Having the right words for the occasion
I feel kind of bad for that first-day news anchor in North Dakota whose on-air debut last week went viral after he dropped a pair of expletives as the first two words out of his mouth. For one thing, it’s hard not to detect a little bit of condescension being directed towards under-populated North Dakota. Just look at those rubes and their low-production value news set.But couldn't we just quickly fast-forward to the point in this country at which swearing on television no longer causes people to become overwrought? Those grizzled veterans of journalism at the New York Post committed a much worse offense in the same week when they labeled two very innocent-- and brown-skinned-- men as terrorists on the cover of their shithole daily. Nobody got fired over that one.
The words this junior anchor uttered are considered unforgivably offensive, yet the next day, every newspaper and television station in the country has a link to the uncensored video clip on their website. Wouldn’t it have been a thoroughly charming reaction by the guy's bosses to have simply chuckled it off and hit the restart button? Nobody was impressed with their mechanical decisiveness in canning him.
That being said, television news personalities, national and local, are, as an aggregate, gutless corporate sellouts that don’t deserve our sympathy.
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Maybe it was the FBI interrogation itself (in 2011) that radicalized Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
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Kurt Vonnegut Letters is a bang-up collection of the author's lifelong correspondence edited by his friend Dan Wakefield. Vonnegut is the Mark Twain of the first post-Twain century. There are letters to family, friends, colleagues, publishers, admirers, critics, and even a woman who led a fight to ban and then burn one of his books in North Dakota. (Jesus, some things never change in North Dakota.)
Here's a favorite letter of mine from the hardcover, addressed to the head of the state library in Indiana...
February 10, 1983, New York City
Dear Mr. (Charles Ray) Ewick,
I am in receipt of a letter from your research librarian Linda Walton, which tells me that your institution is no longer able to buy books. She asks that I give the State of Indiana a copy of my latest novel, Deadeye Dick. I have complied with this request.
Since books are to libraries what asphalt is to highway departments, I assume that Indiana is also asking donations from suppliers of asphalt for her roads. Or has it been decided that asphalt is worth the money, and that books are not?
It may be that whoever told Linda Walton to write that letter supposed that I myself get all the books I want for free. I in fact must pay for them what bookstores pay. So what I have sent you represents an actual outlay of about $7.00, plus postage and the price of a bookbag, plus a fair amount of my time, which may indeed be worthless. Let us forget the time. Are all of Indiana's suppliers of goods making equivalent sacrifices? Or are they to be more respected than I am for the way they make their livings? Are they more manly, more practical, less decorative?
If you have a cost accountant, he can easily prove to you that Ms. Walton's letter to me cost far more than one copy of Deadeye Dick. If you reply to this letter, and you discuss its contents with others on State time, the cost to the taxpayers will soon exceed the retail price of my collected works bound in the finest leather.
Yours truly,
Kurt Vonnegut
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Quote of the day: Kurt Vonnegut, to his friend Robert Maslansky, also in 1983, "There is no chance that I could ever respond warmly to upper class sensibilities, no matter how brilliantly expressed. This is politics. Example: T.S. Eliot. Fuck him. Everybody knows he's from St. Louis-- everybody but him."
posted by CM @ 7:09 PM
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