Tube roses & thorns III

The death of perky

We're still months from the dawn of the Couric Era of the CBS Evening News, but the Tiffany Network isn't wasting any time telling its viewers that a new day is at hand, and not. And who better to reassure the American public than the crusty, folksy, avuncular, plain-spoken anchor they've come to know and love -- Bob Schieffer?

For about a week now, CBS has been using Schieffer to prime the pump with promos heralding the big change. They're largely meant to dispel the idea that everything recognizable about the CBS Evening News will morph in September, when Couric takes over, permanently, the big chair vacated by Dan Rather in March 2005.

For one thing, Schieffer announces that when Couric comes aboard, he'll be going back to his old perch in Foggy Bottom as Washington correspondent, a post he occupied for years. Score one for continuity.

And then there's the image of the new Katie, something that's a telling visual epitaph for her "perky" persona. As Schieffer extols the virtues of "my friend Katie Couric," a short video clip comes up showing Couric, hair properly done, wearing a navy blue suit and a simple strand of pearls (Mikimoto, no doubt), an ensemble meant to convey the gravitas of her new position. Safe to say, folks, we've seen the last of perky Katie in a SpongeBob costume.

Whither Woodruff?

At least CBS has a succession plan in place, along with NBC, whose "Nightly News With Brian Williams" has been percolating nicely for more than eighteen months. ABC, however, has seen its plans for news anchor succession go up in clouds of smoke, one of those clouds from an IED in Iraq.

This all started on Jan. 29, when newly-crowned ABC news co-anchor Bob Woodruff and a colleague were wounded -- Woodruff seriously -- in an explosion near Taji, Iraq, about 12 miles north of Baghdad. Even while Woodruff recovered, there were new reports of infighting at ABC -- and new revelations that threw an already-chaotic process into further disarray.

Elizabeth Vargas, named with Woodruff as a co-anchor late last year, announced her intention to go on maternity leave, a disclosure that caught ABC brass by surprise.

The crazy to-and-fro finally resolved itself when Vargas resigned from ABC on May 23, citing her need to focus on the family she already had and the addition she was expecting. On May 29 ABC named Charles Gibson -- longtime mainstay of "Good Morning America" and a periodic "World News Tonight" substitute anchor after Peter Jennings' death -- to be the new sole anchor of "World News Tonight." ABC had gone through no fewer than three network news anchors in less than eighteen months.

Besides that unusual but still unsettling burn rate, ABC is facing a real dilemma: Now that they've invested money, prestige and branding to announce the ascension of Charles Gibson to the big chair ... what's to be done with Bob Woodruff, when he's ready to go back to work?

Woodruff was gracious, to be sure. In a statement on ABC News' Web site, Woodruff said "Charlie Gibson is a mentor and a friend. I look forward to contributing to his broadcast as soon as I'm able."

ABC News president David Westin, in a statement on the Web site the same day, said "Charlie's taking over 'World News Tonight' will give Bob Woodruff the extended period that he needs to recover and return to the air for ABC News. All of us look forward to that day, but it will be on Bob's timetable, not ours."

But get real: Having effectively kicked Woodruff to the curb, what kind of role has ABC/will ABC carve out for the man who started the year as the heir apparent to Peter Jennings? Unless that blast in Iraq relieved Woodruff of every shred of his professional ego, it's hard to imagine him embracing a third- or fourth-fiddle role his promotion last December suggests he'd never had had to accept.

Now as before ... stay tuned.

Apocalypse Tuesday II

Besides generating the usual fears of the Triple Beast Number, this year's edition of June 6 also issued an omen of sorts for the GOP. The good folks at the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press are at it again, with what conservatives will no doubt reflexively call another downbeat liberal poll.

But there's a difference with this latest sampling of the American mood. With a bigger polling population, Pew's new report comes much closer to being a real sampling of that feeling about the Bush administration, a mood that is souring among the most loyal conservatives, a bloc of voters whose ribs are made of something less durable than rock these days.

