wedge blog

VS.

Pistol Packin' Jewish Cowgirl, ca. 1964

I missed the Ivy League experience.

I missed the sorority houses, I missed the keggers.  Unlike Walter Kirn, I pretty much took the low road through higher education.

It wasn’t as though I didn’t have a road map, marked with red arrows, even. My siblings are all doctors & lawyers…when the song gets to ‘and such’, I raise my hand from the back of the room.  I wound up eight blocks from my childhood home, selling jewelry in Big Sky Country.

Last year when I read Lost in the Meritocracy, I thought about my own formative years in public school. I remember warm milk and soggy graham crackers in kindergarten. I remember Dick. To be fair, I also remember Jane and Spot.

The pivotal memory I have of grade school is hearing that I killed God.

It was the fall of 1966, and I refused to sing Christmas Carols. I was in fourth grade.

Wanda Button pulled me away from a spirited game of Chinese Jump Rope at recess. Wanda and I were not friends. She had bad news.

 “You killed God.”

I was nine years old and I denied it. “Did not.”

“My mom said the Jews killed God.”

I knew a little about Judaism, but I didn’t remember this part.  Flat dry matzo, I knew. Dressing up at Purim, I knew. Passover Seders, I knew.

I was only nine, but hearing that I killed God explained a lot.

It explained why I was the only Jew in class. Who else would fess up? It explained why the Germans, who were probably Christians, had been so mad at us. It also explained why my dad was home dying of cancer. He was a German, and he married a Jew. We were being punished.

I barely realized what it meant to be a Jew, and I was already riddled with guilt.

Even then, though, I wondered, if we killed God, God is dead. Why are these Christians still going to churches? If we killed God, I mean like, what’s the point?

Out there on the Emerson School playground, I started to cry.

I went home and confronted my mother, who had problems of her own, with five kids and my very sick father. Alone after dinner, her red hands dripping over the sink, I asked her if what Wanda said was true.

Mom was tired. She may have been having her own crisis of faith. “It was a long time ago. Some people think Jewish leaders killed Jesus,” she said. “But it’s not your fault. It’s not my fault, and it might not even be true.”

It was a weak defense.

Three months later my father died. I took a week off school, and everyone in my class signed a sympathy card. Even Wanda.

Because there is an Air Base in Great Falls, there were always a couple of military kids in my class.  There was a Bully, a Fat Kid, one Black Girl, a slew of Indians, and I got to be…the Jew.

Walter Kirn was the Smart Kid. This may have driven him slightly nuts, but it gave Walter plenty of tragicomic fodder.  All that stuff that teachers tried to pour into poor Walter—he literally got the last word. For the rest of his life, all Walter has to do is push his hand down his psyche and make smart shit from shit that smarts.

When I reach down my psychic gullet, all I get is a gag reflex.

Given the role of Montana Jew, I guess I made it my job to be strange. After Wanda’s diatribe, I perfected a look that told my classmates not to come any closer or I might crucify them.

When I picked up Walter’s book, I thought that Lost in the Meritocracy would be heavy and literate and full of footnotes to prove we are depriving ourselves of creative thinkers by shoving square brains through progressively smaller round holes. Instead, Kirn, by recounting his own dysfunctional youth, picks up all the shavings and ignites a fine cautionary tale.

The book isn’t cautionary enough to discourage aspiring miserable literati, however. If I’d read it when I was in high school, I might have actually been enticed into being the Smart One just to suffer through the bookish fodder of degradation, adoration and isolation, which may have resulted in enough ‘fuck you smarts’ to earn a fellowship of my own.

Sometimes, though, instead of getting lost in the meritocracy, it’s safer not to open the door.

                                     THE TWO ANDYS

After watching Andy Rooney fumble through a two minute coda tonight on 60 Minutes, I couldn’t resist re-posting this suggestion to CBS News:

 
That ticking black stopwatch is more significant for Bill Geist and Nancy Giles, two commentators often seen on CBS Sunday Morning. They are probably backstage tapping their fingers, biding their time to become the heir apparent for Andy Rooney.  I wouldn’t put it beyond them to send Rooney thoughtful gift baskets with fat-laden treats and cigars.

I hope they are disappointed: Andy Rooney’s successor might not be waiting in a CBS studio. He might be in the bathroom mirror in Pittsburgh or yelling at the kids in Spokane.

CBS has tried citizen commentators before. It’s time to give the last few of those 60 Minutes to the senior citizens who bookend their Sundays with Charles Osgood and Mr. Rooney.

Wedged between short segments in war and politics, for a couple of years The CBS Evening News  Free Speech Segment attempted to become the venue for ordinary Americans to speak out. The concept was abandoned without fanfare in 2006.

