As the World Turns
When we heard last week that more than 80 pop music stars had collaborated to remake the famous “We Are the World” video from 1985, we were surprised, happy, and grateful.
Surprised? Yes, because we could scarcely believe that there are 80 pop musicians who can seriously be described as “stars” and further surprised to discover how many of these lucky people, even the most celebrated among them, have names designed to give the willies to the most well-adjusted proofreader: Will.I.Am, LL Cool J, India.Arie, Trey Songz, Iyaz, Jason Mraz, Musiq Soulchild, and Swizz Beatz, just for starters.
Back in 1985, the worst a well-adjusted proofreader had to worry about was correctly spelling Bruce Springsteen. (And we don’t mean to imply that there are a lot of well-adjusted proofreaders.)
Happy? Yes, because the new video has the potential at last to transmute the limitless vanity and goofy cluelessness of show folk into something useful—in this instance, money to help the victims of the Haitian earthquake.
And grateful? You bet, because the new video gave us an excuse to dig up one of our favorite pieces by P.J. O’Rourke, our much-valued contributing editor. O’Rourke bent his ear and cast his jaundiced eye over the original song in 1985, in an article in the American Spectator. Mentioning how some critics had credited the song’s composers—Lionel Richie, Quincy Jones, and Michael Jackson, back when he was alive—with “illuminating the plight” of the world’s starving and helpless, O’Rourke wrote:
Note the insights provided by these lyrics: We are the world [solipsism], we are the children [average age near forty] We are the ones who make a brighter day [see line 6 below] So let’s start giving [logical inference supplied without argument] There’s a choice we’re making [true as far as it goes] We’re saving our own lives [absurd] It’s true we’ll make a better day [unproven] Just you and me [statistically unlikely] That’s three palpable untruths, two dubious assertions, nine uses of first-person pronoun, not a single reference to trouble or anybody in it, and no facts. The verse contains, literally, neither rhyme nor reason.
Twenty-five years later, O’Rourke’s piece reads as if it were written yesterday.
Air America, RIP
The Scrapbook could hardly allow the death of Air America to pass unnoticed. But that is the way our friends in the Mainstream Media tended to treat the story—which is a bit of a surprise, given the saturation coverage its birth inspired. There was a time, during 2004, when it seemed as if the New York Times couldn’t allow a week to go by without extensive coverage of the exciting new left-wing challenge to conservative dominance of talk radio.
The problem, of course, is that Air America was never very good as a broadcast enterprise; and its underlying premise was fatally flawed. The reason conservatives dominate talk radio, and other precincts of alternative media, is the longtime, wearisome, pervasive liberal dominance of the aforementioned Mainstream Media. Conservative talk radio—of the Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity/Hugh Hewitt variety—fills a vacuum untouched by the Mainstream Media; Air America was just a poor man’s version of the Times, CBS, Newsweek, and so on.
But what memories! The ownership changes, corporate revolving door, executive musical chairs. The host of “The O’Franken Factor” (get it?) is now the junior senator from Minnesota. Talk show hostess Rachel Maddow graduated from Air America to sharing space (and a swiftly diminishing TV audience) with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC. There was “Go Vegan” with Bob Linden, “Springer on the Radio” with Jerry Springer, ex-comedienne Janeane Garofalo, “Wonkette” (Ana Marie Cox), and “Mother Jones Radio.” Talk show hostess Randi Rhodes, who specialized in abusive language, had an eponymous program for awhile before being fired—for calling Geraldine Ferraro “David Duke in drag”—and then landed at Nova M Radio, which went bankrupt before Air America.
According to the Washington Post, the last chairman of Air America, Charlie Kireker, wrote in a memo to employees that “the company was done in by ‘a perfect storm’ of plunging ad revenues, intense competition, high debt and poor prospects for new financing.”
We can think of other reasons. But the most poignant epitaph for Air America is this hilarious paragraph in the Post story:
Since last summer, Air America has been heard in the Washington area on WZAA (1050 AM). Its audience has been so small that Arbitron, which compiles radio ratings, was unable to detect any listeners for WZAA during several weeks in December.
So long Air America. Gone, but not remembered (except here).
Maureen Dowd’s Source Problem
If you didn’t read last week’s Maureen Dowd column (“Defending the Long Gay Line,” February 3) in the New York Times, you missed a historic event. No, we’re not talking about the substance of Dowd’s column—progressive boilerplate on gays in the military—but about the fact that it is probably the first, last, and (in The Scrapbook’s estimation) only piece of journalism in which Senator Roland Burris, D-Ill., has been, or ever will be, quoted as an authoritative source:
And Roland Burris, the Illinois senator, reminded his colleagues that it took Harry Truman to integrate the services: “At one time, my uncles and members of my race couldn’t even serve in the military, and we’ve moved to this point where they’re some of the best and brightest that we’ve had—generals and even now the commander in chief is of African-American heritage.”
For readers who might be unfamiliar with Senator Burris, he is the veteran Chicago politician who was appointed in 2009 to fill Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat—by Democratic governor Rod Blagojevich, after the governor had initiated his famous pay-for-play program to fill the vacancy, and just before the governor was driven from office. Burris, who remains under investigation for allegations that his appointment was made in exchange for promises of cash, and that he lied to investigators about the circumstances of his appointment, is not seeking election to a full term.
And best of all—not that Maureen Dowd seems to have known this—Burris is also flatly wrong about the history of African Americans in the armed services. It is true that the U.S. Army was racially segregated until 1948, and that there were no black officers in the Navy until World War II; but African Americans have fought, bravely and in huge numbers and in storied outfits, in every one of America’s wars since the Revolution—indeed, since before the Revolution. There were black soldiers in the French and Indian War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Indian wars, the Spanish-American War, both world wars, Korea—180,000 black soldiers served in the Union Army, and even the Confederate Army recruited blacks late in the Civil War. In short, there has almost never been a time in our history when African Americans “couldn’t even serve in the military.”
It is possible, of course, that Senator Burris’s uncles wanted to be pilots, and couldn’t pass a vision test, or sought commissions for which they were unqualified. But that is not the same as “members of my race” being banned from service. If Maureen Dowd wasn’t aware of this history, 72-year-old Roland Burris should know it.
Signs of the Times
Under the headline “Forget Polls, Here’s Tangible Proof the Obama Honeymoon is Over,” Doug Heye, an old political hand now blogging for U.S. News, reports on a hard-hit segment of the retail market:
One sign that Washington, D.C., had been home to Obama Mania was the number of independent retailers selling all sorts of Obama merchandise. Every street corner, it seemed, had Obama wares (or Obama wear) for sale. Now, however, most of the winter caps for sale are not emblazoned with the Obama logo. . . . This time last year, the Obama Store was teeming with customers. Ideally situated in the basement of Washington’s Union Station, the store was filled with consumers eager to buy anything with Obama’s likeness while others took pictures of the life-size cut-outs of the president and first lady. Now, the Obama Store is boarded up. How quickly things change in a year.
Sentences We Didn’t Finish
‘The last thing we expected was a return to one-word politics, but that’s what evolved. Before 1960, the one word was ‘segregation.’ You could stamp it on the most hapless of candidates and win an election. After 1980, the one word became ‘conservative,’ as a label for the set of Bible Belt social values that hardened into its present calcified state with . . . ” (Howell Raines, New York Times, February 1).