Showing posts with label cable news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cable news. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 25, 2020

Let's see who's going to be 'hysterical' in two weeks


If I see one more social-media post about not listening to the "hysterical" media -- a group I was proud to belong to, and still do in my own way, and to which my wife, over in the dining room busting her ass for the Omaha World-Herald, still belongs -- I am going to go all Ray Nagin on WWL radio after Katrina.

If not for "the hysterical media," you wouldn't know what the fuck is coming at you like a freight train. You wouldn't know squat about "wash your hands" and how COVID-19 is spread. You wouldn't know that your health-care system is at risk of collapse if you don't stay the hell home and not cause yourself (or your loved ones, friends and random strangers) to be infected.

If not for "the hysterical media," no one would be sewing face masks for hospitals or trying to help out laid-off workers -- because they'd have no damned idea if they weren't hard hit themselves.


https://www.omaha.com/
IF NOT for "the hysterical media," you'd know jack shit about jack squat. (Which still, unfortunately, is too often the case in this country, despite the heroic efforts of "the hysterical media.")

Untold members of "the hysterical media" have given their lives to let unreflective and ungrateful people know the things they'd rather not know but damned well need to. On my darkest days, I don't know why "the hysterical media" bother.

Right now, there are hard-working folks in "the hysterical media" who have been infected by COVID-19 in the course of trying tell you about the threat of COVID-19 and how your fellow Americans are suffering under the plague of COVID-19.

Not that people fucking care. At least, won't care about until they're lying on a gurney in the hall of an overwhelmed hospital, gasping for breath, waiting for death because there's no respirator available.

Your governors have been screaming bloody murder about that shortage. You'd know that if you actually had been listening to "the hysterical media."

Now, please don't get all hysterical when you're blindsided by what you refused to believe was coming. It's a bad look, don't you know?

And please don't say the media didn't try to tell you. They did, and you called them all "hysterical."

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

'Well, just shoot up here amongst us --
one of us has got to have some relief'


Don't look at Boris and Natasha, who stole the 2016 presidential election for the biggest, vilest buffoon and existential threat to ever soil 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

No, look at the Mexicans! The Central Americans! They're overrunning our southern border! Raping our women! Sucking at the taxpayer teat! Talking funny! Montezuma's revenge! AAAIIEEEE!

And don't look at all-American concentration camps! They're . . . they're . . . essentially summer camps! Yeah, that's the ticket! Summer camps! Ex-cel-lent. . . .
If you thought Kirstjen Nielsen’s defense of the Trump’s administration’s policy that separates immigrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border was disturbing, wait until you see what Laura Ingraham had in store for her Fox News viewers on Monday night.

“Consistent with American law, when a party is arrested, your children are either sent to relatives or they become wards of the state,” Ingraham said. “So since more illegal immigrants are rushing the border, more kids are being separated from their parents, and are temporarily housed in what are essentially summer camps.”

The host did not show any images of children being held in cages, nor did she play audio of them screaming for their parents in agony as border agents callously joked, “We have an orchestra here.”

Instead, Ingraham channeled Ann Coulter when she used air quotes around the words “separated children” and attacked Democrats for supposedly feigning outrage in an attempt to “emotionally manipulate” the public for political gain.

SUMMER CAMPS populated by . . . "child actors"! Ooooooooh! That's good!

Just two days into this week, I got nothing left except despair and smartassery. And a Jerry Clower story tailor-made for a nation sick unto death of Donald Trump and his sycophants (pronounced something like "sicko fans").

To wit:


YEAH, ol' Jerry pretty much summed up our predicament with his tale of the coon hunt, John and the bobcat he tangled with way up a sweet gum tree. Most sane, nonauthoritarian and unbigoted Americans, I think, can identify with John.
"What's the matter with John?"
"HOOOOOOOOO! Shoot this thing! Have mercy! This thing's killin' me! Shoot this thing!"

"Johnnnnnn! I can't shoot up in there. I might hit you!"