"As public approval of George W. Bush languishes at all-time low levels, supporters of the president are increasingly hard to find," says the Pew report, written by Courtney Kennedy and Michael Dimock. "In the months following his re-election, roughly half of the country rated Bush's job performance favorably. Today only a third of Americans do so, while more than half (56%) disapprove of his performance."

It gets worse among the presumably faithful, Pew reports. "While the decline in support transcends ideological and demographic lines, the drop among one group – moderate Republicans – has been especially steep. Among all Republicans, Bush's job approval rating has dropped 20 percentage points since December 2004 (from 89% to 69%). This erosion of support has been most severe among Republicans describing themselves as moderate or liberal ... "

If you can imagine, it gets even worse than that. The Soccer Mom Contingent, that bloc of voters whose solidity in the GOP corner last election was considered a bellwether for the future of national politics, is also vacating the premises:

"Within the Republican Party, moderate women stand out for their lack of support for the president. Through most of Bush's presidency he has been evaluated similarly by men and women within the GOP, but this latest survey shows signs of a potential gender gap."

If a high tide lifts all boats, a hurricane wipes 'em all out, and that's what's happening to the Bush administration among voters who are and aren't Republicans. Across the board, GOP supporters including white evangelical Protestants, senior citizens, Catholics and high-income earners are down on the president and his policies. And his support among Latinos (no doubt already subject to erosion because of policies related to the immigration debate) and black voters (who weren't that solidly in his corner to start with, despite 2004's slight uptick) are all trending down.

Now, anything can happen by Election Day, and probably will. The stalwarts in the White House and the Republican party will retrench, lick their wounds and rally what's left of the troops to the cause. Loyal apparatchiks like Ed Rogers, identified on several talk shows as a Republican strategist. Ever the quote machine, Rogers (speaking in January about the fallout from another bad flood tide, the one on the Gulf Coast last year) has long condemned Beltway thinking as too reactive to the individual moment. Rogers raps old-line Foggy Bottom thought as "bad gets worse ... every mistake becomes a metaphor."

But the administration's current woes aren't a matter of bad getting worse. They're a matter of failing to forthrightly address what makes a situation bad in the first place, and correcting it -- a course of action the administration has been challenged with for some time.

Note to Ed Rogers: Some mistakes deserve to be metaphors. They perfectly explain the broader dimensions of a situation, a policy, an administration. They clearly point to the pattern behind a series of seemingly random behaviors. The White House's mistakes of late -- from the dismal official reaction to Hurricane Katrina to the deepening sectarian quagmire in Iraq -- can't be anything but a metaphor for an administration paying, at every turn, for its insistence on its own version of reality.

Apocalypse Tuesday?

If you haven't done it already, get your bets down now, by midnight, in fact, on the likelihood of the end of the world as we know it arriving tomorrow. Because this Tuesday, June 6, the 157th day of the year, the world celebrates that calendrical serendipity that comes along once every one hundred years:

Tuesday is June 6, 2006. In the modern shorthand, that's 6/6/06. You know 'em, you love 'em, those Rorschach numbers with evil attached -- or not, depending on your belief system and your fear of the unknown. You might wonder where this preoccupation came from. You can really blame the Bible for it -- in particular that old favorite, the Book of Revelation.

Specifically Revelation 13:18: “This calls for wisdom: let him who has understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number, its number is six hundred and sixty-six.”

For some it's not an occasion for fear. “Many people avoid the number; they’re afraid of it almost and there’s absolutely no reason to be afraid of it,” said the Rev. Felix Just, a professor of theology at the University of San Francisco. “It is not a prediction of future events. It is not supposed to be taken as a timetable for when the world is going to end,” Just told the Associated Press.

For others, of course, it's all about marketing. Consider some of the events set to happen tomorrow: A remake of the 70s horror classic "The Omen," starring Julia Stiles, Liev Schrieber and Pete Postlethwaite, opens across America, the object of an ad campaign that's been among us for weeks now ("Heed the Omen 6 + 6 + 6").

