“HAPPY” MEMORIAL DAY

“THE GREATEST GENERATION”

BAY AREA ART OUTRAGE

Call me obsessed. It is a holiday and I should be resting, chilling out, tuning out the news and my own news blues. At least I did spend a few hours alongside the Hudson yesterday not far from what we still call Ground Zero. The calming wind, the blue skies, the water taxis’ rolling on the river and the children running everywhere gave me a feeling of normality, of the way our lives should be lived. It was a Sunday in a spanking new park (named after Nelson Rockefeller) in a gentrified neighborhood of lower Manhattan where realty defines reality. Yes, It was pacific near the Atlantic. But somehow it wasn’t enough to block out my forboding about life during war time.

The reality of war cut through the Memorial day nostalgia when 60 Minutes did a gutsy music-driven, no narration elegy with photos of American servicemen lost in a war on terror that many feel has also been lost. Itw as more moving that Ted Koppel’s reading of the names. “They were all Americans? They are all dead,” said Andy Rooney simply to end the broadcast. It was the longest antiwar editorial I have seen on the air, dressed up, of course, as a tribute to men and women lost in the service of empire.

I think it was master producer Don Hewitt’s last shot after a lifetime of demonstrating that a mass audience would watch important stories when well packaged. He was idiosyncratic, a dictator, difficult (make that impossible) and self-righteous. “Tell me a story,” he would say. He also could be brilliant. A one of a kind character, he was was forced out before the network carried him out. The DON of TV magazine programming leaves an amazing track record that, with TV journalism at risk, the corporate heads of CBS are unlikely to improve on, and most likely, will f-up.

NO GOOD WAR

Here are some words about Memorial Day and the “greatest generation” that fought the second world war that we are commemorating today. It was my father’s army and it took my Uncle to the shores of Okinawa. They saw themselves combating fascism not furthering US hegemony.

To remember their sacrifices, and who who never came back, I turn to a few well chosen words from Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe who notes in her column:

“There are atrocities in every war, although no digital cameras recorded them until now. We know or should know that war can hone a killer’s hardness against humanity that may take a lifetime to soften. Would it be different, I wonder, if our World War II memorials included Hiroshima and Dresden, the human tragedies that come adhered even to victory?

“The men I know who have a paid-up membership card in the greatest generation talk less of wartime heroism than of camaraderie and scared-to-the-bones hope of survival. They share a certainty that the war itself was right. By which they mean necessary.

“So maybe we should pack understanding as well as gratitude for this year’s visit to our fathers’ war. There are just wars and there are unjust wars. There are wars that are forced on us and wars we rashly choose. But there is no such thing, then or now, as a good war.”

Such thing!

WAR ALWAYS COMES HOME

I am going to save the rest for tomorrow because I know many of you have better things to do today than turn on your computers. I want to end with a tribute to Lori Haigh who runs an art gallery out west. I don’t know her I but want to be supportive. Lisa Leff of AP tells her pre-Memorial Day weekend story:

SAN FRANCISCO - A San Francisco gallery owner bears a painful reminder of the nation’s unresolved anguish over the incidents at the Abu Ghraib prison - a black eye delivered by an unknown assailant who apparently objected to a painting that depicts U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners.

“The assault outside the Capobianco gallery in the city’s North Beach district Thursday night was the worst in a string of verbal and physical attacks directed at Lori Haigh since the artwork was installed at her gallery on May 16.

San Francisco police are investigating and have stepped up patrols around the gallery. But Haigh decided to close the gallery indefinitely, citing concern for the safety of her two children, ages 14 and 4, who often accompanied her to work.

” Haigh has received some expressions of support since closing the gallery. Her favorite: an e-mail whose writer said, “I’m sure that a few and dangerous minds don’t understand that they have only mimicked the same perversity this painting had expressed.”

the FCC decision on media concentration is coming up on June 2, and we will be marking the anniversary of Tienanman Square as well this week.

Haiti’s Jean Bertrand Aristide’s forced exile continues as he arrives in South Africa vowing to return home one day. (CNN.com marks the event by leading with stupid comments from a minority opposition leader without referencing the fact that SA’s freedom fighters spent many decades in exile and are returning the favor extended to them by friendly states.)….I will have more on that story and many others tomorrow. Please tune in and help us tell others about this column and our work at Mediachannel.org. Write: dissector@mediachannel.org