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Edited on Sun Apr-01-07 04:02 PM by PCIntern
In my lifetime, I never thought that we would be participants in another war-without-end and without-mission. I believed that this country and its military had learned the political and tactical lessons of Vietnam and that any incursions we would make would be of the Gulf War variety: Overwhelming might met with quick success and rapid pullout. Obviously, I was mistaken.
But then it occurred to me that so many things go awry within the society that this assumption was folly. One particular grievous error, or rather, series of errors, comes to mind.
Recently, the local PBS station ran a retrospective of local kids shows from the 1940's to the 1970's as part of a fundraiser (of course). One particular gal, Sally Starr, had been on the ABC affiliate here daily for one to two hours for nearly twenty years and yet there is not one extant videotape or kinescope of her thousands of hours on television. Intrigued by this fact, I went on a search to determine just how much had been lost over the years and the answer is: a stupendous, mind-boggling number of shows exist only as memories or at best, as audio recordings which fans made on reel to reel tapes as a hobby. I had known that the humorist Jean Shepherd's radio work only survived because jazz musicians for the most part loved his cadence and his work and several of them recorded him over many years, but virtually all of early television is Gone With the Wind. This includes, but is not limited to, the early Carson shows, Les Crane, the AM Merv Griffin shows, many game shows, interview shows with hosts of the caliber of Ben Hecht, and the list goes on and on almost without end.
Many of the existing recordings were discarded or erased by re-recording or negligence. We all know that many theatrical films have been lost forever as well. My upset and concern is this: the people involved in these enterprises were not ignorant, they were not stupid, or uncreative. They were lazy and uncaring and have been responsible for lost history probably forever. The technology was there to maintain this library, no matter how vast, but it was 'not in the budget' and was dismissed as romantic, useless, or worse, not even considered at all. It is a tragedy of monumental proportions for which there is no recovery, and for this I am very saddened.
So we can never assume that the 'correct' attitudes are present or that people will do the right thing. We are in no better shape than the ancient Egyptians were, the sum total of human knowledge is decreasing each day for we certainly are not learning from our mistakes. In Philadelphia, a great Library used to exist at the Benjamin Franklin Institute. It held on its shelves thousands of periodicals, reference texts, textbooks, and theses which were one-of-a-kind. A few years ago, because no institution would accept its materials, the library was scatterred to the four winds. Entropy of civilization, you could call it: thus dispersed, it could never be reassembled.
These are tragedies of the first order for an advanced civilization and they are inexcusable.
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