Henri Reynard Speaks Out

Is Politics Again Returning To The Fine Art Of Vituperation?

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I read an amusing editorial by William Safire the other day regarding the return of vituperation based on an exchange between Newt Gingrich and the State Department. It reminded me of many of the amusing things attributed to politicians and the writers who report their sayings to the people. A well turned phrase can often capture the meaning of a moment and prevent its passing without having made the impact it may have deserved. Some of those phrases are funny some are inspiring and others are merely effective from the point of being memorable. Will Rogers was always one of my favorite wits, his humor was clearly not serious except in its impact on the people who read him. Will delivered his comments via newspaper or radio; he died before TV became a household item. His wit was kinder than that of our newscasters today, that was possibly because he didn't treat his opinions as if they were more important than the events he applied them to. His words were important though, he was syndicated in over four hundred newspapers and regularly featured on radio as a humorist, not as a newscaster.

Today we have the phenomenon of columnists and newscasters who make their involvement in the news the important part of the news they report. Their opinions are all wrapped up in their reporting and smug self-assurance is their favorite weapon. The amount of money being spent to put these daily shows on the air exceeds the weekly budgets some states had to spend in the time of Will Rogers. His understanding of his fellow man exceeded theirs on every front and his comments never had that undertone of anger that they all seem to carry today. I will not quote him here as you can find his works in print easily enough over sixty years after his death. I wonder how many of this current crop of overpaid pundits and panderers to power will age as well. I suspect it will be none of them. Not every politician in those times had the puffed up importance that our present leadership seems to emanate from every pore. The nation was working its way out of the bubble that electricity had created in our stock markets in the late 1920's during his last few years. That bubble caused a depression. Will added to the good feelings of people in depression times, which was probably why he was so popular.

I find that some days I turn off the TV more quickly than others, that seems to be due to a lack of tolerance for the hype and pretensions of the news programs presented rather than an inability to tolerate the news. I wonder how many of you tire of the All-Star Wrestling style of news presentation we are daily subjected to on many channels. It is clear that the audience for that style is a big one but it has never been the predominant one during my lifetime. Maybe it could be true that we are becoming the culture based on our popular entertainments that Rome was in its early days of the Empire. I wonder if these newscasters fancy being the lions or the gladiators? I would like to see a few of them in a cage with a lion, even a sleepy old toothless one, it would tell me more about their real character than their shows do.

Will Rogers got his start as a member of a Wild West Show and his rope tricks and feats of cowboy arts are still legendary. I tried a few of them as a kid and nothing I had handy could make my rope loops look like his always did on the films. Some number of film clips of him ran on TV when I was allowed to watch. American humor has always had its heroes based on the homey populist approach to wit and wisdom. Maybe that is the missing link to that past time, wit and wisdom. It is apparently in shorter supply than money to fuel a media that seems more and more out of control. That has probably always been true, wit certainly is often missing even from the best newscasts and wisdom is missing from far more of them.

We are a people handicapped by our force fed sound bites and lack of time to pause and consider what we really think. How many people have used that phrase, "Now I'll tell you what I really think" and followed up with some sound bite written as propaganda by people we would never quote if we knew them personally? It is the illusion of personal connection that TV creates, between us and the people inside the box, which is truly dangerous to our independence of thought in this nation. I think a lot of the popular commentators are merely reliable mouthpieces for the ownership that dominates our media today. I have heard that only six companies control the vast majority of the media in our nation, as much as ninety percent. Do you suppose that such a concentration of power could exist by accident? Can you imagine men like Rupert Murdoch accumulated such power and refuse to use it? I would hope that naiveté has not become quite so rampant in this nation as to make that idea believable. Remember the next time you turn on Fox News that the vision of reality presented there is the product of a foreign media empire that is providing us with its version of patriotism to emulate. I prefer Will Roger's questioning version of populist patriotism to what they are selling. God bless and keep you, our troops and all our people safe in these sometimes unwise, and often witless times.