CSotD: Mediacracy
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This is like being stuck at the airport.
Not like being stuck in an elevator. We've got access to bathrooms.
That makes a big difference, but we're still not going anywhere for awhile. And I'd rather sit here than have Capt. Obama feel pressured to take off into a blizzard so I could be part of a plane wreck.
I remember being stuck in the Syracuse airport during a storm, and this guy screaming at one of the ticket agents, who tried to reason with him by pointing out that it wasn't just his flight that wasn't taking off. None of the flights were taking off.
"What about the mail?" he shouted. "They're getting the mail out. If they can take off, why can't we?"
And she told him the mail was flown on commercial flights and wasn't going anywhere either, but he was beyond reasoning.
So here we are, and there's a lot of screaming but much of it makes no sense and none of it makes any difference.
To hell with that, then. Let's talk about chicks.
In Piranha Club, Bud Grace recalls his (doppleganger's) roots and reminds me of the summer of 1970, when I was crashing in a very free-form house in Boulder that was just across the street from the TKE house.
And how the poor TKEs used to stand in front of their building, pretending to play basketball but mostly looking over at our house and wondering where they went wrong.
Boy, did they pick the wrong time to be frat boys. I read somewhere that George W. Bush resented having hit college just at the time when preppy frat boys were off the menu. I don't know if that's true, or how significant it is, but I would point out that raccoon coats and pennants were well out of fashion before Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement shifted the social focus.
And that, even at the height of the 23 Skidoo era, you will notice in this Official Frat Boy Training Film that the guy who was actually, really, truly getting the ladies was not one of the clowns wearing a dorky hat.
This topic also puts me in mind of my 10th college reunion, at which a couple of my friends reported that a topic of conversation at the Monogram Club dinner where they had gotten together with their fellow athletes was that they had somehow managed to pick the only time in history when being a Notre Dame football player pretty much got you bupkis.
I didn't tell him that, despite what may have seemed apparent looking at the guitar-slingers sitting in the grass surrounded by women, we had all of us, jocks and freaks alike, picked the wrong time in history to be at a Catholic school. Especially one that wasn't co-ed.
(Note that, in this picture, we are surrounded by one woman. This would not, trust me, have changed a whole lot if the two of us here who did sling guitars had been slinging them at the moment.)
Worse than that is that, despite the poor clueless TKEs standing on their front lawn with their tongues hanging out, even freeform, anything-goes Boulder couldn't quite live up to the media hype.
We did what we could, but TIME and Newsweek had set the bar impossibly high.
Still, we were confident that the whole world was watching because there we were on TV and in the news magazines, and there were the TKEs looking at us and then every Sunday we'd have Mom and Dad and the kids driving by in the car with Dad's tongue out the open window scraping along on the pavement like Vanessa Redgrave's scarf.
Think I can't drag this back to health care and the government shut down?
I think our own self-congratulatory sense of dominance — which was driven by the media and accepted by the frat boys and jocks — is being repeated today by the Tea Party faithful.
We dominated the media, sure. But we were only a faction within a fragment of society as a whole.
And, while we were getting a lot of attention in the news, on TV, in movies (Yeah, you wish, you pathetic old Hollywood geezers), we weren't scoring as often as outsiders thought we were.
And yet, for the moment, we were the Big Thing.
For a few years afterwards, it was apparent that, if everyone who claimed to have been at Woodstock had actually been there, the Eastern Seaboard would have tilted up and slid into the ocean from the weight of the crowd.
Then the national mood shifted and suddenly it turned out we had all been supporting our troops in Vietnam the whole time, including not a small number of us who were heroes there.
Thus history adjusts to the popular mood.
Which means that, while at the moment we have this idea that a major portion of Americans want to get rid of Obamacare and cut all spending on social programs, if you ask us years from now, we'll deny we even know what you're talking about.
I mean, look at the evidence: If you think Americans don't support the Affordable Care Act, try to sign up.
I rest my case.
And then there's this:
While Congress was going through its last minute futile gyrations, Jen Sorensen was picking up her 2013 Robert F. Kennedy prize for editorial cartooning, which was based in large part on her blockbuster health-care cartoon, which I covered back here.
Brilliant frontline reporting. Jen's one of the cartoonists I have to consciously hold back from featuring here all the time.
But just to show there's no hard feelings:
Today's Moment of Zen goes out to Bud Grace, all his brothers, and to the CU chapter of TKE:
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