Walter Cronkite: In Memoriam

We weren’t, God knows, a conventional family. For one thing, we were Southern, and that put us well outside the social mainstream. For another, we might or might not, on any given day, gather for supper without my father mysteriously absent from the table. He was frequently away, off on one of his periodic, unannounced jaunts, holed up drunk in a hotel room somewhere, with or without his woman du jour.

During those times, we ate in total silence, never sharing what any of us felt about the situation, the embarrassment of the calls from the court, saying he had missed a hearing, or calls from his law partner, asking if any of us knew how to contact him. Or, in my case, the relief—relief not to have him in the house, with his glowering, accusing presence that communicated to me without fail what a disappointment I was to him, the sissy son who couldn’t play football or baseball if his life depended on it, but who, strangely (and this was somehow shameful to my father), excelled at fishing and hunting, who could find his way around the woods even at night, when other boys remained lost and helpless on scouting trips designed to teach us self-sufficiency in the wild.

No, we weren’t conventional, so we didn’t always have all the rules that governed the table and television behavior of other families around us. Like one down the street where each person at table was required to say something, anything, in a daily ritual of “sharing” and “conversation-making” that sent me into a panic anytime I was invited to eat with these folks. Just as their habit of giving each person a bowl of popcorn for his- or herself, with a spoon to eat it, sent me into a spin when I spent the night there . . . . Needless to say, in that tightly controlled Calvinist family, with its hypochondriac, exercise-addicted father, television during meals was strictly forbidden.

We didn’t have any specific rule about television during supper, though my father might, depending on the severity of his hangover on a particular evening, jump up and turn off the t.v. set, announcing that civilized people don’t watch television while they eat. Our table rules—and they were legion—were more confined to niceties like posture, or how one held a fork, or whether one offered the last item on a platter to everyone else before taking it for oneself, or whether one chewed with a closed mouth and kept his extra arm in his lap, since strong and able people did not lean their elbows on the table.

In my memory, television began to insinuate itself into our suppers only gradually, during the Civil Rights and Vietnam era. With Walter Cronkite. Before that time, we didn’t watch t.v. as we ate—in part, because we didn’t even have a television set until I was well into grade school, and who would have wanted to try watching those queasy-making black and white splotches and lines when he ate, anyway?

With Walter Cronkite, news became imperative, even when it interrupted our mealtimes. Since the news hour coincided with our supper hour, we had no choice except to watch as we ate, and we did so voraciously—watch the news, that is, as we chewed the meatloaf or tuna casserole, enjoyed the pole beans with new potatoes and fresh-sliced tomatoes. We needed to know about the church bombings in Birmingham, the civil rights activists who had mysteriously disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi. We needed to know because these stories were part of our own story.

As white Southerners, we were inextricably involved in the massive social shift underway in our country, with its explosive tension points in places like our neighboring states of Alabama and Mississippi—Alabama, the state in which my mother’s father had been born, Mississippi, the state in which he had grown up. We could not escape these stories, because they were our stories.

And because they were our stories, we needed to discuss them as we listened to Mr. Cronkite around our supper table. What to do? How to handle the demand to change—seemingly overnight—everything we had been taught to believe about race, about social rank and order, about God’s arrangement of the world? Was it possible to call Beulah Mrs. Jameson without sounding like a fool when the insincere words fell out of our mouth?

And, increasingly, as I began to think with an adult mind about what was happening around me and dared to challenge my father during these dinner-table confabs: why were the roads in our neighborhood paved, when those in the black community next to us were unpaved? Why did we insist on believing that God had consigned Ham’s descendants to perpetual servitude, rather than believing that we ought to do to others what we hoped to have done to ourselves? What did the bible mean, when it was full of so many contradictory passages? Which ones demanded attention, and which belonged to bygone cultural eras?

Through it all, the reassuring voice of Walter Cronkite droned on in the background, assuring us that, no matter how horrific the events we saw that night on the t.v. screen—the bombed-out church, the Vietnamese village on fire with napalm—the world turned upside down still had some meaning. Some sanity prevailed somewhere, perhaps someplace like his native Missouri, our neighboring state to the north, which managed to remain down-home and quasi-Southern without the violent baggage of places like Mississippi and Alabama, and, we feared, our own state of Arkansas.

