It’s how long the gap in Nixon’s Watergate tape was.
And (in a bit of useless trivia that I have no business knowing), it’s how long “Alice’s Restaurant” runs.
And it’s also just about how long this clip from days of yore lasts.
So if you have 18 and a half minutes, sit back, enjoy, and remember that once upon a time in this very country we really did used to have lively debate between the Left and the Right that didn’t involve putting cameras and microphones in front anorexic blond skanks, drug-addled gas bags, or Savage Little Weiners and letting them shriek “Traitor!” at the tops of their lungs 24/7.
That another American foreign-policy debacle was once in the spotlight and even at the high tide of the ocean of blood that two Administrations spilled in Vietnam, we still managed to carve out space in the commons to talk to one another.
Long before the air filled up with bombastic shitpeddlers like Bill O’Reilly
and Yahoo Smackdown Teevee designed to keep the pig people angried up and fitfully somnolent…
In this very country you could turn on Free Television and watch
Bill Buckley debating Noam Chomsky over issues of War and Peace and American foreign policy debacles being pursued right off a cliff.
No it was not Utopia.
Sure Buckley has a hard time pushing his venom around his Brahmin accent, and, yes, the way his face lights up when he thinks he has gotcha is much too “Hannibal Lechter” to let the children watch.
But it was free, it did not condescend or pretend that complex issues were simple, and was open to all.
And it was better.
It was what public debate could be, and it is without a scrap of phony nostalgia that I can say that was so much better – so much more nutritious -- than the Hate Radio/Rove/Gingrich/Dobson-powered chum-bucket scrapings that pass for public discourse today that even trying to compare the two is like comparing fresh apple cider to rat piss because they’re both approximately the same color.
Mr. Conservative staring into the very teeth of Evil Secular Liberalism for 18.5 minutes.
Both very bright men, both confident and unapologetic in their convictions, both very well versed on the subject at hand and on his opponent's views. And –- wonder of wonder -- never once does Buckley feel the need to call Chomsky a terrorist-loving traitor, bellow at him to “Shut Up!”, cut off his mike, sic his private security goons on him, or throw a chair at his head.
And if you didn’t understand some of the big words you did not demand that they stop being elitist and Talk Stoopider!!
Instead you hung on, made a note and looked ‘em up later.
Because you realized that this is what Real Grown Ups sound like when they are abroad in a land where being intelligent and expressing your opinions thoughtfully was not yet considered reactionary, disloyal and, worst of all, bad teevee.
7 comments:
Yeah, Bill Buckley could be an SOB, but at least he was a civilized SOB. When I think of the decline of the media and of debate since I was a fledgling IBW, well, Drifty, I wanna kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in muh teeth. Eat dead, burnt bodies. I mean kill, kill, Kill, KILL!
You DID realize you were letting yourself in for something like this as soon as you mentioned "Alice's Restaurant", dinncha? ;)
From the Group W bench, IBW
Gawd Drifty, you're making me all nostalgic and shit for civilized discourse. And when was the last time that the corporate media moguls even allowed Noam Chomsky to appear on television? -- Which is just as well in some sense, because as you note, the actual structures of televised politics no longer even allow the possibility of a conversation with someone like Chomsky to occur.
I take that back, Bill Moyers still has intelligent conversation and provides space for that to occur, but as far as I know it is rarely/never of the type of the very adversarial Buckley/Chomsky debate. (Loved the doorbell "end of round" in the clip, BTW.)
Chomsky once noted why it didn't even make sense for him to appear in most television/radio interview formats because he would need to entirely deconstruct the prevailing immersive worldview for the audience before he could even interject an idea that didn't sound like it was coming from Neptune because it had no context otherwise. Not something even someone as brilliant as Chomsky can do in the thirty seconds to three minutes allowed.
I'm ashamed that our society has no televised fora for public intellectuals. It's our great loss as a culture.
Watched a bit of that clip, and even though Buckley appears polite he never let Chomsky speak without interruption. Bill'O just takes that type of conversation to it's extreme conclusion. because the right is always wrong, and they never, ever want to hear about it.
TV is about dumbing us down these days, and any pretensions about otherwise has been dispensed with.
It's not that there's not an audience for intelligent. Look how many shows that even touch the toe of good comedy or drama become momentarily popular and then get yanked.
Anyone can think of a show they and all their friends loved that got yanked for "low ratings." Even though everyone they knew was watching that show.
I don't believe that crap any more. They want eyeballs in front of the set, sure, but they want the dumb eyeballs that will believe anything they are told.
That's why there's so little worth watching. It's not that no one will watch it.
It's that they (and I say this with no smile on my face) truly don't want us thinking.
Because then we might think twice about buying the crap they are selling.
Some group of somebodies, high up, coordinated or not (Rupert Murdoch, Sun Myung Moon, the Waltons, all fit the mold) wants the masses to be:
1. Un- or misinformed;
2. In ill health;
3. constantly Afraid (Hell, the ACLU, queers, gun control supporters, Al-Qaeda - hint bet the Superfecta, and box 'em!);
4. on the verge of bankruptcy or ruin.
Why?
Because then, even if the masses bother to vote, the House odds get better - the House candidates can win because the putative opposition support either doesn't vote, or has an increased likelihood of being buffaloed into voting against its own interests. Toss in some cute tactics like caging votes, and a merry go round of cash cash CASH, and its easy to conclude we're screwed.
In the early 50's, WTTW used to run a show that consisted of two people having a conversation. The moderator (Alistair Cooke) would introduce each person, first to the viewers and then to one another. Then, they talked.
During their WTTW's 50th anniversary celebration, they ran an episode of the show. The conversationalists were Carl Sandburg and Frank Lloyd Wright.
~BB~
Notice how Buckley begins to get quiet as the conversation drifts onward and he begins to look disinterestedly to his right as Chomsky speaks. I think Buckley started getting beat. Ahh, for the days when an intelligent conservative could debate an intelligent government critic and the critic could do well, all the while in the context of a civil discussion! Great clip, D.
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