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June 19, 2006
Tim Russert Should Really Find A New Subject
Ah, yes, the importance of fathers. Russert offers a soothing balm on our troubles: why write a book about the degredation of the American political sphere when you can write about daddies? And make everyone feel warm and gooey.
He didn't actually write it. These are just letters from the first book "Big Russ and Me". I suppose all of us who had good fathers, including me, can just write a book about them now. Or maybe we can't. Maybe you can only be an elite journalist to get this kind of book deal.
The big journalist stars, Russert, Brokaw and their ilk, write about the generation before them with almost a glossy sheen. The Greatest Generation. Big Russ and the Greatest Fathers. If you were born prior to 1930, you get a big fat gold star. Your sweat got us through the depression, your blood got us through WWII and you were too busy saving the world to shed any girly tears about it all.
The great white-washing of history continues because you never hear how it was this generation who kept segregation up and running. This generation justfified the internment of Japanese. This generation whose brightest minds got us into Vietnam. This generation who brought commercialsm, materialism and the military/industrial complex to great heights in the 1950s.
They accomplished a great deal and lived through great trials, our grandparents. Of course, if your grandparents actually came from Europe, out of WWII, they lived through a much darker and bloodier epoch. Perhaps that's why some of the original agitators of the 1960s were children of European immigrants who had a feeling in their gut that satifisaction doesn't come from a new washer and dryer alone.
It is perhaps our greatest fault in our retelling of American History that we bath ourselves in the good and ignore the bad, as if there can't be two sides to the same coin. Every "generation" (as if they are homogenous) does good and does bad.
Implicit in the Russert/Brokaw argument is that the 60s generation, my parents, were worse than their parents. We've adapted a conservative mindset about the 60s. The words "excess" and "selfish"... so often used. Was it excessive and selfish for Cheney, Goodwin and Schwerner to take that fateful bus trip to the deep south? Was it excessive and selfish for the students on UofW Madison to sit in on Dow Chemical's recruitment effort? What is excessive and selfish about earnest people trying to change the world, bring equality and end a vicious war?
Russert knows when he speaks of fathers, he's spoonfeeding us Norman Rockwell. There are good fathers out there; of this there is no question. There are questionable fathers out there. Bad fathers. Fathers who abandon their children. Fathers who beat their wives. Fathers in that questionable middle, who perhaps don't do anything "bad", who support their families financially, but are emotionally unavailable to the children. The father/child dynamic is complicated; just as the "generational" idenity. What Russert and Brokaw peddle is a certain truth, but not a total truth.
One final note: if Russert is so atuned to the goodness of fathers, why wasn't he, a mere two weeks ago, standing up for families with two fathers?
Posted by emily at June 19, 2006 5:39 PM