This was a voice we could trust. It was a version of our own voice, with its laid-back cadences and its air of gentle, unassuming authority. It was the kind of voice my mother characterized as gentlemanly—a trait she knew when she saw it, though it was becoming rarer and rarer in the world in which we lived. Walter Cronkite had it, as did Adlai Stevenson. Lyndon Baines Johnson didn’t, though Lady Bird was a real lady. Bill Fulbright counted for a gentleman. Orval Faubus decidedly did not.

So Walter Cronkite did more than inform me, during those crucial formative years of adolescence in a sleepy Southern state far from the social mainstream, when the news was always from outside, always essential, if I wanted to find connections between my own small, closed world and the bigger world around me. He also molded me as a person, as a truth-seeker. As a gentleman. He functioned as an important role model, one to which I was told to aspire.

He was what a gentleman ought always to be. He refused to compromise, when it came to telling the truth. We admired that, even when we resisted the truth he wanted to bring to our dinner table on any given evening. And he was courteous to others, even to those with whom he obviously disagreed—qualities we ought to cultivate and practice in a world in which the rules seemed to be slipping, so that people seemed inclined to behave like animals towards each other, and not with humanity.

He never condescended. He put everyone at his ease. A gentleman can talk with equal composure to a president or a street sweeper. In the final analysis, a person’s social status doesn’t matter. What matters is the quality of that person’s character, something Rev. King kept stressing in every speech he gave, and how could we disagree, even when we knew he wanted to use that rubric to crack our social world wide open?

A man of integrity who was not afraid to go where his pursuit of the truth led him, even when that pursuit led him to speak out against his own friends, against those with whom he rubbed shoulders, those who sat with him at the tables of power. A journalist par excellence. And a human being par excellence.

That’s who Walter Cronkite was to me. That’s the man to whom my mother taught me to listen carefully as he delivered the nightly news in the 1960s, the man she encouraged me to become, no matter what vocation I chose in my adult life.

A man—a type of man—whose absence will leave a definite hole in the heart of our society. A man to remember, celebrate, and admire. And, insofar as possible, even in a postmodern world very different from the one in which he came of age, a man to emulate, who leaves behind a legacy to be carried on by other truth-tellers, since the challenge of seeking and telling the truth never goes away, no matter how seismic the shifts in the world around us.

Mr. Bush the First Goes to War (2)

The following journal entry is from February 1991:

I’m haunted by the question, What if someone generations hence reads this journal and wants to know re: the war, and I say nothing? I try not to write self-consciously for an audience, but of course one always looks nervously over one’s shoulder as one scribbles in a journal.

Another difficulty is that all I would want to say about this war is prosaic and trite in the worst sense of that word. Or perhaps better to say it feels prosaic and trite. Having lived and thought through Vietnam, I read the newspapers now in a kind of daze. Can people really still believe these clichés? All that poets and others were already seeing during Vietnam—the demonic technologization of war that makes war a macho blood-sport pursued from an easy chair, the subversion of plain sense in military rhetoric (body bags as human remains packages)—only seems accentuated now, so outré that one assumes everyone reads the news to laugh and cry at the black absurdity of it all.

In this war, adding to the above, of course, is the almost breathtaking arrogance of the political and military manipulation of the media. What strikes me in this regard is not just that the conservatives have begun to manage the media with this war (or the Panamanian or Grenadan one), but that they began to do so immediately between the Vietnam debacle and the mediazation of America in the Reagan period. We had a president who was pure image—and false image—precisely because the media enabled us to penetrate the façade of the military-industrial complex in Vietnam.

The intent of the powers that be to give us a media-driven, media-groomed, façade-president had everything to do with the way the media allowed us to see what was really happening in Vietnam. The powers that be were determined not to allow this to happen again. And they have been effective about controlling the media ever since. And the media have colluded.

All of which is to say that I feel a great sense of futility about saying anything re: this war. The government’s ability to manipulate the media has grown so strong and is so cunning that one senses whatever one says in opposition to the war actually becomes one more way of supporting the war—no matter how violently one’s words oppose it.

And this makes me want to make a more personal decision to live outside the controls the government and all powers that be want to place on my thoughts. I want so much to lead a life of quiet and intense protest and to write poetry that distills my grasp of the other that lies beyond control.

+ + + + +

Wars and rumors of war,
And one lone heron on the bayou shore.