There's the release of the new "Left Behind" book by the Rev. Tim LaHaye, co-author of a wildly successful series of books with an apocalyptic theme. In case you don't come to the point on your own, LaHaye's "Left Behind" Web site promotes the new book, “The Rapture.” with a tag line he didn't need an ad agency to come up with: “06.06.06 Will You Be Ready?”

Rock and roll metallurgists Slayer are resurfacing with their new Unholy Alliance tour starting June 6. Deicide, a rock band out of Florida, releases a new album, "The Stench of Redemption," on June 6.

And lending weight to the idea that June 6 is indeed the devil's workshop, tomorrow conservative apologist, writer and right-wing attack mutt Ann Coulter releases "Godless," her new excoriation of what she calls "the church of liberalism," and justifies the presence of her vacuous grinning face on TV talk shows for another year or two.

Clearly, there are demons among us -- right along with fools, opportunists and movie publicists. Somewhere along the way of our being fascinated with 06/06/06, we overlooked another June 6, a date as rare as the one we dread/dream of tomorrow, a date that confirms the existence of angels.

The shorthand is 6/6/44, but it always sounds better when you say it all: June 6, 1944.

In a world without Web sites, metal bands, mushwit conservative mouthpieces and a lot less movie promotion than today, angels from many nations stormed a beach in a distant country and fought an army managed by devils, at horrific cost.

And we are now and forever the beneficiaries of that titanic struggle.

That's why we needn't fear the triple-six experience: Our world has already seen the manifestation of hell on earth. After D-Day, folks ... how bad can Ann Coulter possibly be?

Retiring the cowboy

Have you heard the latest news about the president? Did you watch him on Thursday night, and see his kinder, gentler side? At long last, is this compassionate conservatism? How can this be?

It seems the President of the United States, whose DNA is seemingly hard-wired for conversational swagger and braggadocio, apparently has a more circumspect dimension. It was briefly evident on Thursday when the president spoke at a joint news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The thrust of the joint appearance was to shore up public support for the war in Iraq and to explain once again the need for staying the course in the conflict, regardless of the cost to each nation's respective treasury and global standing.

In the rough-and-tumble of the obligatory Q & A with the Washington press, President Bush was asked, once again, if there were anything, any actions or statements, that he regretted in the way he helped the United States prosecute the Iraq war.

Regrets? He's had a few, and for the first time, in a burst of candor and self-assessment uncommon for the commander-in-chief, Bush laid them out in public.

Bush admitted that some of his more ineloquent phrases -- including the infamous "Bring 'em on," uttered in July 2003 were "kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal to people."

"I learned," said our newly-discovered empath-in-chief, "some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner, you know. 'Wanted, dead or alive,' that kind of talk. I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted."

Almost as soon as Bush had expressed his feelings -- the closest thing to a mea culpa for his trademark cowboy rhetoric we've heard from this president -- the bloggers and mandarins of talk radio weighed in. Some of the more strident conservative voices jumped into the debate with less than complimentary reaction.

"Sad day in Crawford, they're hanging their heads," said William Bennett, former education secretary, values czar and once-rabid gambling enthusiast. "One of the attractive things about the president is that he talks Texas," Bennett said to the New York Times' Elizabeth Bumiller. "But what broke my heart is when he said, 'I need to be more sophisticated.' What is this, Kerry talk? Is he going to use the word 'elan' the next time he speaks?"

Bennett told Bumiller that many of the listeners on his call-in radio show expressed a similar distaste for "what they considered the president's groveling."

The reactions of at least some conservatives begs the question of why, apparently, circumspection and consideration for others aren't thought of as worthwhile values. Why, when the president admits his own human frailty, is it seen as weakness rather than strength? Aren't reflection and honesty with oneself to be found in your Book of Virtues, Mr. Bennett?

