Brian Williams on the Culture of the First Person

Brian Williams, NBC News anchor, was on Letterman's Late Show last night. They talked about a lot of things, principally the question of whether Letterman or his chief rival, Jay Leno, has more gravitas. That took a while, and it was quite funny; Letterman does a good Leno impression, and Williams has a decidedly non-newsy wit about him. But my fondness for David Letterman is not why I'm posting this.

News anchors are regularly asked--even expected--to decipher the zeitgeist, to assign a diagnosis to the current state of the culture. Their job is essentially to narrate the times we live in, and that requires a pressing problem. For Williams last night, that pressing problem is narcissism on a grand scale.

[I] still come back to this that says you're the star. It's about you. Listen to the commercials on all those channels and the message is all in the first person in ways we never ever used or would dream of in the time of say Mad Men, for a modern television reference. So I think it's that.

Admittedly, news anchors are notoriously nostalgic for more noble eras. The times they narrate are held up against older, seemingly better eras and found wanting. For Williams's predecessor, Tom Brokaw, that better era was during World War II, and he spoke in glowing terms to whoever would listen about "the Greatest Generation" who fought that war and recovered that economy. For Williams, it appears that era is the Camelot Age, when Kennedy was president and advertisers smoked and drank in their office. (They don't do that anymore, right?)

Of course, no era is without flaw, and usually, in the light of history, those flaws are pretty obvious. The Greatest Generation locked Japanese Americans (and others of Asian heritage) in internment camps; the Kennedy years were marked with racial violence. And those are just off the top of my head. No disrespect to either gilded age, but they both have their share of tarnish to contend with.

Nevertheless, the narcissism epidemic facing the current culture is well documented, far beyond my own Deliver Us from Me-Ville. I'm not sure it's the bogeyman Williams makes it out to be, but Me-Ville has a strong gravitational pull, one that in and of ourselves we don't have the strength to surmount. Fortunately, we're not left to languish in our self-absorption. In Christ God enters the culture of the first person and draws people to himself. Maybe Brian Williams and the rest of us, the next time we're tempted to look back, should spend a little more time looking up.

Uber-pious, I know. But I couldn't resist.

Why I Like David Letterman, and Why Sarah Palin Fans Should Take a Chill Pill

I don't think underage sex jokes are funny. I think they're sad. There, I said it. Having said it, I will now move on to say why I am a fan of David Letterman, whose inadvertent underage sex joke last week wasn't terribly funny and made a lot of people mad.

And so, here now are the top three reasons I'm a fan of David Letterman:

3. He's a great broadcaster. Better across the board than Jay Leno, more at ease than Conan O'Brien, more consistently conscious of his place in broadcasting history and his role in the cultural conversation than just about everyone in talk and variety, Letterman brings the funny consistently in fresh, original ways--even when he's repeating jokes over the course of days and even weeks. Late Show staffers put their energy in creating funny bits and crafting pranks; for every elaborate set manufactured on the Tonight Show during the Leno era there were two blue-collar Late Show staffers smoking together. I've argued here before that the rise of Barack Obama has a lot to do with not the politics of David Letterman but his ability to get the whole country to laugh at the same thing. It's worth noting that Conan O'Brien, among countless other broadcasters, has acknowledged a debt to Letterman's craftsmanship.

2. He's an underdog. It's significantly harder to line up guests with massive star power when you're based in New York rather than L.A. Musicians and actors head west to build their brand; they head east to hone their craft--or to visit Letterman. He stays in New York because he thinks it's "the greatest city in the world," and he does his own thing consistently, without regard to the pressure of competition from the more strategically situated Tonight Show. He even makes jokes about it from time to time, which takes moxie, and I respect moxie.

1. He's a Midwesterner in the big city. You can take the boy out of Indiana, but as Letterman has shown consistently, you can't take the Indiana out of the boy. His interview style, his sardonic commentary on current events, his interactions with his mom, his no-nonsense interviews on serious matters--even his ability to make a fully developed, serious statement about a joke gone wrong or an attack on his city without letting that comment hijack the humor of the show, or vice versa--I think reflect Letterman's upbringing in the Midwest, which is a helpful corrective to the snobbery of both coasts and the wide-eyed assimilation of other Midwesterners who've made it big. Beyond his own show, the sit-coms and dramedies he's produced over time reflect well the sensibilities he was nurtured in back home in flyover country.

So I'm a fan of David Letterman, and I remain so despite a joke that some say went beyond the pale. I'd like to suggest that people who think so give the matter some further thought.

