Longing for No News Alerts That Scare The Hell Out of Me

I think I was like most teenagers growing up. I generally knew what was going on in the country and the world in the early and mid-1960s. I watched Walter Cronkite on CBS and listened to his colleague, the avuncular Eric Sevareid, dispassionately analyze current events and long term trends. And there were huge stories for both Cronkite and Sevareid and their fellow broadcasters to parse. The Cuban missile crisis. The civil rights movement. The assassination of a president. The Great Society initiative. The growing war in Vietnam. The space race.

It wasn’t until the summer of 1966, however, that I became aware of a need to listen to news every hour on the hour. Keep in mind that WCBS Newsradio 880 in New York did not become a 24 hour news station until August 1967.

I absorbed the importance of listening to news headlines every hour from a high school graduation present my parents provided—a trip to Israel. As I would ride the Egged buses across Jerusalem or Tel Aviv I would notice passengers intently listening to news broadcasts upon each hour.

Living during a perilous time in that nation’s history—that phrase applies to every moment of Israel’s 68-year history, but I digress—Israelis not only wanted to know the latest news. They also were listening for broadcast codes to alert them should their reserve units be called up.

A year later, during the Six Day War, I became obsessed with knowing the latest news from Israel. For good reason—my sister was in Israel, ending the second year of study abroad. Our family had no way of knowing if she were safe, where she was, what she was doing (turns out she was packing crackers for the soldiers). 

Naturally, after I became a journalist, I continued, to this day even in retirement, to turn on the radio at the top of each hour. For decades it was to hear if anything traumatic had transpired in the Middle East. Now, in addition, it is to hear if anything Trumpatic has traumatized (at least half) the nation.

I obviously do not agree with what our new president and his sycophantic Republican House and Senate are doing. But let’s be honest. Nothing was not foretold during the campaign. 

Hearing the hourly news keeps me abreast of the latest rollbacks. That’s what we have so far. Donald J. Trump is bringing us back to the pre-Obama years. He is doing what Obama did to Bush II-era regulations, what George W. Bush did to Clinton-era regulations, what Bill Clinton did to Reagan-Bush I era regulations. You can’t blame the public for feeling whipsawed by the constant change, the feeling on both sides of the aisle of one step forward then two steps backward.

We want transparency from our elected officials. What could be more transparent that the money grab schemes of the Trump family? What could be more blatant than Trump’s assertion that the public doesn’t care? Republican elected officials have shown they don’t. And so far, average GOP Joe Citizen hasn’t shown he cares either. 

Even on forced repatriation of illegal aliens Trump has been no more extreme than the deporter-in-chief Barack Obama (more than 2.5 million sent back to their countries of origin). Yes, the separation of a woman from her family made for heartrending visuals last week but if Trump’s storm troopers round up criminals of whatever stripe he would be acting within the bounds of socially acceptable power, even if a portion of those deported are no more dangerous than any street corner drunk or check kiter.

What any sane person doesn’t want is a violation of fundamental trust in our government and country. We don’t want truth to be undermined by “alternative facts.” We don’t want science to be rejected and supplanted by alternative theories. We don’t want our commitment to international leadership to be replaced by isolationism, a void to be filled by Russia and/or China. We don’t want our status as a nation of immigrants to be sullied by fear. We don’t want our cherished Constitution and its rule of law, as protected by an independent judiciary, to be trampled. We don’t want the long march of equality for all religions, people, gender and sexual orientation to be stalled. We don’t want to fall into the abyss like past empires that rewarded a sliver of oligarchs while the populace struggled to maintain dignity and economic independence.

And so we listen to the news every hour to see and hear the latest excess from a White House turned into a golden goose by a leader who never had to worry about his next meal, who never developed empathy for those who did, who never had to burnish in the crucible of public opinion a plan to help the less fortunate, who never engaged in any domestic or international exchange if it did not directly impact his personal wealth, who treated the public as rubes with money for the taking through shady construction deals and phony education programs, who denigrates our institutions, our elected officials and our judiciary even as he cozies up to dictators who murder their opposition, muzzle the free press and subject their people to deprivation so that they and their acolytes can live comfortably. 

A Saturday Night Live skit provided an apt closing to this blog posting. In it, a People’s Court judge tells Trump, portrayed by Alec Baldwin, he’s doing too much. She pleads with him, “I want one day without a CNN alert that scares the hell out of me.”

Just Wondering About Radio Ads and Noah

Here are some things that stop me cold in my tracks:

I wonder why an organization devoted to round-the-clock news, WCBS Newsradio 880, airs commercials that are creepy at the least and blatantly false and misleading in the extreme. I’m referring to all the radio spots about health claims (how’s your testosterone level?) and debt relief (what’s the size of your credit card balance?) and any number of other questionable ads. Don’t they vet the claims? You’d think the standards of an all-news radio station would be higher than simple talk radio which allows shills to promote gold and silver as hedges against post-apocalyptic  times.

I’m also curious as to whom exactly these ads are targeted at and how they match up to WCBS Newsradio 880’s actual audience. I’d have thought the radio station’s listeners were above average in education and income. Yet these ads seem to appeal to the lowest common denominator. 

Treading Water: Pictures of Russell Crowe dressed as Noah in the new Darren Aronofsky film Noah startled me when I saw him wearing pants and fingerless leather work gloves. But a little research on the Web revealed that gloves go back at least to ancient Egypt (here’s a graf from gloves.com.ua: 

“History has a lot of facts of using the gloves in ancient times. They were popular and served as a protection of the hands in Old Egypt. The Pharaohs wore them as s symbol of their high position and women wore them to protect the beauty of their hands (they rub their hands with honey and fragrant oils and put on thin silk gloves). In those times the gloves were made as small pockets without holes for fingers. Then they were made only with one thumb (as today's mittens). Egyptian women used these mittens to protect hands while eating or working.”)

As for trousers, they seem to have sown up (I know it should have read “shown up” but I couldn’t resist the pun) about the time horses were domesticated enough to be ridden. According to a 2009 Reuters article (http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/03/05/us-horses-history-idUSTRE5246HI20090305), “Horses were first domesticated on the plains of northern Kazakhstan some 5,500 years ago -- 1,000 years earlier than thought -- by people who rode them and drank their milk.” 

If Bible believers are to be believed, our world is just 5,774 years old, giving Noah plenty of time to fashion himself a pair of tight fitting pants instead of trampsing about in a bulky robe.  

I’ve commented before that I’m disappointed how few books I’ve read in retirement, but one I did read was David Maine’s The Preservationist, recently re-released under a new title, The Flood. It’s a psychological exegesis of the Noah story as explained through the eyes of the arkman himself and his family. It’s like The Red Tent, imaginative story-telling to fill in the blanks the Bible chose not to include, what Jewish scholars refer to as midrash. 

Interestingly, Maine names one of Noah’s unnamed-in-the-Bible daughters-in-law Ilya. She is Cham’s wife. Aronofsky casts Emma Watson as Ila, Shem’s wife. 

One of my favorite examples of midrash on Noah comes from an early routine of Bill Cosby. He imagines Noah arguing every time God proscribes another task. Finally, in exasperation over his recalcitrant subject, God convinces Noah to stop complaining by asking, “Noah, how long can you tread water?”  

Three Letters: Speaking of the Almighty, has anybody else noticed that with the departure of Tim Tebow and the signing of Michael Vick, the NY Jets’ quarterback controversy has gone from g-o-d to d-o-g?