It stitches the shallows,
Here a silent sentinel,
There a shadow sliding over the still dark water
To stand again nearer, then past, the bridge.

At each cycle
My dogs lunge in mock fury,
Strain their leashes out towards the teasing game.

All along my walk,
I think, try not to think, of our latest little war.
I shut mind room
To what's better left unthought,
But back again it comes:

Live oaks sporting jaunty yellow ribbons,
Car antennas flying tiny flags,
And--most startling but not unexpected--
Police motorcycles swathed in red, white, blue,
As if the flag extends the power of the driver
Out, behind, to all the world and space
One could ever dream.

The heron comes as welcome antidote
To my shadowboxing with futility,
Keeping apocalypse at bay.

It, this one thing perfect and complete, invites me
To consider the healing promise of the everyday,
The never comprehended fullness of the flight,
The shore, clouds floating, sinking
To water's mirror.

Mr. Bush the First Goes to War

The following journal entry is from January 1991:

Bush has gone to war. Always obscene, but what is particularly obscene this time is the immediate media transformation of this tragedy into spectacle. No new observation, this. Yet the process this time is further down the road than in Vietnam. This time, big t.v. studs—Rather, Brokaw—jaw with big army studs while all the world is supposed to look on breathless. It’s no more and no less than a football game, the telecaster conferring with the coach.

And what coaches. The living dead, swaggering and fit for the finest board rooms, these generals stand before the camera and deliver grave messages. They love it, love their attention. It’s as if the real scene behind the scenes is finally before us—these men who run it all behind the scenes finally on camera to tell us who and what and why. I don’t recall any war in which this has occurred so prominently as in this “war.”

Why so? Two terms of Reagan have made the always passive, always hypnotized American public even more susceptible to media manipulation. Comments in the newspaper today about the job our boys are doing—awesome to see the planes take off, just have to deliver those bombs, business to do. The sense of suppressed excitement that something is finally happening. Stay tuned, folks—the next installment of WWIII airs shortly. Popcorn in the bomb shelters.

+ + + + +

Always the same mideast city as a backdrop,
Muddy against the screen behind the t v man
Asking us to humanize the bombs
In the comfort of our living room.
Play by play the war unfolds,
Red starburst streams on maps
Fondled o so lovingly by Mr. General
So and so.
His pointer trembles with suppressed delight
That at last now today Jan. 17 1991
We're finally doing something
Kicking some oilgreasy Eyeraqui ass
To shout it to the world, America is BACK!

And how.
Rambo couldn't say it better--
Kaboom! Kachuga! Pow, pop, pow!
The movies pale beside this theater
Of George's little war.

While mamas pray
And widows weep
And justice cries to heaven for one day.

We Are in Trouble: Comments on theTheocracy Slouching to the Polls to Be Born

I remember reading years ago something German theologian Dorothee Sölle wrote about the Vietnam War. To be specific: what she wrote about is how those who manipulate the public’s consciousness to make war thinkable must inevitably assault the linguistic structures that enable us to see, touch, witness what is going on when we kill fellow human beings in war. They must break the link between what we know to be true with our own eyes, and what they inform us is true.

As well as I remember, Sölle points out that one of the “advances” of modern warfare is its ability to remove the killer from the killed. We now have the ability to kill millions of people in an instant, merely by touching a button. We do not have to see the faces of those we annihilate. We do not have to hear their screams. We do not have to smell the burned skin and witness the mangled bodies. We can fly over, drop the bomb, and go about our other daily business after we've taken care of that bit of business.

War as business, war as transaction, war as techne: it’s only a matter of building the killing machine, deploying it, telling someone to do his duty, and then doing that duty, if we’re the one so ordered. All in a day’s work. I can be flying one hour over the village I napalm, and the next, sitting in a beer hall joking with friends—never having seen a single face of the human beings I have just murdered.

Sölle notes that this capability not only removes the human cost—the human reality, the evil—of war from the table of public life (except, of course, for those who are killed, and for their friends and relatives). It also requires linguistic structures to get the rest of us, who might have qualms about what we understand to be done in our name and with our tax contributions, to buy into the murder.