1. It was an A-Rod joke. The joke that's raised the hackles of so many is a classic type for Letterman, which begins with a focus on one newsworthy item (in this case Palin's visit to New York) but ends with an abrupt, surprising focus on another (here, Alex Rodriguez's notorious promiscuity). Really, try the joke without A-Rod in it and it doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

2. The outrage didn't match the joke. Letterman makes jokes about A-Rod's sex life all the time, and likewise celebrity mashup humor (where two unrelated stars are absurdly brought together) is also a hallmark. People concerned for the hypersexualizing of contemporary culture or for the privacy of public figures have ammunition lobbed at them every night by Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Craig Ferguson, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher and, weeknights this fall at 10pm Eastern, Jay Leno. Analyzing the phenomenon that followed this ill-conceived joke on the Late Show quickly reveals it to be not actual concern for women's rights but a contrivance: conservatives grabbing the spotlight from the liberal majority and flexing their cultural muscles. I don't begrudge public figures their efforts to stay in the public eye, but I will--in true Midwestern style--call them out when they're manufacturing offense and manipulating public outrage. There are far more urgent and upsetting things for people to be outraged by. Besides, it was a joke, for Pete's sake.

The whole scandal is probably over by now; Governor Palin has accepted Letterman's apology, deftly turning her comments from the joke to a jingoistic salute to the U.S. military. Maybe she took lessons from the Late Show in crafting that little switcheroo. As for me and my house? As long as I hold the remote, Letterman will be on my TV.

I’m the Governor! I’m Important, Yo!

Pardon my long post, but I'm feeling a bit heady. Illinois is a heady place these days, after all: the Bears may make the playoffs, the junior U.S. senator is about to become president, and the governor is about to be impeached and imprisoned. The 2016 Olympics are a possibility here that is strengthened by our favorite son ascending to the presidency but weakened by our chief executive allegedly conducting a political crime spree.

I’m fascinated by the governor’s story. He’s been in view here far longer than President-Elect Obama, to be honest, and his own presidential aspirations have never been far below the surface. Senator John McCain, the “maverick” reformer cum failed presidential candidate, told David Letterman that Governor Blagojevich once told him that he considered himself a reformer like McCain, thanking him for being a political role model. McCain and Letterman shared a laugh over those comments, absurd as they sound alongside transcripts of foul-mouthed shakedowns from the governor’s office.

The conversation about Governor Blagojevich has shifted, at least temporarily, to the question of his mental health. People think he must have been crazy to conduct so brazen a campaign as the one to sell a senate seat and force the firing of critical journalists. The mental health community, however, is stopping short of calling the governor psychotic; instead, they’re calling him a narcissist.

Dr. Daniela Schreirer is a forensic psychologist at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology and she does not see any sign of mental illness in the public Blagojevich, but believes he does have sociopathic traits.
"We're just talking about traits. We're not talking about full-blown diagnosis. But certainly, there's the same sense of entitlement, the same sense of thinking I am superior. I can do whatever I want. I am not going to be caught," Schreirer said.

Blagojevich was, at one time, a rising star. He achieved office initially by being charming and self-deprecating; an advertising campaign consisted of everyday Illinoisans struggling to pronounce his last name but admiring his qualifications and energy. He eventually became a U.S. Representative and made a name for himself by helping to negotiate the release of three American soldiers, who were being detained in Yugoslavia under dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

Three years later he was running for governor, but the presidency was on his mind. In an ad that cemented his reputation in my mind as a twerp, he had grade-school students quiz him about American presidents: “Sixteenth president?” “Abraham Lincoln! . . .” Ostensibly about his commitment to education, the ad told me that he viewed the governorship as a stepping stone to his true destiny as president of the United States. And yet he spoke clearly, candidly and winsomely with interviewers, among other things stating with enthusiasm that he and his family “love Jesus.” This at the time was one of the most plainspoken, unambiguous comments on personal faith I'd heard from a candidate who wasn't in the pocket of the religious right. So while I didn’t vote for him (remember, I thought he was a twerp), I had hopes that his tenure as governor would be marked by policies that reflected his love for Jesus—just and compassionate programs, ethical policies and practices.

Blagojevich became governor in what might be considered the easiest campaign ever: the current Republican governor, George Ryan, was on notice that he’d be facing trial after his term ended, and the Republican candidate to replace him shared the same last name: Jim Ryan, no relation. For the second time in his career, Blagojevich’s last name carried him into office. Four years later the Illinois Republican party still couldn’t get its act together; State Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka was the only Republican holding statewide office, and when she ran against the governor on the argument that he had failed both to manage the state’s economy and to fight corruption, one video of her dancing with former Governor Ryan put an end to her chances to unseat Blagojevich. He made Elvis jokes about being “All Shook Up” over his victory and settled into his second term.