"Well, just shoot up here amongst us -- one of us has got to have some relief."
SO . . . until somebody gets some relief, here's some smartassery which, I fear, comes way too close to the truth.



Wednesday, August 17, 2016

The view from 10645 Darryl Drive


This is my neighborhood, the one in Baton Rouge where I grew up.

My parents built their first -- and only -- house there in 1956. I moved in at the end of March 1961 from my previous address at the old Our Lady of the Lake maternity ward.

From 1956 until three days ago, not a drop of unwanted water entered 10645 Darryl Drive unless somebody spilled a glass of it on the floor. Then we mopped it up. 

Look at the picture above, taken by the Civil Air Patrol on Sunday. 10645 Darryl Drive is in the bottom fourth, one-third from the left.
 
There's not a big enough mop in the world.

At right, thanks to Google Street View, is how the home of my youth looked three years ago -- when it was the home of my mother's old age. This picture is from May 2013, a month before Mama fell and broke her hip at age 89.

When the paramedics took her away to the new Our Lady of the Lake, she couldn't have known that she'd never see it again. A couple of months after that, she'd be here in Omaha, in the assisted-living apartment where she would spend the last 18 months of her life.

Mama lived at 10645 Darryl Drive for almost 57 years. In 2001, Daddy took his last breath in the bedroom that was once mine.

I AM grateful they did not live to see Sunday's scene at 10645 Darryl Drive -- to see their little world in their little part of Baton Rouge, La., overtaken by dirty, brown floodwater. I am grateful that, in extreme old age, they did not see the house they so loved invaded by the deluge. See their memories drowned.

I am grateful they were not faced with cleaning up a gigantic mess when they were too old and too ill to even consider putting things aright again.

Today, the scene at 10645 Darryl Drive has been repeated thousands upon thousands upon thousands of times -- much worse in most cases. Water to the countertops, water to the ceiling, water to the roofline. Water consuming everything and, in 11 cases as I write, someone's very life.

Also as I write, I've lost count of how many people I know back home, both family and friends, who got flooded out, in many cases losing everything they owned. I have cousins who now possess only their lives, their loved ones and the clothes on their backs. This is my hometown's Katrina. This is Katrina for an area spanning 20 parishes (counties) in south Louisiana.

NEXT DOOR in Denham Springs, a town of more than 10,000 just across the rampaging Amite River, 90 percent of homes were flooded. In Livingston Parish alone, where Denham Springs is the largest municipality, it's estimated that more than 100,000 people lost everything they had.

Nobody's come up with a number for Baton Rouge, the capital city of 230,000 people.


Not that you'd know any of that from the national media.

Louisiana lives matter . . . not that you could tell from watching the evening news or the cable networks, where all the airtime is devoted to more pressing things than the fate of rednecks, coonasses and black folks in a banana republic somewhere in Flyover Country.

Somewhere toward the bottom.


NO, the cable networks are preoccupied by what obviously matters in life, like panels of opposing party hacks yelling at one another over whether Donald Trump's shit stinks. Tomorrow, Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper will be hosing down the bellowing political hacks as they debate whether Trump was right to be livid that CNN suggested that his shit wasn't the best shit, the best smelling shit that anyone ever shit. Believe me.

As a former resident of 10645 Darryl Drive, I have an opinion about what these blathering, coastal media elites are full of.

But now I return to my regularly scheduled mourning, both for my people and for a country that doesn't much think their lives, their suffering and their deaths matter much at all.

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

'We must be strategic in how we riot'


When a major cable network lets fools like Marc Lamont Hill on its air to say things like "We must be strategic in how we riot," you know with absolute certainty that the last grown-up in television news has died or retired.

President Obama wasn't kidding the other night at the White House Correspondents Dinner when he "joked" that "usually the only people impersonating journalists on CNN are journalists on CNN."

