Back on August 29th, Ben Stein appeared on "CBS Sunday Morning." Mr Stein has started appearing quite frequently lately, espousing his opinions of the American scene. This is fine with me. I'm all for free speech, whether I like what's being said or not. The problem with Mr Stein, however, is that he makes arguments which are simplistic, shallow, and fundamentally absurd. His monologues are floor shows of lazy thinking, and if there's one thing I hate, it's lazy thinking.
His topic on that day was his vacation getaway in Idaho. Pretty harmless stuff, you say? Not after he spins it into a lot of political buncombe. I sent the following as the text of an e-mail to "CBS Sunday Morning," but they have not, as yet, had the wisdom to either read the letter on the air or to give me a job like Ben's.
In his commentary this past Sunday, Ben Stein showed that it is possible to still look through rose colored glasses even if you have an asigmatism, cataracts, and night blindness. First, I was taken with his statement that this idyllic and rural vacation spot in Idaho (which, by the way, thanks to his big mouth, will soon sag under the collective weight of thousands of TV-watching idyll seekers) is the place that we are pledging allegiance to when we pledge allegiance to the flag. I hate to be the one to break it to him, but the flag that we pledge our allegiance to flies over cityscapes just as regally as it does over the countryside. When we make that pledge, we pledge ourselves not only to the vacationer, the farmer, and the rube, but also the city slicker, the office worker, and the guy who sells hot dogs on 49th Street. Even Democrats and other dissidents are included in this pledge.
The second part of his rural rhapsody that raised an interested eyebrow was his depiction of the place as an enclave of the 1950s, a Lost Valley in the midst of turn-of-the-century post-modernism and moral relativism. The place comes across as a summery sort of Currier and Ives print, or perhaps as a Norman Rockwell caricature of an episode of "Leave It to Beaver." All the Moms wander around their self-cleaning houses draped in pearls, while the Dads, who wear ties even while showering, cheerfully spend the day working at some unnamed job "down at the office." The well-scrubbed, semi-literate children never bother their cowlicks or freckles over anything as dirty as the world and never chirp a sound harsher than "gee whiz."
Alas, back in the actual, living 1950s, things were a bit more complex. The prospect of nuclear holocaust held the world hostage, people's lives were destroyed by McCarthyism and a paranoiac fear of Communism, and Jim Crow ruled all those Americans whose forebears had hailed from Africa rather than Newport. As I understand it, there was even murder and spousal abuse and alcoholism. They even had bad news!
Mr Stein needs to learn, as do many of his friends and cohorts who are cavorting around Madison Square Garden this week, that the citizens of rural America are no more profoundly American than is the person who prefers to roam the wide open concrete, and that the 1950s were not an idyll, but merely another stretch of history that existed in space and time. And if he won't believe me, he should try reading Allen Ginsburg.
9 comments:
Robert,
Thanks for the prints, they go with the shower curtain nicely. And yes, probably too many of my fictional characters talk like this. The dopes.
And idyll hands are the devil's workshop.
It took me almost three hours to think up that wheeze.
As a matter of fact, I do remember "The Devil's Workshop." It was on right after a show starring a Mr Reegin called, "The Multinational Giveaway." I also remember "This Old Bunker," which, if I'm not mistaken, was a spinoff of "That Darn Kaiser," which in itself was a spinoff of "Here Comes Mr Bismarck." Do you remember the songs? "I'll See You in Stalingrad," "Doin' the Beerhall Putsch," and "I've Found a New Use for the Goosestep." Those were the days! Of course, people in those days were quite the idyllists, to the point where they devised their own idyllology, one which thrives in tight hearts and minds to this very day.
Yes, Robert, I know the song collection of which you speak. My favorites are "Stormtroopers in the Sky," "The Last Time I Invaded Paris," and "I'll Be Seeing You in Buzz Bomb Launching Time." I think my real favorite was the theme to the movie of the same name, "The Triumph of the Will." With its melody, so reminiscent of "The Shadow of Your Smile," I softly croon its lyrics: "The Triumph of the Will/Is on the loose/You see it in/The Austrian Anschluss." How can one forget the days when the trains ran on time?
I've been thinking about "The Devil's Workshop," and seem to recall that it's creators were also influenced by an old-time kiddies show, "Internment with Uncle Joe Stalin." I don't know if you remember this show or not, but it was something like "Captain Kangaroo" only Mr Moose was in a gulag and Bunny Rabbit was assinated in Mexico. O! to be back in that simpler time!
On rereading my previous post, I accidentally left an "ass" out of "assassinated." I think it was Archduke Ferdinand.
Yes, Uncle Joe had a witty way with a firing squad. I'm amazed that the Russian Bear was allowed on an American show like "Das Kapitan." But then, in those days, Commies were everywhere, even in the woodpile. Just by the way, I had always thought that Mr Greengenes had been exiled to Sakhalin Island. Thanks for the correction.
Wow, man, the '60s. Like I remember the '60s, man. Fight the power! Property's a crime! Don't bogart that joint, man! Those were my student days, man! And, man, there were like protests, man! Berkeley and San Francisco State. Remember those, man? Yeah, I saw those on TV, man, given the Huntly and Brinkley treatment or maybe it was Kronkheit, man. Yeah, man, I couldn't go, man. Sister Mary Frank wouldn't let us, man. What a drag. But we were for peace and we'd kill you if you weren't. Wow. Groovy. Peace. Yeah. It was like, yeah, wow. You know? It was like an elephant in a parade, you know, man? Wow. No, I'm cool. I'm cool. Yeah. (Pause.) What were we talkin' about?
You've brought up a number of topics which are of interest to me. So many, in fact that I decided to make my response into today's blog entry. See what you started?
Mention of The New Math always makes me think of Tom Lehrer's song of the same name. It includes this lovely lyric:
And you know why four plus minus one
Plus ten is fourteen minus one?
'Cause addition is commutative! Right!
I think I can say without fear of contradiction that Professor Lehrer has provided us with the best math song ever.
Post a Comment