The governor’s second term has been characterized mainly by gridlock. It seems that he’s systematically alienated everyone in state government, such that the legislature and the Chicago Transit Authority, among other institutions, faced near-implosion while he sat in the bleachers enjoying hockey games. Some tried to call a constitutional convention for the express purpose of making it legal to recall his position; others spoke explicitly and frequently about his grandstanding and bullheadedness.

Barack Obama, it’s presumed, frustrated Blagojevich’s career plans by taking the national spotlight in 2004's Democratic National Convention and launching an ultimately successful presidential campaign in 2007. This was to be Blagojevich’s year, if you believe the scuttlebutt, but public and peer opinion had turned against him, so that by election day 2008 he had, among his liabilities, a federal investigation into his office and a devastatingly negative reputation among his constituents, and as almost his only asset, a recently vacated senate seat.

I feel bad for Rod Blagojevich. That’s a relatively new feeling for me; I’ve typically dismissed him as a mere worshiper of “the characteristically American bitch goddess of Success,” as Mark Stritcherz put it in America magazine. But Blagojevich is merely the most recent and most pronounced example of the pervasive streak of narcissism, with its attendant sense of entitlement and invulnerability, that runs through our culture and, I think, every human heart.

Blagojevich is, in that respect, this year’s Gary Hart, who dared reporters to follow him in their suspicions of his infidelity, and who resigned his own presidential campaign when they did exactly that and caught him in an affair. Blagojevich is this year’s Richard Nixon, who publicly told onlookers “I am not a crook” but who privately and obscenely violated the law on tape. He’s this year’s Ananias, who made a grand public gesture in donating his wealth to the early church but who was revealed to be just another poser with a wicked heart. He's this year’s Cain, who killed his brother and then stared down God with a brazen dismissal of the accusation: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” He's this year's me, and all the mes here in Me-Ville.

Stritcherz goes on to lament the Me-Ville we find ourselves in, a world effectively incapable of policing itself or aspiring to self-sacrifice toward the greater good, by describing the world we've fallen short of:

In a morally and spiritually robust society, institutions identify such characters as rascals and discipline them accordingly; they can separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were.

I paraphrase the apostle Paul: Who will rescue us from this city of death? Thanks be to God who, if we dare follow, will deliver us from Me-Ville, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen. Come Lord Jesus.

Stupid Political Analysis Tricks

I have a new working theory, which came to me in an epiphany while, as is usually the case, I was watching TV. Here goes:

Ahem.

Barack Obama's success is owed in part to David Letterman.

Letterman's regular pillorying of President Bush in the segment "Great Moments in Presidential Speeches" evoked in the American cultural memory a longing for a great orator, someone whose words could capture the significance of a moment, add meaning to it and rally people around a vision for the way forward. Phrases such as "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," even Reagan moments such as "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!" reminded us that great moments call for great presidential speeches, and that it's been at least twenty years (and I would argue that it's been at least forty years) since a president has provided that for us.

There have been important speeches, of course, from the aftermath of 9/11 to the concession of Al Gore in December 2000 to some of Bill Clinton's state of the union addresses. Some of those speeches have been pretty good even; I remember watching Chris Matthews, himself a former presidential speechwriter, fight back tears during the Gore concession speech. But the days of momentous American oration ended, so far as I'm concerned, in 1968 with the deaths of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, which incidentally was before I was born, and I'm no spring chicken. So for millions of us, great speeches have been effectively prehistoric.

Until now. Obama is talked about for a few key things: his ethnicity, his experience, his associations, his oration. Talk of his ethnicity is always equivocal; it shouldn't matter in America. Talk of his experience has been handily countered with talk of the need for change. Talk of his associations is tricky for any of Obama's critics, since they likely have more and less savory associations by virtue of being in the business longer. That leaves his speaking skills, which leaves everyone in awe. I think he leaves everyone in awe in part because he's so dang good at it, but in part because we've been reminded for eight years by David Letterman that once upon a time presidential speeches--really, speeches of any kind whatsoever--could be worth memorizing, studying, discussing, living into.

I'm sure that David Letterman will find ways to mock and tease an Obama presidency, but he will surely have to retire the segment "Great Moments in Presidential Speeches." It won't be funny anymore, it'll only be great.