Avuncular American

Man Of the 20th Century, Walter Cronkite

When legendary BBC/PBS commentator Alistair Cooke died a few years ago, it was like losing your grandfather, whose wisdom you would now have to do without.  Now we've lost Walter Cronkite, who told us every night "And that's the way it is."  Great was the impact of these authoritative chroniclers of the Twentieth Century.

Cronkite, who hosted a weekly documentary series "The 20th Century" as well as two decades' worth of the evening news for CBS, epitomized the best of broadcast journalism.  His presence was reassuring, even if the news he was relating was of the most jarring sort: war (Vietnam), assassination (the Kennedys, MLK), or revolution (Iran, and the ensuing hostage crisis).

In TPM, David Kurtz provides a touching remembrance of a childhood influenced by this father figure.

The passing of Walter Cronkite also reminds us of the demise of The News, as in "did you see The News last night?"  It was mainly a reference to Cronkite's CBS Evening News, and it invariably included reports from a string of American correspondents positioned across the globe.

Cronkite and his international team are now gone, replaced by pretty boy (or girl) anchors who rely on technicians whose prowess with pixels cannot patch over the lack of depth or analysis.  Cronkite had an amazing team of journalists, reporters like him who had covered World War II with Edward R. Murrow: men like Eric Severeid, who died in 1992, and Richard C. Hottelet, whose work had landed him in a Nazi jail.  Cronkite and his colleagues were literate, homespun, authoritative, and must have been appalled in ensuing years by the downward spiral of TV "journalism" that is embodied by the likes of Fox News.

Readers in the US will be able to watch the CBS tribute, "That's The Way It Was: Remembering Walter Cronkite" (image), tomorrow Sunday 19 July at 7:00 PM EST; for the rest of us, they have put up a nice page of text and video here.

Walter Cronkite, the original "avuncular American."

"Fauxtography" - Errol Morris, Hany Farid, & Charles Johnson

The problem is not that the photograph has been manipulated, but that we have been manipulated by the photograph. Photoshop is not the culprit. It is the intention to deceive.

Errol Morris, "Photography as a Weapon," New York Times 11 August, 2008

Anyone remotely concerned with propaganda, public diplomacy, disinformation, public relations, agents provocateurs, communications, information operations (you get the point: the use and misuse of images and information) should read Errol Morris in the NYT.  Yes, it's an erudite discussion between Morris (most recent film: Standard Operating Procedure, about Abu Ghraib) and Charles Johnson (who unmasked Iranian photo-manipulation of its missile launch in his blog "Little Green Footballs") and Dartmouth's Hany Farid, an expert on digital fraud.

But most fun are the digital illustrations throughout the piece, with prize-winning doctorings of the Iranian fauxtograph.  Be sure to read the footnotes too, plus all the links to Johnson's and others' work.

It's good fun, but deadly serious.  After all, staged "incidents" have launched and justified wars from the British land grab of Zulu territory to the Gulf of Tonkin... to Colin Powell's "Curve Ball" moment at the United Nations.  Next time you hear about Iranian speedboats harassing American aircraft carriers, think of Errol Morris and his friends, reserve your judgment, and check the pixels.

Culture Wars, European Style - May '68

I would be remiss in my duty as an observer of the European scene if I let the month of May pass without a comment on May 1968.  Since I was a pimply teenager in Pennsylvania at the time, I cannot speak from personal experience.  But you cannot be alive in Europe in the spring of 2008 without being bombarded with documentaries, books, commemorations - nostalgia of the most maudlin to the intelligently reflective.  At most recent count, 100 books (!) have been published in French alone.

One of the most thoughtful TV programs (now out on DVD), one of the few to put the street protests in France into their international context, is Patrick Rotman's "68."  Francophone readers can listen to an RTL radio interview with Rotman here.  Rotman, as a 19 year old student at the Sorbonne, was a participant and witness.  It was definitely a turbulent year, worldwide.

Anniversaries, especially those ending in round numbers like 40, are fair game for reflection.  Especially when many "soixante-huitards" (in the States, we would say baby boomers) are themselves in their sixties.  In France, there is a particularly contemporary - political - slant to these recollections: President Nicolas Sarkozy is an anti-68, conservative politician, in a country where the dominant intellectual strain grew up in the shadow of the May '68 protests.  Shadows of the US, where "what did you do during the Vietnam War?" continues to fuel political debate, and where the Republican Party would like to program the national DVD player to skip the tracks between Eisenhower and Reagan.

But just like America's boomer hippies have morphed into Wall Street lawyers and Washington politicians, so too have many soixante-huitards joined the establishment.  Probably the best example of a student leader keeping his youthful ideals while succeeding in the political world is "Danny The Red" Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now a member of the European Parliament for Germany's Green Party, though he has as much of a profile in France (born there while his parents fled Nazi persecution, he's perfectly bilingual and bi cultural).  Cohn-Bendit was recently shown chatting with the long-retired chief of the Paris police, who he credits with saving lives (and perhaps French democracy) by holding his fire during the student/labor protests.

"'68" is perhaps most resonant now because of the current existential crisis in the world economic system, with financial, food supply, environmental, and societal (immigration, aging, unemployment) pressures causing many to question the way the Western world organizes itself.  It's another nostalgia "industry," for sure.  But without necessarily offering answers, this season's European retrospectives serve a purpose in forcing introspection of the most useful type.  For the US too, this will be most evident once the Democratic Party finally sorts out its candidate to face John McCain.  Will it be '60s vs. '70s? (age, not decades).  Or will it be McCain national-security-means-guns vs. Obama's more inclusive definition of security through diplomacy, economic strength, and inclusiveness?  The Culture Wars in the United States are not over yet.