The Problem with Us Boomers

Before there was a John F. Kennedy the game of politics was won by the candidate who promised the most and revealed the least. In 1960 JFK changed that streak of luck when he conquered his challenger by the sweat of his opponent's brow.

Why it happened was a matter of revolutionary technical advancement that forever changed how we viewed our world. How it happened changed the game of politics forever. And when it happened, the consciousness of the boomer generation was forever altered.

Since it was the first-ever televised presidential debate, more than 60 million Americans tuned in to watch then Republican candidate Vice-President Richard Nixon and Democratic candidate, Senator John F Kennedy present their views not just oratorically, but visually as well. Since this was the first-ever televised presidential debate and more than 60 million Americans tuned into watch, our ears became muted as our eyes became memorized. So much data to take in all at once! Because it suddenly seemed strange to hear words spoken when we could also see lips moving, relatively little was actually heard while our eyes busily scanned the candidates bodies, uh faces.

For rather than pay strict attention to what was being said, we listened much more intently to these candidate's posture, poise and facial expression. So much so that when 'The Great Debate' as it was called back then was officially over, the only thing we studied, the only truth we came to was that Kennedy was ridiculously handsome, and Nixon grievously ugly. The next day every newspaper exploited Nixon's exaggerated by TV studio lights sweaty forehead. The next morning it was the only thing an audience of more than 60 million could recall.

But what is a presidential debate except a study in contrasts? Today we have two candidates running for the same White House seat who have never been more conspicuously different in ethnicity, cultural background, age, political policy reform, agenda, voting record or vision, and yet for some aberrant childhood psychologically driven reason, we insist on reverting back to the imaginary days of Camelot and fervently keep striving to superimpose the iconic remarkableness of John F Kennedy on Barack Obama and wistfully note his wife Michelle's choice of dress as symbolically Jackieish.

If it wasn't so delusional sad it would be downright embarrassing. When is our boomer consciousness ever going to grow up? When is our boomer's trauma and grief over losing our beloved knight in shining armour ever going to be healed? From the look of it, never. We continue to yearn for someone we can never get back. We still carry a juvenile ideation of being tenderly governed by a beautiful and righteous hand. If we still can't admit that a politician, any politician, even a Barack Obama, will do anything, anything at all to enhance their chances of getting elected, even if it means taking on the persona of another, then this latest game of politics has already been lost.

For where are the people, my fellow boomers, who were supposed to be listening for the sound of wrong notes during our reign of terror? Why did we subordinately allow our free press to collapse along with the twin towers? Wasn't a free press what we boomers were so in your face, ready to march into hell for back in the sixties? How did so many good people stay silent when so many journalists were captured and had their throats cut in order not to be heard? Why did we just throw our hands up in the air when Bush/Cheney/Rove made expert use of intimidation and illegal scare tactics to shoo away all that wanted to conduct unbiased investigations and probe into matters of high treason and impeachable offenses?

Boomers have to stop thumb sucking on what was once upon a time and impose their better instincts upon their offspring; like the call to arms directive they once followed to question loudly and seek genuine answers, otherwise it's profoundly apparent we've hampered every generation that has come after us to never get past our past.

I'm Sorry for Your Loss but....

The three day, non-stop memorial honoring the sudden passing of Tim Russert, pieced together from archive footage and impromptu eulogies from all the many famous faces who worked with Russert over the years, is completely unjustified and unwarranted. It blacked out all other news, as if the flood waters in Iowa had suddenly receded, not one soldier was mortally wounded or dismembered in Iraq or Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia wasn't inching forward to collecting $150 per barrel this coming July 4th.

But ever since Tom Brokaw, as a former news anchor for NBC and close friend of Tim Russert, broke the tragic news on Friday of Russert's collapse at work, it seemed all three major cable news outlets, MSNBC, CNN and even FOX News had nothing else to report but to gush out a tsunami of grief and sadness upon their audience.