As I watched rioters rule the streets of Baltimore last night on CNN, with police standing by observing as thugs looted liquor stores and set buildings alight not 50 yards away, I thought "This is a civilization refusing to defend itself." It seems to me there is a hierarchy of imperatives, and just above "Police should neither kill nor brutalize ordinary citizens or suspects in custody" is "Society must not be allowed to descend into violent mayhem."

Last night, Baltimore descended into violent mayhem. Last night, its elected leaders fiddled while Baltimore burned. And on a national "news" network, some damn-fool commentator lamented that the oppressed needed to be more "strategic" in their rioting.


Marc Lamont Hill
FORGET "two wrongs don't make a right." Forget that by looting and burning the stores of merchants, burning a church's senior-housing project that was under construction, assaulting bystanders and journalists for the crime of being white and endangering the lives of innocent residents of their own neighborhoods the rioters threw away any claim to the moral high ground. Forget every single thing that should be self-evident in any society not intent on suicide.

Forget all that.

Instead, let's focus on the strategic value of being "strategic" in your rioting.

The moneyed and powerful may no longer possess the will to preserve public order or defend a teetering civilization, but I will guaran-damn-tee you that the moneyed and powerful -- in other words, the ruling class -- does have the will to defend its money and its power. So what then happens when "strategic" rioters head downtown, or to affluent neighborhoods, to strategically riot, burn, kill and loot? What happens when city hall and Camden Yards, home of baseball's Baltimore Orioles, go up in flames?

ME, I'm thinking that when Stuff White People Like start to be consumed by the all-encompassing rage and "strategic" rioting of the underclass, those who might be indifferent to the ongoing immolation of the ghetto suddenly will embrace the tactical efficiency of helicopter gunships and Bradley Fighting Vehicles. If and when that comes to pass, I wonder what academic rabble-rouser Marc Lamont Hill -- more commonly known in the 'hood as "p***y-ass toilet fodder" -- then might think of being "strategic in how we riot."


Ultimately, when a minority suffers injustice and abuse by those in power, moral authority is the only authority it possesses and moral suasion is the only weapon it can count on. When people who are vastly outnumbered and, in Fortress America, vastly outgunned as well start to believe that two wrongs do make a right, at some point they will find the "oppressors" think that three just might.

Monday, February 16, 2015

Your 'Cantore loses his s***' post du jour

 
It's official.


 
Thundersnow . . .
 

(Jump to the 3:20 mark) 
 
is better . . .
 

than sex.  

And better than winning 
the Powerball jackpot, too.

Stupid me. I just think "Well, crap. 
I'm gonna have to shovel more than I thought."

Tuesday, December 09, 2014

1 Adam-12, 1 Adam-12 . . . chlorine leak,
Hyatt Hotel. See the giant raccoon. Code 2


When one is confronted with somebody releasing chlorine gas at a furry convention in Chicago, you can try to act like this isn't seriously, mind-blowingly absurd.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom
You can try to pretend this is just another, unexceptional entrée in our American smorgasbord of criminal "mass incidents."

You can try to suppress that regressive, normal-normative little voice tormenting your modern, enlightened mind, saying "This is some seriously weird s***, dude!"
 

You can click the heels of your ruby slippers together three times, repeating "It's just another valid lifestyle choice! (click) It's just another valid lifestyle choice! (click) It's just another valid lifestyle choice! (click)"

Yes, you can try to pretend that bat-s*** crazy ain't crazy at all.

You can try.


OR . . . you can do what MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski did Monday morning on Morning Joe . . . as Joe Scarborough sat next to her giggling into his hand. And in doing so, she found that she had become -- for one day, at least -- the voice of a nation.

It's too bad that "I RUN SCREAMING INTO THE NIGHT WITH MIKA" is too long to put on a bumper sticker. On the other hand, "I GIGGLE WITH JOE" isn't.

It's also too bad that whoever put the chlorine powder in a stairwell at the furries' Hyatt convention site just couldn't see the fuzzy, cuddly humor in it all. Or run screaming into the night. One or the other.

