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Edited on Sun Jun-15-08 10:10 AM by Daveparts
Just a Good Dog
By David Glenn Cox
We run as if we can out run our shadows, but to no avail. The next logical path is to pretend that it really doesn’t exist, to live our lives as a series of endless summer days. Pretending, praying the sickle of fate will fall on someone else and leave us be. Living in a solitary cocoon where such things happen only to others.
The sudden death of a media personality like Tim Russert tears open our cocoons and exposes us ready or not to the brutal reality that is life. We take it all for granted until a near miss shatters the illusion. Then the reality of death creeps in under the door and through the cracks in the floor boards and takes us ready or not. Russert most certainly wasn’t ready at 58, he was a media mogul, a mover and a shaker. Yet that in part is what killed him.
A lush lifestyle, a high fat diet led to his condition, his associates maintain that he pounded on his treadmill in his office. How many of us are so dedicated? To pound our treadmills in our offices? How many of us have an office with a treadmill and a shower? Russert was at the top of his field, he was a presenter, the modern media like to present themselves as journalists. But Russert like so many others was just a presenter, presenting the corporate media font, in easy to digest sound bites.
The old adage holds true that the mourners at a funeral are actually mourning their own fate not the deceased. NBC is certainly mourning Russert’s passing, you would think that a king or a president had died. Even the death of Elvis Prestly didn’t receive such coverage. Round the clock for the entire weekend, for a man who delivered the corporate mail. Russert is heralded for his work on Meet the Press,Where NBC carefully picked out the corporately vetted for in depth five minute interviews.
Of the four most frequent guests three were Republicans, the most frequent guest Bob Dole (63 appearances) followed by John McCain with 50 appearances. Robert Novak was a regular with 247 appearances topped only by David Broder with and astounding 396 appearances. Broder is the fawning officianato of George Bush and Karl Rove while he regards himself as a centrist he is presented as the other side of fair and balanced, he works for the Washington post you know, so he must be liberal.
Broder and I have something in common, he is from Chicago Heights Illinois.I lived in and around Chicago Heights for years and as a child my parents rented a house there. The house next door that abutted our driveway had a German Shepherd dog fenced in its backyard and to call this dog viciouswas an understatement. I had never done anything to this pooch but my entrance or exit through the back door of our house made the dog lose his mind. Not just a barking dog, but a hysterical snapping, salivating growling nemesis who attempting to scale the fence to reach me his intended prey every day.
After my departure he would continue with his display and bemoan his failure. One day the shepherd disappeared, we learned that he had passed on, the family mourned. I wondered how could they mourn a creature that was so viciousand so unobjective in his targets, eventually coming to the understanding that he was doing his masters bidding. It was his performance that they missed; he was a good dog to them even if he was an utter failure as mans best friend to the rest of us. This I think explains NBC’s over reaction to Tim Russert’s passing.
He did the job that they wanted done and did not question whether he fulfilled his higher calling of journalistic ethics. Could a couple of Broder or Novack appearances have been bumped to make room for a Noam Chomski or a Howard Zinn? Not hardly, has Amy Goodman ever been invited on the program or Jeremy Scahill to discuss his best selling book “Shadow Army” about Blackwater and the rise of private mercenaries.
Dennis Kucinich hasn’t been a guest on Meet the Press since 2004 despite being both a presidential candidate and a congressional leader of the anti war movement. Despite attempting to bring articles of impeachment against both Vice President Cheney and President Bush he wasn’t deemed newsworthy enough. Maybe Kucinich’s attempts were considered too frivolous so lets interview Steven Colbert instead. President Bush is said to be grief stricken by Russert's passing and I’m sure he is, we’ve all learned what a sensitive guy President Bush is over the years.
My heart goes out to Russert’s family its not easy to lose a parent or a spouse early in life. He made his journalistic choices with his family in mind, and it made him a good provider. He recently took his wife on an Italian vacation, a wonderful gift that most of us would love to replicate for our spouse. But to achieve Russert’s level of success in the words of Bob Dylan, you gotta serve somebody. Heaven and hell are found in the same direction it’s only a short divergence from the path, a minor fork in the road that makes the difference.