The dissatisfaction that conservatives have lately developed for President Bush may be a hopeful sign for the rest of a presidency lagging badly in the opinion polls. It's unlikely in the extreme that George Bush will morph into a liberal any time between now and 2009, when his gig is over.

But Bush's comments on Thursday suggest at least a willingness to retire some of the language powering the cowboy aspect of America's foreign policy. The fact that his shrinking base finds conciliatory language to be a problem may be a hopeful sign for the rest of the country, a country hungry for both a leader, and a foreign policy, they can again be proud of.
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Image credit: Shawn Clark, Lazyeights Photography, (permission to use granted under GNU Free Documentation License, v1.2)

#715

Barry Bonds hit a line-drive home run off Oakland Athletics pitcher Brad Halsey on May 20 to reach 714 home runs in his career, after a long dry spell finally tying the career home-run record of one George Herman Ruth.

Whenever Bonds digs in and blasts career home run No. 715 into the bleachers of some stadium sometime this year, and bet the mortgage that he will, no one from the stands will be on the field to run the bases with Bonds, as some exuberant souls did on April 8, 1974, when Hank Aaron banged out One Past Ruth. Security will see to that.

And after it happens, you can be just as sure that baseball's numerical hierophants will warm up the asterisk-printing machine, placing what some have called the most significant typographical symbol in baseball right next to Barry Bonds' name.

The reason, of course, will be Bonds' alleged use of steroids in recent seasons, in defiance of federal laws and the hallowed traditions of baseball. But even as the Bonds drama heads toward its conclusion, it's high time to step back from the media and the public’s relentless focus on Barry Bonds to take a more comprehensive view of cheating, even a broader sense of how "cheating" itself is defined for a game whose past is as much one that is checkered as it is one to be cherished.

Dictionary definitions aside, in the context of baseball, it's fair to say that to cheat is to compromise the values of the game. By that perfectly reasonable yardstick, you can make the case that Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the monstrously intransigent commissioner of baseball, stained the game in his fashion, by continually barring black players from participating in the National Pastime for the 24 years of his stewardship, with at least some acquiescence of the team owners. Landis’ action for none other than purely racial reasons blocked such great players as Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Buck O'Neill and others from playing in the major leagues.

Had players like Gibson and others been allowed to play in the majors, had their statistics been weaved into the folklore and nomenclature of the game, we would no doubt have seen a completely different statistical baseline for setting records. The single-season records for Babe Ruth and Roger Maris, for example, might very well never have been the sequoias of achievement they became. Don Larsen’s El Perfecto might have taken a back seat to one thrown by Satchel Paige.


That’s not to excuse what substance or substances (erythropoietin? human chorionic gonadotropin?) Barry Bonds may have taken to give himself an illegal edge; that’s not to say that what Bonds may or may not have done wasn’t cheating. It is to say that cheating in baseball needs to be put in a broader historical context than just Barry Bonds 2006. In a game whose history is rife with embroideries of the truth of inches the game lives and dies by, it won’t do to pillory Barry Bonds forever.

From the 1919 Black Sox scandal to Mark McGwire’s pumped-up single-season record to past (and present?) literal tweaks of the surface of the baseball itself, the game has seen more than its share of cheating. Barry Bonds’ tainted achievement, when it comes, will join a pantheon of prevarication that’s hand in fielder’s glove part of the same game as that which we more loudly celebrate -- at Cooperstown.
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Image credits: Top: Sports Illustrated magazine. © 2006 Time Inc. Bottom: Onetwo1 (public domain), through Wikipedia

Seniors of sound

What is it about the sixties that's so freakin' cool? Some recent birthdays or record releases by sexagenarians bear witness to the idea that we get better with age (well, some of us, anyway).