Thursday, September 04, 2014

Good to know


Uhhhhhhh . . . isn't this the not-radical-Muslim version of the ISIS philosophy?

And isn't that what we're all saying is a barbaric violation of basic human rights?

Man, either Sean Hannity is an idiot or he thinks his audience is really, really stupid. Either way, you just can't make this stuff up.

HANNITY: You dedicated this, your book, to Miss Kay, which I thought was really nice. Let me ask you first. I wrote a book once, "Deliver Us from Evil." I think good people have a hard concept understanding evil. That book talks about evil you have there in front of you. The lord's prayer says "deliver us from evil." I think you're a preacher at heart. I'm not telling you anything you don't know. But if anybody could cut off somebody's head like that and put children's heads on our stakes, isn't that evil in our time? And how should we deal with it?

ROBERTSON: Worldwide, planet-wide, Biblically speaking, two groups of people, the children of God, and the whole world is under the control of the evil one. That's First John 5:19. The evil one works in those who are disobedient. Galatians 3, they are prisoners of sin. Second Timothy 2, the Bible says they've been taken captive by Satan to do his will.

Listen, let me show you one. I've got the old -- hey, America, Declaration of Independence, it's my book marker. Don't forget that. Listen to this, Sean. Solomon, one of the wisest men on earth if not the wisest, he's speaking of wisdom, "Whoever finds me, wisdom finds light. Watch and receives favor from the lord. But whoever fails to find me," this is the God of the Bible, "harms himself." Now, listen to this on this ISIS thing, "All who hate me love death."

So you scratch your head and you say, well, why is it that when we're not even over there in the Middle East, why do they continue to slaughter each other when we're not even on the premises? They can't blame us. We left Iraq. You said what happened in Egypt and Syria, you say in Libya. They just slaughter each other. You say, what? "All who hate me love death," Sean.

HANNITY: What is the answer? I think the only answer is, I think they are at war with us.

ROBERTSON: Yes.
HANNITY: Whether we like it or not, I think most people would rather live in peace. Most Americans, just leave us alone, we'll leave you alone. They're not going to leave us alone. They're not going to leave Israel alone. So that leaves us with two options -- do nothing and get ready for the next attack. And then we'll have a report that says, they're at war with us, we weren't at war with them.

ROBERTSON: In this case you either have to convert them, which I think would be next to impossible. I'm not giving up on them, but I'm just saying, either convert them or kill them. One or the other.

HANNITY: That's going --

ROBERTSON: Maybe that time has come and gone, so I think that with this ideology that we're faced with, this is like street gangs, street thugs on steroids. You think about it, most of the wars we've fought, they were not asymmetrical like this one. This one, it's not a country with a standing army, and we line up and do battle with a certain amount of rules that they violate. But you say this is more like worldwide gang warfare, but this gang is well-armed and well-organized. I think, my opinion, we're going to have to deal with this group way more harshly than we have up to this point.

HANNITY: Because they're so harsh. I know they're going to be people that are always looking to jump on you and say, "Convert them or kill them." And they're going to say, "There goes Phil Robertson again." I know the media. I know they how act.

ROBERTSON: I'd much rather have a Bible study with all of them and show them the error of their ways and point them to Jesus Christ, the author and perfector of having your sins removed and being raised from the dead. I would rather preach the gospel of Jesus to them. However, if it's a gun fight and a gun fight alone, if that is what they're looking for, me, personally I am prepared for either one.
NEXT on Fox News Channel, we'll hear some words of wisdom about how to have a closer relationship with the tween girl in your life from Sons of Guns' Will Hayden.

Oh, brother. Ohhhhhhhhhhhh, BROTHER!

Today's culture -- with cable TV leading the charge -- has ruined parody and satire for the next 200 years.



HAT TIP: Romenesko.

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Nattering nabobs of know-nothingism


I miss Eric Sevareid.