The new “advances” of modern warfare require words that shield us from the sordid reality of those advances. So we now speak of “neutralizing” the enemy, rather than killing her, of “sanitizing” an area rather than murdering its occupants. And, when the same folks who control the manufacturing of the war materiel and who profit from this manufacture also attain the ability to spin our language outside reality-based boundaries, well, what’s left to do? What’s left to assure their total control over everything?

A next step is to chain the watchdog media insofar as they keep wanting to natter tirelessly on about reality-based inconveniences. It’s important not only that murder of innocent civilians be spoonfed to the public as a winning surge: it’s also crucially important that we never get to see the evidence of our winning surges. That is, it’s imperative that we don’t see the real-life, real-dead human bodies, mangled, splayed, leaking blood and guts, on our t.v. or internet screens. A huge mistake of the Vietnam War was the willingness of the media to flash news to the American public in which we actually saw the little Vietnamese girl running down the road naked, fire streaming from her back. From a bomb we had dropped. From a bomb we in the heartland, munching our suppers at the family dinner table, had paid for.

Seeing, touching, witnessing atrocity has the potential to lead to backlash against atrocity—and our complicity in atrocity. For those trying to sanitize our consciences when it comes to our willingness to accept our complicity in murder, it's important not to allow us to see the bodies returning home, either, the bodies of our own soldiers. These remind us that, as bombs are deployed and enemies neutralized and problem places sanitized, human beings are the ultimate price. Both them and us. Both human.

I bring all of this up today as part of a larger reflection. As the current presidential election slouches towards its final end, I’m asking myself—more than ever before, more than with any previous election I’ve tracked since I began to vote in the late 1960s—what it would take to end democracy in our nation.

That is, assuming that someone, somewhere, would like to see our democratic experiment finally ended. As I think about it, I’m more and more convinced that the final act leading to nightfall is to remove the stinger of plain truth from plain language, so that people no longer have the ability to tell a lie from truth. Or even care to distinguish lies from truth.

Assuming that someone might want to move our faltering democracy in an overtly fascist direction, what would that someone have to do to move us definitively past the tipping point? Well, after years of “sanitizing” and “neutralizing” our language so that red has come to suggest green and pro-life comprises war and the death penalty, after deploying the term “elitist” as a weapon so that anyone asking simple reality-based questions about the growing gap between truth and lies in official rhetoric is, voilà, an elitist, we simply have to sin more boldly. And as we do so, defy anyone to tell us that we are sinning.

We have to start sinning boldly by telling lies that anyone can see to be lies, and declaring them to be true. Because I said so. And God is on my side. And God is not on your side. And if any watchdog group challenges the lie, that group is elitist and I won’t even talk to them until they are chastened and willing to swallow the next lie I intend to tell as I sin boldly.

I used to claim to be great. I now declare myself to be GREAT. Who are you to question that declaration, to ask piddling questions about evidence and facts, when it is I—the GREAT ONE—who have made the declaration, I who have twisted the arms of those I terrorize to make the declaration?

A society that has moved light years beyond doublethink and newspeak to the lie boldly told by one declaring herself or himself GREAT and an emissary of God is a society in trouble.

We are in trouble.

If we let ourselves be duped and bullied in this way, if we do not fight back, we must be prepared to accept the inevitable: the definitive falling of the curtain, the demise of our democratic society. We must be prepared to see people of good will hounded from our midst, people of integrity gloriously smeared in every way possible by people of the lie, and then booted out as troublemakers.

We must be ready to endure the muzzling of poets and artists, the hemlock administered to the philosophers and theologians we have not yet succeeded in making obsolescent, those who will not conform.

We must be ready to stand and cheer as some new group of Brown Shirts burn books and order us to cheer. In the name of God, you understand. We must be prepared to watch with sneers on our faces as rabbis, imams, and pastors who have refused to bow to the new theocratic GREAT ones are publicly humiliated, forced to tape-record canned sermons in praise of the GREAT ones of the land.

I imagine the new Brown Shirts—God help me, but I do!—displaying huge pro-life banners as they do their dirty business in the name of the GREAT ones whom GOD has sent.

Not ready for this? It's coming with a vengeance, if we don't wake up. And the narcotic—of cultivated stupidity, of systemic lying, of god dispensed as right-wing commodity to those who crave a dispensable god that answers to them alone—has been administered for so long now, there is not much hope to postpone the inevitable. Or to make a difference.

Unless we awake from our slumber very soon. And do something.