1967 fell asleep for 44 years and just woke up...
Inside Television 573
Publication Date: 10-7-11
By: Hubert O’Hearn
While you’ve been watching the trial in Italy of someone you don’t know who was acquitted of murdering someone you didn’t know; and while you’ve been watching the trial in L.A. of a doctor you don’t know who is accused of murdering someone you didn’t know; what has been going on in New York is something you don’t know because television would prefer you to know about things you do not need to know. It is evidently much more important that we need to know the political opinions of a country singer with precisely one recognizable song than it is to know the opinions of thousands of people, including students, teachers, and Nobel Prize-winning economists occupying the throbbing artery of Wall Street.
In the eleven years I have been filling the space between cleverly written display ads suggesting the existence of hot deals on hot tubs and hot dogs, I have rarely if indeed ever been disgusted with the entire television industry. And actually I’m not entirely disgusted with it now. The fest of breast that was The Playboy Club was canceled for one thing. And Keith Olbermann is still on the air, virtually alone in giving Occupy Wall Street the in-depth coverage it deserves. As I mentioned to a friend the other day, if I ever meet Olbermann I’m planting a big wet one squarely on his lips whether he likes it or not.
But for ease of sweeping convenience, let me stick with disgust with at least the vast and greater iceberg of television news. While you’ve been trying to decide if Amanda Knox is attractive or not - and leave us face it if she was a heavily-set black woman with a droopy eye and armpit stains you never would have seen a minute of coverage - I have been catching where I can YouTube video and interviews on truthdig.com of the most incredible, on-going peaceful protest to have gone on in the United States of America since the last helicopter left the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.
Ah, but many of you reading this probably don’t remember those helicopters or the Vietnam War at all. I always knew there was some reason I had survived a couple of technical deaths on operating tables and I rather like to think it was so that I could glory in this moment. And glory, glory Hallelujah this is a beautiful moment. So sit back in your chair, wave nicely at the waitress for a second cup of coffee and let me tell you about the 1960s.
There used to be this thing called the Left, you see. The Left existed and thrived in a big and beautiful country that now is afraid to even peep aloud the word liberal. The Left protested that Vietnam War, the lack of equality for blacks and women, and the enormous waste of the Cold War. The Left occupied college campuses; they marched, they sang, they gave us Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, The Smothers Brothers, and the last generation of poets worthwhile reading. And when Walter Cronkite on CBS reported that the U.S. was losing the Vietnam War, even Lyndon Johnson knew that the war was lost. The Left had won.
And as soon as it won, it lost. It became fractured and diffuse, started selling cars or totaling ledgers in accountancy and it let Ronald Reagan become President. Only now, with the same sense of what Hunter Thompson called fear and loathing, the self-same fear and loathing that gave birth to the well-covered rise of the Tea Party, has the Left spawned a new generation.
The message of Occupy Wall Street is longer than I can condense here. But its fight to take back democracy from those who would treat it as chattel is as noble a fight as any in the world. And all I can say is, all those precious minutes being frittered away on newscasts who think that Hank Williams Jr’s belched opinions are more important than economic and political reform in the greatest nation on Earth are treating you as an idiot, a simpleton and a pawn. Is not the future of America, whose corporate interests seek to rape Canada’s Arctic of carbon deposits and to hell with the damage, isn’t that worth a little of your time? Be seeing you.
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