I miss the days when newscasters stuck to the facts and not their ill-informed opinions. I miss the days when silence, or moving on to the next story, was a viable alternative to babbling about those things one does not yet know with certainty.

I miss the days when grown-ups sat behind the TV anchor desk, not overgrown teen-agers emoting when thought -- or silence -- would be more appropriate.

Those are not the days in which we live.

Eric Sevareid
THE CLIP ABOVE represents the days in which we now live. Days in which we are free to speak ill of the dead, so long as we put on a somber face and gravely speak words which signify nothing apart from our ignorance and prejudices. Fox News' Shepard Smith must have thought he was saying something when he blithely proclaimed that "something inside you is so horrible, or you're such a coward -- or whatever the reason -- that you decide to end it."

Like too many journalists today, Smith doesn't know what he doesn't know.

But that doesn't matter today so long as the words -- which words matter not -- just keep spewing from one's mouth like vomit out of a drunk behind your local tavern. It's all good. If forced to, you can vomit out an apology later.

Over at CNN, entertainment reporter Nischelle Turner inadvertently -- Isn't that always the case? -- indicted her genre of journalism and all its malpractitioners:
“I’ve been getting a lot of feedback from the mental health community in using that word,” Turner said. “A lot of times when we’re doing live coverage we say things and we’re talking and we don’t realize what we’re saying. They’re absolutely correct. That it is a disease, so I apologize for using the word demons.”
HERE ARE some words to live by for broadcast journalists when the red light goes on: If you don't realize what you're saying, it's far better to say nothing at all.

Still, all of this nonsense today apparently is much preferred over researching a subject, mulling it over and committing reasoned and humane commentary.

Because Eric Sevareid is dead. And journalism -- particularly that of the broadcast variety -- is busy at present committing suicide. Are all the Shep Smiths in the world just so many cowards, or is it that something inside of them is so horrible that they just can't help themselves?


Film at 11. Until then, we'll just prattle on about things we know not.

While today's talking heads are doing that, watch this master of the past and weep for the present.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Cue Don Henley . . . one more time



"You're a dumbass, aren't you?"

"Yes. Yes, I am. And the only side of an interview I really listen to is mine.

 "So . . . could you tell whether the missile came from Russia or Ukrainia?"

IT'LL BE just our luck that the last thing we'll hear before the Apocalypse is some Howard Stern fan pranking some cable-news doofus about the shock jock farting H-bombs.

TV news is infamous for babbling idiots and their epic fails, but this has to be one of the epic-est of them all.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Deck the halls with ginned-up outrage




If somebody had to say it, chances are that Jon Stewart just did.
"Uff course Kris Kringle iss vhite!"
A Festivus pole made out of beer cans at the Florida state capitol? That I find hilarious.
Fox News cynically using the commemoration of the Savior's birth to manufacture outrage, ill will and hatred of one's fellow man? That is as truly disturbing as it is completely predictable.
The TV gathering spot for pissed-off people on the political right might have "news" as part of its name, but it seems to have a lot more in common with Joseph Goebbels than it does with Edward R. Murrow.

The cynicism on display by Fox News regarding "the war on Christmas" is astounding, coming as it is from people casually cashing in on the sacred as they appeal to the worst demons of their viewership.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

'Without a doubt . . .' karma's a bitch


Boy, oh, boy, did
CNN blow it on the Supreme Court's ruling on the health-care reform law.

I consider this -- along with the cable network's collapsing prime-time ratings -- to totally validate the concept of karma. The universe could have forgiven one Anderson Cooper-Kathy Griffin pairing on New Year's Eve, but not two. And especially not annual ones.

"But without a doubt, the individual mandate, which has been the polarizing centerpiece of the political and policy debate over health care, the justices throwing that out is a direct blow to the president of the United States," said CNN's John King, "a direct blow to his Democratic Party, and this is a victory, if you will, for conservatives."

NOTE: NSFW language at video's end

And karma, as we all know, is a bitch.