Tomorrow -- in a world at war, a place consumed with strife and militarism and people loose with dangerous agendas and bad wiring -- is Bob Dylan's 65th birthday, and that, friends, is reason enough to celebrate, despite all the amputations of the most dangerous time in our time. He was our prophet, Woody Guthrie with an edge. With grace, wit and an unassailable belief in the power of a single steadfast voice, Bob Dylan has transformed America and, maybe more importantly, America's sense of itself.

He set the terms of engagement early, pointing out the social, sexual and racial polarities and divisions that polite America would just as soon have left alone. At the dawn of the national traumas that too much of America knows from the history books, Bob Dylan both framed the social debate and acted -- writing muscular, indelible music -- as our American seismograph, charting the rumblings of "the collective unconscious," telling us what was coming, if only we bothered to listen.

It's a sign of his continued vitality that he still works -- touring constantly, actively recording -- and still works with the mystery that animated his early career. Dylan is the host of his own radio show on the XM satellite network. His “Theme Time Radio Hour” airs at 10 a.m. ET Wednesdays on XM, with Dylan doing double duty as both curator and narrator.

"Much like his concerts, Dylan’s radio shows are a journey through 20th century musical Americana, the sort of thing he would have heard growing up in Minnesota with a transistor radio hidden under his pillow when he went to bed," reported the Associated Press.

But he's no conventional DJ operating from a specific studio every day. Ever the mystery, Dylan reportedly tapes his program from a variety of locations known only to him.

It's also a sign of how America changed that his earliest fiery protestaions -- "Masters of War," "The Times They Are A Changin,'" "Ballad of a Thin Man" -- are now part of the American songbook, fibers in the fabric of the national self-image. We can't imagine America without Bob Dylan any more than we think of this country without folk music, rock music, protest, passion and a sense of humor.

May your bootheels keep wandering, sir ... on this side of the stars, for as long as possible.

* * * * *

Neil Young, that master rock troubadour just turned 60 last November, has a new record that proves his continuing vitality on the scne, as well as a willingness not to pull punches with the power brokers of Washington. The man who immortalized in song the four students killed at Kent State in 1970 ("This summer I hear the drumming ... Four dead in Ohio") is in the lead again.

With his new album, "Living With War," Young returns to his incendiary form of his musical past. With much the same populist passion brought to 2003's "Greendale," Young proves a willingness to stay on point in the cultural/political free-fire zone that is contemporary America.

"Even if you don't agree with Neil Young's politics, you can't help but be daunted by the intersection of his genius and ire," writes Jaan Uhelski on the amazon.com Web site, adding that what animates the record is the "pure, naked, visceral reaction to the Bush administration's foreign policy."

In its 10 songs -- one of them a moving, choir-driven version of "America the Beautiful," another a song with the nerve to be titled "Let's Impeach the President" -- Young has created nothing less than a document of these times, separate and distinct from an earlier, equally bloody era.

It's been much the same with him for a number of years. During the grim time of Gulf War I, Young fought the powers that be on his Arc/Weld tour, often playing Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" onstage. And, of course, during the grim era of the Richard Nixon administration, Young's "Ohio" called the question of how a nation could persist in an unjust war with a angrily eloquent song that holds up today, more than 30 years after its release.

To his eternal credit, Neil Young's never been about just phoning it in. Peep this excerpt from a May 2003 interview with Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune:

"I don't believe in just doing my hits, because you can only do that so many times, and then you just repeat yourself. At this stage in my career, that would be the kiss of death. You might as well go to Vegas and just collect. I don't want to do that yet, and hopefully I can avoid doing that for a long time."

With the creative efforts of Dylan, Young and others, including Paul Simon (making concert appearances behind a new and much-acclaimed record), Leonard Cohen and Joan Baez, it's clear the sixties -- the age range, not the era -- are in very good hands.

Maybe the older we get, the more we have to look forward to.
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Image credits: Dylan: Ketil Blom (permission to use granted under GNU Free Documentation License, v1.2). Young: Adrian M. Buss (permission to use granted under GNU Free Documentation License, v1.2)