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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Just a word in praise of coots — maybe this apologia from an ex-hippie (well, I exaggerate just a tad) is not what I should be addressing in writing to you, but I just can’t help it. I used to be alert, quick, affable, witty, charming, sufficiently sophisticated and all the other things that made for great cocktail party presence and banter.
Alas, I have become an old coot. I now sit in the corner and scowl at the new crop of alert, quick, affable, witty, charming and sufficiently sophisticated people flowing around the room. And guess what -- I’m happy! No more forced smiles, forced laughter, forced agreement or forced anything. I can relax at last, burp and fart when I please, and if anyone intrudes into my blessed solitude, I can tell them where to go if I feel like it.
Heck. It’s sort of like being president—not a presidential candidate, mind you (they are still trying to be alert, quick, affable, witty, charming and sufficiently sophisticated people), but the real thing. So be kind to John McCain and Hillary (yes, I know you didn’t mention her, but deep down, I suspect she’s a real coot, too). By the way, I’m going to form a new social/lobbying group to promote the coot agenda -- it’ll be called “Curmudgeons Are Us.” Want to join?
Richard F. Gorman, III
Richmond, VA
Thank you for your delightful letter! I plead guilty to calling McCain "a weird old coot" and will think twice before doing it again. Coots, by the way, are slow, duck-like birds whose somewhat addled manner became identified with eccentric old men. Women are never called coots. Yet another barrier for us to break?
What is all this mourning over Tim Russert about? He may have been a regular guy -- I don't know and I really don't care. But he was not a journalist in any true sense of that word. His biases and predilections were transparent, and he clearly played favorites and a kind of in-Washington softball that made "Meet the Press" more like an advertorial when it should have been more prosecutorial, as in that old definition of a journalist as someone who comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.Just hoping you might address the mythomanic reaction to his sudden passing.
Harry Pearson
I was certainly shocked when I heard the radio bulletin about Russert's death as I was driving home from campus. After his high visibility during the Democratic primary, it was a stunning example of the ancient motif of the ever-turning wheel of fortune. "Count no man happy until he is dead," characters are always intoning in Greek tragedy. So much fame and acclaim, and Russert's story was over in an instant. As a member of his baby-boom generation, I processed his sudden passing with a shiver. Who will be next?
However, within 24 hours of saccharine media saturation about Russert's death, I couldn't take another second of it and refused to listen to or read one more word about him. I ignored the funeral and the weepy talking heads and the reverential anointing of his son. Good lord, with a war going on and hundreds of thousands killed or injured in major natural disasters around the world that week, the Russert orgy was an appalling exercise in solipsism by the media elite. That our two presidential candidates felt compelled to attend the funeral and to accept fulsome family directives about sitting together was an embarrassment -- an advertisement to the world of how the American major media arrogantly think of themselves as another branch of government.
And all that blather about Russert's "legacy" -- an inside-the-Beltway mirage that's already evaporated. Russert couldn't hold a candle to Walter Cronkite, who was an authentically national figure in ways that Russert could never dream of approaching. Most people in this country -- especially those who attend church on Sunday morning -- didn't know or care who Russert was. I myself, despite my interest in politics, virtually never watched his show. I found him smug, manipulative and uncomfortably repressed, and I disliked his "gotcha" brand of inquisition.
By all accounts, Russert was a warmly supportive colleague, laudably even to the rare conservatives in Northeastern newsrooms. But as for the painstaking preparation for which he was touted, he had the resources of a large network staff to help with that. We have a far superior and fairer interviewer right here in Philadelphia: Marty Moss-Coane, whose rigorous daily prep for her superb "Radio Times" show at WHYY (an NPR affiliate) boggles the mind. Russert's tenacity in questioning some (but not all) guests stood out because of the general servility of the American media to people in power (as in the long run-up to the Iraq invasion). But Russert wasn't that remarkable by British standards -- where incisive, well-informed reporters on TV and off pursue lofty members of government with breathtaking ferocity.