"Wow, that's a dramatic moment," to quote Wolf Blitzer as he enthused on hearing the initial, horribly wrong word from reporter Kate Bolduan.

Oh . . .
Fox News Channel got it spectacularly wrong this morning, too. Karma has been busy.

Be good, people. Is what I'm saying.

Thursday, May 03, 2012

More viral, please


This video of Shepard Smith violating Fox News policy (and MSNBC policy . . . and CNN policy . . . and . . . ) by telling the unvarnished truth needs to go more viral than it already has.

That is all.

Tuesday, May 01, 2012

The thrill ain't gone

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy


I think MSNBC's Chris Matthews had a thrill going up more than his leg here.

President Obama might or might not be Henry V, but I'm pretty sure that most everyone on the cable "news" networks is Napoleon XVI.


Friday, January 06, 2012

The devil has all the good games


LSU football may have just achieved full understanding of what it means to win by losing. This soap opera is Alabama's problem now.

But that's the least important thing illustrated by this video. The most important thing to be learned from this orgasm of hype and adulation thrown at mere teenagers, however gifted, is that
ESPN is the devil.

ESPN is single-handedly turning college athletics -- and college recruiting -- into The Jerry Springer Show. That or The Steve Wilkos Show. . . six of one, a half dozen of the other.

I'M A LITTLE surprised there's no paternity test shoehorned into the Big Announcement here. That's OK, Mama still manages to work in a classless reaction to the bad news that did come her way on live television.

But not just live TV . . .
the devil's live TV.

Thanks for another cultural low point,
ESPN. Now go to hell.

Sorry, I meant to say
back to hell. My bad.

Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Because CNN can't afford 20ish strippers


Occasionally, I am compelled to haul out a dire warning about television legendary broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow delivered to the Radio and Television News Directors Association . . . in October 1958.

As far as I can tell, each time the sad pairing of Kathy Griffin and Anderson Cooper on the alleged
Cable News Network drove me to it.

Here we go again.


AND HERE Murrow goes again -- out of dire necessity. Not that there's any saving us now.

I began by saying that our history will be what we make it. If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us.

We are to a large extent an imitative society. If one or two or three corporations would undertake to devote just a small fraction of their advertising appropriation along the lines that I have suggested, the procedure would grow by contagion; the economic burden would be bearable, and there might ensue a most exciting adventure--exposure to ideas and the bringing of reality into the homes of the nation.

To those who say people wouldn't look; they wouldn't be interested; they're too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter's opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.

Stonewall Jackson, who knew something about the use of weapons, is reported to have said, "When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival.

-- Edward R. Murrow, 1958

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Only a (bleep) calls a body a (bleep) on TV

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy


Here's what I learned pretty much on the first day of my high-school radio broadcasting class: The microphone is always on.

Of course, not always, but if you don't act like it is when it's not, time will come when you think it's not but it is. And $%&* me if generations of actual broadcasters have found themselves eating government cheese in a van down by the river after forgetting that simple rule.

The other thing I learned shortly thereafter at the voice of Baton Rouge High,
WBRH, is that when you try to bleep stuff on the fly, a certain percentage of the time, it doesn't work out. Have you ever heard the version of Pink Floyd's "Money" where the "bull" gets bleeped but the "s***" doesn't?

I have. Praise be that one wasn't actually my fault. I was to blame for various other transgressions.

SO NOW we have the world of cable "news," where entertainment trumps all and former pols and present ink-stained wretches take to the airwaves because that's what all the cool kids do. And the pay ain't horrible, either.

It was only a matter of time before the guy from Time, Mark Halperin, decided to be the coolest of the cool kids by calling the president a d*** on national TV. He thought the seven-second delay would allow him to engage in safe-badassery.

Of course, the condom tore . . .
er, the brand-new producer couldn't find the "dump" button.


AND THAT "cool kid" from Time? They got him on the rag, rag.

