisanori Kano.
*I’ll let the reader figure out why, in a so-called “red” state, I call it the orange party—think of the colors you mix to get orange. And “off orange” because we like the façade of being anti-Trump while voting with him right down the line.
Kearney, Nebraska
October 2022
Next blog: Post-election November, possibly about national holidays and national rhetoric; meanwhile, check out this link:
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