Naturally because Russert's demise came about so suddenly, so unexpectedly, his weeping, self-indulgent colleagues are understandably trying to cope on air with the loss of a good friend and mentor. But what is not authorized is why Russert deserves the same kind of grand gesture of a send-off befitting the statue of a president?

What did he achieve in his long career to deserve that kind of outpouring of gratitude for having lived? Did Tim Russert's interviews single handily save this country from the awful tyranny of the Bush-Cheney Administration? Where was Russert an exceptionally transcendent leader of journalism? Where in eight long years of being held hostage to a out of control regime did Russert make a profound difference.

Aside from having a spirited ability to recall dates and facts to overlap historical events, at times he appeared to be a willing partner in aiding and abetting the current administration's diabolical scheming by never wanting to step over that fine line of making a guest angry enough to dissuade them from coming back on his show ever again. But why would that have been such a bad thing? What would have been the loss? Their absence would have spoken at a much higher volume than to have to watch them squirm out of impeachment hearings by pretending gross and malicious falsehoods.

If Russert hadn't let the current administration get away with such lies and deceit it would have made for a much more compelling argument that he was our last journalism shining hope and every citizen would have remembered him for not allowing the agents of death to pilfer and ravage anymore. Then he might have gone down with the likes of Edward R Murrow, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Woodward and Bernstein, and the still great Bob Shieffer, a Washington reporter who took over for Dan Rather as anchor of The CBS Evening News. None of those men smiled when they knew they were staring into the eyes of moral corruption. In other words, when Donald Rumsfeld looked Russert directly in the eye to let him know he was mad as hell and wasn't going to answer such an impertinent question, Russert would immediately back off, withdraw the impolite, discourteous inquiry and with a big, cheery red nosed smile, come back with a lesser offense his guest could easily skirt around. There, isn't that better Mr. Mass Murderer? Let me get you a glass of warm milk to go with that soft pandering. The bottom line was Russert's prosecutorial enquiry against the thugs and rapists that run this country wasn't anymore productive than pansy Larry King.

Furthermore, under Russert's style of programming there was often no mistaking his ideological bias. Whatever happened to the expected journalist neutral stance? Who was overseeing the strict code of ethics that legitimizes journalistic standards when Russert outright yelled for Hillary to get off the stage already? Why was he allowed to be so heated against Hillary? If he had uttered an obscenity at her surely the FCC would have whipped his butt. But there was no accountability held when he overtly overstepped his journalist integrity in opposition towards her? Over the last weeks if you had been watching Meet The Press it was hard to miss the tipping point when he suddenly took over as Obama's campaign manager and gave up his position as the host of his own network news show.

Media Matters.org as well as the prestigious CJR.org (the Columbia Journalism Review) cites Meet The Press episodes that spotlight Russert's prejudiced tendencies. There you will find entire word for word read outs of statements made by both Bill and Hillary Clinton that were taken out of context to act as prompt aides for Russert's interviews. And why didn't anyone at least raise an eyebrow when right after the historic November 2006 midterm election upset, when the Dems won a major victory by gaining back control of congress for the first time in twelve years, when they took away six senate seats from Republican incumbents to win a one-seat majority in the upper house, and did not lose a single seat in either chamber, the first election in U.S. history in which any party kept all of its congressional seats, and Russert only invited three Republican players, Senator McCain being one of them, to appear on his show? What happened there? Did every Democrat up and leave the country for a big congratulate pep rally?

Still, apart from Russert's dubious journalistic intentions, it's curious as to why his colleagues were so unfathomably shocked at their captain's sudden passing, when they themselves run reports every other day on what to do to prevent heart attacks. They were all well aware that the man they adored and loved had an enlarged heart, yet stood by and apparently did nothing while he continued to eat enough of the wrong foods to gain an enormous amount of weight in recent years. Russert was a grown man and a highly intelligent one. He must have known he was committing suicide. Where is the surprise in his collapse? It was only a matter of time. Heart disease is a killer.

NBC's Andrea Mitchell repeated ad nauseum this weekend how much her beloved colleague and mentor loved his country. If he loved this country more than he loved his food - maybe he would still be here and the Bush-Cheney team would not.

