December 27, 2010 10:55 AM
Years Of Crisis - 1955 With Edward R. Murrow
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Since we're sprinting to the final stretch of 2010, it's time to start looking back at some notable years well before this one.
Today it's 1955 - fifty-five years ago and the world was entirely a different place. Knee-deep in the Cold War with hot spots in Asia creeping up all over. Parts of Europe still getting back on their feet. Africa slowly emerging from Colonialism and experiencing growing pains. The world in general still fearful of The Bomb and America in particular still politics as usual.
Part of the Years Of Crisis series from CBS Radio which began in 1949, it was hosted by Edward R. Murrow with correspondents reporting in and giving their assessment of the world situation as it was, that year-end in 1955.
Camus denied the label of Existentialist which still sticks nevertheless. He was denounced as a Trotskyite by the Communists which can be taken as not such a bad thing.
He also seems to have been more in line with the Anarchists. Also something which can be taken as not such a bad thing.
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Oh the platitudes from these people.
Chomsky debating Richard Perle and the American Foreign Policy exposé par excellence.
here
statusquObama, change you can only pretend in
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tktUfZXHw8
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
For one of the most pleasant holiday gifts of the year. It is a genuine treat, both historically, and as a journalist to listen to those whom I remember with such fondness from the days of yore.
There are times I tend to be very hard on the "gadfly" style of News Reporting, (and far worse News Anchoring) practiced by Networks of all stripes in this day and age of shrinking attention spans and ever expanding corporate greed.
Listen for only a minute to these men, and you will instantly discover why I find "News Anchor=News Reader" "reporting" to be so entirely odious and corrosive to the Forth Estate, whom we have so wrongly supposed of late is watching America's Freedom while her citizens' backs are turned.
All of these men were legendary News Anchors at one time or another, and all are sorely missed by this reporter. They began as newsmen on a beat, covering real stories, genuine wars, and real historical figures of the day. They were not magically transported to an Anchor chair by virtue of a number of figures on an Agent's contract, or by some blip in the ratings that have become the unblinking deity of all, up to and including News Divisions now run by people more skilled at counting beans than they would be at cooking them if they ever found themselves working in the field, as these men did so often. My one and only regret is that Ernie Pyle could not have been among their number.
Yes, good people, hark ye here for a while in this season of good cheer, and remember along with me the "good guys" whom I cheered for in my youth, and still cheer for, even deep into the beginnings of my radical middle age.
This is what Newsmen sound like. If anything you are listening to "entertains" you more than informs you, if what you hear every day when you go seeking of News, does not sound like this, pick up any communication device at hand, and call out these networks and pseudo-"News" conglomerates, and demand in that still and quiet voice that is the best of us all that you see and hear more voices like these across a News desk, and fewer of the clowns, clods, and outright crazies sent to distract you from what you need to know to better your life, and the life of this world as a whole. The same world these men brought us word pictures of, so long ago, so that we would not loose our place in it, and let true freedom slip away with the tides of events and time.
Good Night, Ed, Thank You, and Good luck.
Beckhead rejected the comparison of himself to McCarthy. He preferred to think of himself as an Edward R. Murrow. What a complete and total moroni! Blasphemer is more like it.
In 1955 the middle class was strong.and Roberts, Thomas, Scalia and Alito were not on the Supreme Court. Our country was better.
This is not my father's America
Different, far different, perhaps. "Better" I will leave to Historians far beyond myself. But as someone who lived thru the history of that time, I can and will tell you that in a real sense, we were unprepared for so much that came up and hit us so fast, which is why the 1960's changed so very much about who we were, and indeed who we are (and ought to be today) It was after Korea, and Vietnam was a French problem, compounded by Africa. Suez was just around the diplomatic corner, and America never saw it coming. A Senator from Wisconsin taught everyone what fear could be, even as the Nation wrestled with Powers made of Politics and fear. Yet, in less than two years, he would be discredited and gone away, while a Nation worried more about what the "Reds" could put in orbit over their heads. These years were the last great "Entre act" between two ages of history, that still both divide and unite generations in ways so very few remember these days.
The lesson (other than the sweetness of friends and memories) to take away from something like this, seen thru our lens, is that without knowing it (perhaps it is easier and more humane that way) is that we live each and every year, in extra ordinary times, and that we as both a Nation and as individuals have a role to play in history from which there is no chance or hope of escape. Because history is something that lives every day in us, and we have a responsibility to those who will hear our voices decades (and now perhaps centuries hence) and bless or curse our names for the history we write each and every day for them.Reporting that history, and its effect on the global Human Condition remains the greatest challenge of our days.
As Greenspan copped, we all have an ideology which explains the world for us and these ostensibly straight white guys certainly have theirs.. still, their professional preparation stands in such sharp contrast to the stuff we get today..
Germany, Quemoy and Matsu no longer seem to be hotspots as described in this recording but the Arab-Israeli conflict has gone on and on, spawning danger that covers the earth..
Everything getting bigger and bigger while the mounains merge with the valleys? A lot to think about there.. Bigger and bigger scale of organization still today though now we also have wealth differentials which begin to make the Guilded Age seem egalitarian.
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