Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.
--Walter Lippmann
For my parents, Walter Lippmann's column in the Washington Post was essential reading. He helped crystallize their thoughts, often presented an alternative way of looking at a problem and because his political perspective aligned with theirs, he was like a warm cup of milk, comforting and healthy. Walter Cronkite served that same role as a source of television news, although he was wonderfully inscrutable, never revealing his own opinion about what he was reporting, even as he help select the nightly video images of the carnage, the futility and the frustration of the War in Vietnam.
DeGaulle once commented the graveyards are filled with indispensable men, and neither Lippmann nor Cronkite are alive today and yet the nation seems to muddle on.
But there are people who have, for me at least, replaced these icons. I look forward to a column from Gail Collins of the New York Times every bit as much as my parents opened their paper to Lippmann. For me, it's Jon Stewart, not Walter Cronkite.
My parents might shake their heads and mutter about the regression to the mean--my tastes are simply not as high brow.
But, no. While Gail Collins may not turn a phrase like, "Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible," she gets to truth and illumination just as quickly and deeply as Lippmann. She comes from a more proletarian road. While Lippmann was Harvard, Harvard, Harvard and not disposed to conceal it, Collins was educated in the Midwest and in Amherst, Massachusetts, and not at the expensive private college there, but at the state institution down the road which helped create Sesame Street.
She trusts the intellect of her readers every bit as much as Lippmann did--knowing the reader has to be bright enough to get the joke--and she usually begins with the joke, with the report of the really absurd stuff our leaders do and say. While Lippmann intoned, "It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: The music is nothing if the audience is deaf," Collins knows this without saying it and trusts we can hear the music and respond.
So her column today about the upcoming vote on health care is quintessential Collins, beginning with some stories about Nancy Pelosi invoking saints as she pushes the health care bill forward and the story about Harry Reid having become so weary he voted against the very bill he was sponsoring by mistake. But then she gets to the real point--Obama is pushing this health care bill and if it passes, some day we'll all look back on this time and be amazed we allowed Americans to go bankrupt with such regularity over health care bills, that we did not care for our own. We might then be looking back as we do today and wonder what life was like and would have been like without Medicare.
She has that kind of clarity.
Jon Stewart, in his own way, can illuminate. Using all the high tech tools, he shows what the mindless Right is saying and just in case you can't see through it, he helps. Playing clips of Glen Beck giving a lecture on a blackboard, Jon Stewart is able to parody a performance so outrageous it ought to be a parody of itself and thus beyond parody. Beck is literally so stupid, he defies criticism. But Stewart manages to get past that. He can usually demolish Rush Limbaugh by simply playing a Limbaugh clip and rephrasing what Limbaugh says.
This is not always easy, when you have a man capable of saying, "If you commit a crime, you're guilty." Or, "If Thomas Jefferson thought taxation without representation was bad, he should see how it is with representation."
And Stewart would look into the camera and say, "That, actually, is what we call, 'Democracy.'"
Limbaugh at least has a sort of harebrained clarity of his own: "Nationalizing businesses, nationalizing banks, is not a solution for the democratic party, it's the objective." Of course, that is an interesting comment coming in light of our understanding of the failure of regulators which led to the nationalizing Limbaugh is railing against. And what do you think Mr. Limbaugh thinks of regulators, government regulators, the heavy hand of government restraining the horses of free trade?
Limbaugh, of course performs an ongoing service with lines like, "None of what Barack Obama is doing or wants to do to this country is anything the rest of the world hasn't seen before and already failed at."
Like providing health care to your citizens. Oh, yes, England, Germany, Spain, Italy, you name it--they are all just roiling over the failure of their own health care systems. You want to really see popular revolt--just try imposing what we've got for health care on Western Europe.
And then there's one of my favorites, "You know why there's a Second Amendment? In case the government fails to follow the first one."
That's a good line. Now as I read the First Amendment it says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
And when it comes to the War on Christmas, Rush is front and center: "My friends, I am not going to participate in this killing of Christmas. They can try but they can't take it away from us."
Which means, of course, don't take my Christmas tree away from your public school yard or your courthouse.
The other part of the First Amendent prohibits Congress from making laws "Abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble."
I must have missed the story about Rush organizing a militia with guns drawn, to protect that teenager who was suspended from school for holding up his Bong Hits for Jesus sign.
The blogosphere can post, but there are only a few people who can step up to the microphone. If the dark forces can muster Limbaugh, Beck, O'Reilly, who can muster the forces of light to bring them to the radio, the newspaper and the television?
We are lucky to have Gail Collins and Jon Stewart. And don't forget Rachael Madow, if anyone would actually tune in to watch her.
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