You ask the first legitimate African American candidate for President if he would renounce the support of Louis Farrakhan? It was an ugly and obscene question designed by its asking to tie Obama to Farrakhan. Most certainly the KKK and the Aryan Nation will support John McCain but that question will never be asked of McCain. To ask it of Obama was crass and baseless and no better than Willie Horton ad. Russert asked Dennis Kucinich in 2003 "Do you believe the president of the United States would risk the lives of American men and women for oil?"
I do and so do millions of others and maybe that’s why Kucinich doesn’t get an invite. He makes statements that millions not in power agree with, the questions those in power would prefer not to get any air play. Russert admitted that he had been mislead in the run up to the Iraq war and that’s so strange to me. A lawyer, a college graduate, so easily deceived and with all of those Washington sources. Here I am in the tiny berg of Powder Springs Georgia and I knew from a Marine Colonel in 2002 that the war was a done deal.
With just a little bit of research I was able to find out that Saddam would have needed over 40 truck loads of yellow cake uranium from Niger just to get started. That the operation was run by a French company that kept a manifest on every shovel full not just at the mine but on another manifest at the dock as well. I had learned for instance that chemical weapons had an extremely short shelf life, some as short as several weeks. Knowing that, I knew that Saddam had no chemical weapons because he had been cut off from the raw materials. Yet this well educated person, this paragon of the media was still totally in the dark.
It is strange indeed that his friends would remember his fine mind chocked full of factual information when during his testimony at the CIA Valerie Plame investigation it failed him so miserably. Russert testified on February 7, 2007 At the trial, the prosecution asserted that a FBI agent had called Russert regarding Russert's phone call with Libby, and that Russert had told the agent that the subject of Plame had not come up during his conversation with Libby. While another witness Cathie Martin the Vice President’s former communications director testified that she "suggested we put the vice president on Meet the Press, which was a tactic we often used. It's our best format", allowing the administration to "control the message.”
As you can see I come to bury Russert not to praise him, When I was in High school there was a youth two years my senior. He was vicious, he was a bully, and he was a criminal. I’d seen his antics, his vandalism his extortion’s and intimidation’s of his fellow classmates. And one night while drunk he drove his car off the road into a water tower. He was paralyzed from the neck down and a year later he was wheeled out before a pep rally and praised to the stars. He was now a fine individual; they presented him with a letterman’s jacket and placed it over his emaciated shoulders. That bothered me because they were praising some thing that he was not. He was a thug and it wasn’t that I was unsympathetic to his plight.
I just resented being told that this boy that I knew to be a thug was now some how some one that we should look up to. Conversion and renunciations of our sins must begin at home it cannot be done by public acclamations. NBC may, Boo hoo all they like and the telegrams of the self-important will pore in. The anointed inteligencia will pronounce this tragic loss. But excuse my hardness of heart for he did nothing for me as a viewer he worked for his bosses and not for me. Instead I’ll mourn the other passings this week, the unnoticed, the unpleasant and those not considered newsworthy.
Sgt. John D. Aragon, 22, of Antioch, Calif., died June 12 in Kadamiyah, Iraq
Sgt. Steve A. McCoy, 23, of Moultrie, Ga., died June 10 at Brooke Army Medical Center, San Antonio, Texas, of wounds suffered on March 23 in Baghdad, Iraq
Today the United States Marine Corps announced the deaths of four more Marines, all around the same age as Russert’s son. Russert loved his son as we all love our sons. I’ll mourn for them; they that will never get a chance to take their wives to Italy or own a seven million-dollar home in Nantucket. Their deaths are hardly noticed and controversial only when mentioned for too long on the air. They served their country unquestioningly and made the ultimate sacrifice. They that have left us so young, leave us to answer hard questions; did we serve them as well as they served us? How did this come to pass that they should die so horribly so far from home? They left us behind to ask ourselves, who was our good and just servant and who was just a good dog?
Who did we misuse and who misused us?
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