Arrogance Has No Color

Our country's legal obligation to dip into a political gene pool every four years and take a leap of faith on a new candidate is similar in a lot of ways to serial marriages. Every once in awhile the odds have to favor you’ll catch a good one.

Unfortunately for us though that was not the case eight years ago when we undeniably scraped the bottom of the pool, and four years after that when we discovered our fishing rods splintered and broken, we seemingly threw up our hands and settled for the same dead fish.

One primary reason for why we had a back to back disastrous fishing season was too many people thought that the sneer on George Bush’s lips was nothing more than a facial tick. Eight years later those same people finally came to realize that what they thought was a facial aberration, was a sneer alright.

How long will it take the country this time to realize that Obama’s overconfident gait and habit of avoiding a person's eyes when they lean in close to shake his hand, are overt body cues that send out signals of a condescending attitude? How long will it take for the public to catch up this time?

How long will it take for this country to collectively raise up their blood stained consciousness and demand to see substance rather than the rhetoric stamped on the back of Obama’s quest for ‘change’. Who in the press corp is even willing to stand up and question what’s behind the anemic filler of a campaign motto called ‘change?’ Certainly not our so called ‘free press.’ They are so enamored, so embarrassingly captivated by the ability of Obama's campaign strategists to slay the evil ambitious Hillary Clinton dragon, that a so called liberal journalist by the name of Tim Russet, along with the most staunch Republican pundits over at Fox News are joyfully awaiting the preordained anointment of the coming Messiah.

When John Edwards last year, while busily campaigning to make his bid for the presidency kept reporters waiting on the tarmac to get a supposedly, grossly expensive hair cut, he was criticized and lectured so bad the next day in the press, you would have thought he had committed the worst atrocity in the world. Yet last Friday, after an event ended in Northern Virginia Obama literally ditched the press people who had been waiting patiently for him to board, in order to secretly meet with his arch nemesis, Hillary Clinton. The following day the same press people, although visibly angry and feeling very betrayed, hardly made a squeak.

Wouldn't it be enormously refreshing after being stripped of our press credentials by eight years of elitist arrogance, if by some miracle the currency of all this ‘change’ could propel our terrified and muffled reporters to finally muster up their courage and find their backbone so as to get back to doing the job they get paid for, (Woodward & Bernstein ring a bell anyone?) then maybe we could be journalistically informed as to exactly who Barack Obama is, and why he clearly wants to be our next president so dam bad!

Any individual running for elected office has to own one outsized ego and one all-weather proof suit of very thick skin. If they don't, they could never survive in this fishbowl arena. But individuals who wish to run this country by and large often get to extend their prowess beyond just that meager aspiration - they can play pretend skipper for the whole planet if they so desire. Hence we’re talking not just enlarged ego, but full blown, out of proportion self-importance superiority. Just think about your own boss and then times that by one hundred million.

If ‘change’ is all that’s required to fix the ills of this war torn country than we should elect Obama on the basis of his skin color alone, since his presence in the White House as president will ultimately provide the American populace at least, if not the entire human race, with one of the most palpable dramatic 'changes' ever. Why the town I grew up in only broke its tacit color barrier in the last decade! Gosh gee willikers Aunt May, looks like these here times, they really are a-changing.

But I digress from the main point, which is, by merely casting a vote in the upcoming presidential election I’ve helped to trigger the effect of a ‘change.’ Never mind that Bush’s turn up at bat is almost officially over which loosely translated means we have no choice but to bring in a new governing team which by definition alone, signifies ‘change.’

Issues aren’t always as black and white as they look. Of course this country needs a histrionic change. No one with a pulse would argue against that. But quite frankly Senator Obama, the question that you so eloquently have yet to answer, the chief issue that you have yet to comprehensively address, even though you've now given hundreds and hundreds of speeches is, apart from changing the skin color of an American president, what are you specifically purposing to do to make the change you so fervently promise, a 'change' for the better.