Dispatches from the reference desk
I tend to watch a lot of incidental television lately; that is, if the TV just kinda happens to be on,1 I’m watching it. I’m loath to fixate my passive eyeballs upon anything that requires a serious commitment of time from me as a viewer. So like many people this year, I’ve been tuning in to an amount of primary elections coverage that probably constitutes “unhealthy” by most psychiatric standards.
By the way, is it just me or is Wolf Blitzer more or less begging for somebody to devise a drinking game around this whole “best political team on television” thing? Something like, “If Wolf says ‘best political team on television’ twice in one sentence, take three shots of tequila!” Seriously, how many stumbling drunk Americans would there be if that game existed?
Thousands dead of “Situation Room”-related alcohol poisoning. A nation mourns and a beset medical community asks, “How long before Blitzer stops?”
It would be like a national collective bender right on through the Emmy Awards Ceremony that will eventually strip that distinction away from CNN and confer it upon some other news channel so that a new political team can have their chance at beating you over the head with it.
Funnily enough, however, CNN does have a decent political news team, and so I’ve often spent the night with all 360 degrees of Anderson Cooper (to be the subject of my next tell-all memoir The Anchorman Always Rings Twice) and friends.
On Friday, March 7, 2008 (viz. last night), the University of Arkansas hosted a lecture followed by Q&A with Cooper as part of its “Distinguished Lecture” series, so I braved weather that can literally freeze a man’s brain inside of his skull in order to get over to Barnhill Arena.
I’ve got a lot of admiration for the Anderson Coopers of the world, because, man…you wouldn’t ever find me in places like Somalia, where teenage gunmen extort locals and aid workers alike and malnutrition exceeds emergency levels by whole percentage points, or Congo, where one in four children dies before the age of five. That’s why Cooper gets to write a book called Dispatches from the Edge [check catalog] and all I get to write is a blog post called “Dispatches from the reference desk.” For the safety of my life and limb, I think that’s a fair trade-off.
I think the one element of what he had to say last night that most impressed itself upon me is how spotty the record of the suffering is in these war-ravaged and often forgotten nations, even for the people who do most of the suffering within them. Children desiccated by famine—bodies destroyed by rampant disease—and lost to families who haven’t got even a photograph by which to remember them. Sometimes even their names are lost to grandparents who suffer the deaths of more grandchildren than they have fingers to count them upon. Cooper talks of preserving their memories through stories, and really, thank god somebody is willing to take that on. He’s quite a good storyteller, to be sure.
I just got through helping a couple of college kids at the reference desk; one of the young women noticed that I had a library copy of his book sitting in front of me. “He’s so humble,” she said. It’s true—there isn’t anything particularly self-aggrandizing about the man, except to the extent that you sort of have to be in order to become an anchor on a cable news channel, and that’s refreshing.
He is also adept with a sly turn of phrase, which is at least part of the reason why he seems to have won over last night’s crowd, even including the latter-day Holden Caulfields of the University scene whose cynical outrage sometimes swallows the questions they mean to form.
Just for the heck of it, I am going to quote a bit from Dispatches from the Edge and encourage anybody reading this to come and grab one of the two copies of the book owned by FPL. This comes from Cooper’s chapter on Niger:
I close my eyes, pretend to sleep. Maybe I am sleeping. In Africa it’s hard to tell. Coiled in a dirty sheet, sweat-soaked, my hair matted with the day’s dust and grains of sand in my mouth, I dream about work, storylines, plots; I edit pictures in my head. I wake gasping for breath, unsure where I am. Niger. Rwanda. Somalia.
In Africa there are too many pictures, too many contrasts. You can’t catch them all. It’s like sticking your head out of a fast-moving car—you suffocate; it’s too much to take in. Amputations. Executions. Empty beds. Shuttered stores. Crippled kids. Wild-eyed gunmen. Stripped-down corpses. Crashed cars. Mass graves. Hand-made tombstones. Scattered ammo. Half-starved dogs. Sniper warnings posted like billboards. Buses and boxcars stacked at intersections. Old men in boxy suits walking to jobs that don’t exist in offices that aren’t there. It all blurs together. Desert. Mountain. Rice paddy. Field. Farmers bent over. Heads rise as you pass. Eyes follow eyes. Little kids run to the road, stand frozen, not sure if they should be happy or scared. They keep their weight on their heels so they can run back at the lurch of a car, the crack of a shot. Houses, whole towns, nothing but rubble—roofs blown off, walls burnt out, crumbled. Desiccated, eviscerated, gutted, and flayed.
At some point, though, the disorientation fades. You put it behind you; go on. This is an adventure waiting. Life happening. It’s not your life, but it’s as close as you’ll get. You want to see it all.
One minute you’re there—in it, stuck, stewing in the sadness, the loss, your shirt plastered to your back, your neck burned from the sun—then you’re gone, seatbelt buckled, cool air cascading down, ice in the glass. You are gliding above the earth, laughing.
That bit’s got sort of a beat poetry thing going on that some cats might not dig, but in any case, it gives you a compressed version of what it’s like to look through the eyes of Anderson Cooper.
Anyway, if he isn’t quite your speed, but you are fond of the idea of checking out a memoir from a life in news reporting, here are a few other biographies written by television journalists.
- A Life on the Road by Charles Kuralt [check catalog]. Kuralt was the anchor of CBS’s “Sunday Morning”, but was well known before that for his “On the Road” series, which ran on the “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite”. “On the Road” explored the United States just off the beaten path as Kuralt took the scenic route around the country in a motor home.
- David Brinkley: 11 Presidents, 4 Wars, 22 Political Conventions, 1 Moon Landing, 3 Assassinations, 2,000 Weeks of News and Other Stuff on Television by David Brinkley [check catalog]. Apart from being the designer of the world’s longest subtitle, David Brinkley was a long-time news commentator for NBC. “The Huntley-Brinkley Report”, which aired from 1956 to 1970, pioneered early television documentary techniques, though he is probably most famous for his news panel show, “This Week with David Brinkley”, done for ABC from 1981 through 1996.
- A Long Way from Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland by Tom Brokaw [check catalog]. Tom Brokaw is, amongst other things, known for his coverage of the Watergate scandal during his term as NBC Washington correspondent, and then later for his gig as host of the “NBC Nightly News”. He’s still around and writing books for crotchety members of what I like to term the “sandwiched generation”—you know, those sort of difficult-to-define people who didn’t fight in World War II yet aren’t baby boomers, so they’re kind of in awe of the former and a little ticked off by the latter. His most recent is Boom!: Voices of the Sixties : Personal Reflections on the ’60s and Today [check catalog] which features such chapters as “A loss of innocence”, “The fracture of 1968: the noisy masses versus the silent majority”, and “A dream fulfilled and a dream deferred”. Still a strong voice in the United States media, despite his inability to pronounce the letter “l”.
- Peter Jennings: A Reporter’s Life [check catalog]. Published posthumously, the content is apparently culled from interviews given by Jennings in the years before his death in 2005. I would venture to say that Jennings is best known as anchor of ABC’s “World News Tonight” from 1982 to 2003, though he had his start with the Canadian Broadcast Corporation. He was plucked from the CBC in 1965 when he was still a young stud of 26, and ABC made him the youngest network news anchor ever.