Shove that up your royal Timese machine

Thursday, June 09, 2011

Rome, sweet Rome


I am half of a Waltons family.

My wife and I both were devotees back during the television series' first-run days in the 1970s and early '80s, and we try never to miss our daily, syndicated trip back to Waltons Mountain today.

The only trouble is this: The channel where we get our nightly fix of Mama and Daddy, John-Boy and Mary Ellen, Jason and Erin, and Ben, Jim-Bob, and Elizabeth also features some of the worst low-budget commercials to ever curse a television screen. The only ray of light is that the faith-based INSP channel doesn't air Enzyte ads.

So, during commercials, I flip over to CNN or MSNBC. And something has become clear to me during these word-from-our-pathetic-sponsors interludes -- The Waltons represents programming far more serious and intelligent than anything on the cable-news channels.


TONIGHT, I kept cutting away from Jason fighting the Nazis in Germany in the run-up to VE Day to talking heads speaking in grave tones about Rep. Anthony Weiner's wiener. More precisely, I kept dropping in on Lawrence and Rachel and Eliot seeing the Republicans' attacks on a Democratic congressman and his junk, then raising them Sen. David Vitter's hooker problem and Newt Gingrich's scandal of the day from back in the day.

Then I would return to The Waltons and a world of homefront sacrifice and battlefield tragedy, circa 1945.

Ike and Corabeth struggling with keeping their customers in food and gas in the age of wartime rationing. Jason trying to hold a shellshocked soldier together as they hunted German holdouts. The shellshocked soldier coming to himself not in the service of killing, but in risking his life to avoid killing a young German infantryman who didn't believe the war was over. John-Boy, meantime, was falling in love with the prettiest woman in France, but ended up torn away from her when the war in the Pacific intruded, landing brother Ben in a Japanese POW camp and calling the first-born son back to Waltons Mountain . . . to his family.

MEANWHILE, on Piers Morgan Tonight, the worldly travails of Sarah Ferguson -- one of which was, apparently, being injected with so much Botox that the upper half of her face has ceased to move whenever she talks . . . which, as it turns out, is much too often.

Of course, one doesn't have to retreat to Waltons Mountain, 1945, to encounter ample tragedy, human drama, and existential gravitas. There's plenty of that today.

Americans find themselves at war, one way or another, in no less than four Middle Eastern countries. In fact, young Americans junior-high age and younger have no memory of a time when this nation was not at war in that region.

Those wars, during that time, have played no small role in bringing the United States to the edge of insolvency. So has a decade of living beyond our means. So has several more years of dealing with the economic collapse Wall Street's (and our) excesses precipitated.

Tens of millions of Americans now owe more on mortgages than their homes are worth. Tens of millions more are out of work. The economy continues to tap dance along the edge of a bottomless chasm.

Not that any of that matters when there are Republicans to bash and Democrats to paint as enemies of God and man. Not when we have Anthony Weiner's wiener to wield as an X-rated weapon in political combat -- which just happens to double as kinky infotainment in a country as polarized as it's been since 1865.

I WONDER how many of those condemning the congressman from New York are guilty of the same thing. I wonder how many of those defending him truly don't see what the big deal is, anyway.

I wonder how many see the whole sordid mess as just another excuse to engage in tribal warfare -- not over any grand principle, but just because they hate Them.

While Americans were otherwise occupied, we stumbled so far off track into decadence and internecine warfare that even columnists for London's left-leaning Guardian newspaper openly wonder whether their American cousins are standing at the crossroads of Britain, 1914 and Rome, A.D. 200. And still we cannot see the forest for the . . . well, never mind.

I suppose it is ever thus in societies a lot nearer The End than they think.

Monday, June 06, 2011

Simply '70s: Mary Hartman predicts 2011


Mary Hartman! Mary Hartman!

In high school, I was hooked on
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman simply because it was the edgiest, cuttingest, wickedest (and most wickedly funny . . . when not wickedly painful) thing on television. In many ways, it was Monty Python meets Paddy Chayefsky.

And, come to think of it, this deeply satirical late-night soap opera was just about as prophetic as Chayefsky's
Network that same year -- 1976. Here, we see a parody of public television that comes to resemble the modus operandi of today's alternate reality of cable news -- where infotainment uses real people as weapons (and cannon fodder) to fight ideological battles for the amusement of their viewers.

Except, of course, when they use real people as salacious chum to draw viewers like one might lure sharks.

Young Rev. Jimmy Joe Jeeter got off easier than today's average media consumer, I say.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Unction Junction, what's your function?

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The Good Book says there is a time for everything:

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. . . ."

When Rachel Maddow was laying into Birther Nation, a doctor in Tuscaloosa, Ala., rightly had other things on his mind.

Dr. David Hinson was working at the hospital when the tornado hit. He and his wife had to walk several blocks to get to their house, which was destroyed. Several houses down, he helped pull three students from the rubble. One was dead and two were badly injured. He and others used pieces of debris as makeshift stretchers to carry them to an ambulance.

"We just did the best we could to get them out and get them stabilized and get them to help," he said. "I don't know what happened to them."

WHEN the Rachel Maddow Show took to the air Wednesday night, scenes like this were playing out all over Alabama and Mississippi. They would be playing out shortly in Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky.

None of this registers, however, in a special place where politicos and ideologues can rage against the machine unmolested by real life or real people. I call it Unction Junction.

Yes, we need to speak out against the birthers, not that anyone's mind will be changed at this point. But "there is a season and a time unto every purpose under the heaven," and last night wasn't the time for that.

Another thing we need to worry about --
and this might be as good a time as any to do it -- is an ideologically obsessed and hyperventilating media culture that doesn't know its Ecclesiastes.

While we were otherwise occupied. . . .


Wednesday evening, all the cable-news chatterers were chattering away about President Obama, birthers, evil Republicans and evil Democrats.

They were losing their minds over Donald Trump losing his mind.

Well, not Piers Morgan, it must be said.
Cable News Network's resident Brit was giddy over the someday-heir to the throne's impending marriage to a commoner way too good looking for Himself.

As far as we know (and the ranks are growing by the minute), 269 would-be viewers in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky were otherwise occupied. They were dying -- being bludgeoned, sliced, impaled or crushed as massive tornadoes turned the world around them into rubble.

Of course, you would have been hard pressed to notice if you were watching CNN, MSNBC or the Fox News Channel. Lawrence, Rachel, Eliot, Ed, Bill and Sean had bigger fish to fry, better "Others" to hate on than to focus on a bunch of Bubbas being ground up in the worst tornado outbreak since 1974.

SEE, to the media elite -- and to Washington . . . and to the think tanks . . . and to the entertainment industry . . . and to the eternally outraged activists whose continued existence depends upon staying eternally outraged (and making sure Lawrence, Rachel, Eliot, Ed, Bill and Sean do, too) -- we're all The Other, pretty much.

We don't matter, just our money or our votes. And if we're dead, there's no percentage in noticing that 269 of us just got bludgeoned, sliced, impaled or crushed to Kingdom Come.


ON THE other hand, video like this is da bomb. Pretty dramatic stuff here. Stuff's getting blowed up good, and you can cut the dramatic tension with a knife as the meteorologists' voices grow ever more urgent as the milewide Swirling Wall of Death (TM) approaches.

Yeah, with video like this, and with daylight views of all this rubble, 269 dead Bubbas might be worth a second look. Cable "news" might have an opening between the more urgent political contretemps Wednesday and the more pressing royal wedding Friday. Let's see whether CNN, MSNBC and Fox can shoehorn it in.

Rachel can blame it on global warming and the GOP. Sean can blame it on an angry God who's had it with the godless Democrats.

And Anderson can keep the tornadic supercells honest. Might work.


Videotape at 5:30, analysis at 8.