Free Speech wasn’t a bad idea: it was just the wrong venue.With overwhelming hard news, the twenty-odd minute Nightly News is not the forum for cogent feedback.

Free Speech deserves a new life, a transplant where it’s more likely to thrive. Tick, tick, tick.

Did you hear Andy Rooney complain this evening (4/25/10) about the lack of primary care physicians?  Hardly a news flash. It brought back sad memories of Harry Caray during his last drooling seasons with the Cubs. The producers probably have more respect for Rooney’s body of work than for  his recent commentaries. Rooney might be a great guy, but he has the stage presence of a not-so-delightful cross between A.A. Milne’s “Eeyore” and a weary Studs Terkel.

Go ahead and retire with dignity, Mr. Rooney. Get a winch for that desk and update your memoirs from a posh perch on the Upper East Side.

Once the office is cleaned out, let’s replace Andy Rooney with Andy Warhol. This is the digital age: condense Warhol’s ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ down to three or four. Open up You Tube, hire a new producer, go through submissions. Pick one to air, and maybe four “runners-up” to link to CBS News’ website.

Reviving Free Speech within the context of television’s premier newsmagazine accomplishes many goals:

*It gives viewers a level playing field to have a say in a respected venue.

*It may broaden the base—is Uncle Charley from Butte, Montana finally going to get the chance to tell off the Feds? The segment will widen viewership for web and broadcast. The demographic right now is fairly easy to deduce, given the geriatric content of advertising placement and all those white heads in the studio.

*It would saves money. Talent is everywhere. Post basic requirements and links on the CBS News website, where hits and submissions are bound to explode.

*It offers commentators more freedom than the old 90-second Free Speech segment, and gives a voice to stories that are best told in  ‘first person’.

Of course, I volunteer to be your first citizen commentator.

It may be hard to be as much at ease as Andy is behind his famous burlwood desk, but even Andy might admit it’s not hard to be better looking.

In a secreted lab, far away from cameras and animal rights activists, there may be researchers behind locked doors watching stop-action images, busily calculating the bone fracture tolerances of figure skaters.

I imagine primates rolling over spent limbs toward steel food dishes, the result of a controlled study that roughly translates in English to ‘Chimps on Ice’.

When I was a kid, a single spin above the rink was considered the ultimate in figure skating. I was glued to a our first color TV to see Great Falls, Montana’s own John Misha Petkevich skate at the 1968 Olympic Games: the crowd swelled into polite applause at a single Lutz back in those days.

In the 1960’s, Olympic skaters were young adults in their twenties. Now that science has confirmed that our bones begin their brittle decline at puberty, talented skaters live far from their families and fall asleep clutching stuffed animals on their way to five a.m. practice. Time’s a wastin’…you got one, maybe two Olympics, right?

We are seeking the limits of humane endurance, boldly about to go where no groin pull has gone before. First it was a single, then a double, a triple, and now, the elusive quad. At each increased rotation, rapt fans wonder if the skater’s body will spin apart on camera, appendages detaching, Quentin Tarantino style, across the rink.

It’ll take more than the Zamboni machine to clean up that one—but can you imagine the ratings?

Is there a limit? The Last Lutz, a banner headline may someday read, atop a photo of a perplexed seventeen-year-old kid cradling what used to be his left leg, designer skate still attached. There will be an “I Told You So” sidebar written by 94-year-old Dick Button, and interviews of boy Soprano hopefuls who’ll glance at their coaches before nervously assuring reporters that this tragedy will not deter them from their dreams.

The last resort may be selective breeding. It’s probably a shameful drinking game among sports agents, a whispered fantasy league. Look at sports controversies today and tell me it’ll never happen…well, maybe not with figure skating.

Gender scandals are on the rise, though on ice they have involved orientation more often than chromosomes. Still, could some version of reality be far behind a Will Farrell movie? How can we give our skaters the edge?

Beyond the sextuple Lutz, ankles may shatter, trainers may shrug, and sports medicine experts may be forced to frantically search for controversial protocols: is it worth sacrificing the youths of the few, so every four years the many can spend a few hours of pride and nationalistic frenzy, witnessing the ignominy of an icy ass on NBC that does not belong to Jay Leno?

Is this a party or a wake?

Six months ago I cancelled our daily delivery of the Great Falls Tribune. I’d been reading the Trib all my life and I’ve been the subject and author of a few stories over the years. I’m writing because, as a subscriber who has been missing for six months and an advertiser that’s been missing for three years, The Tribune never once noticed I was gone.

I understand it’s not totally the newspaper’s fault. The industry is suffering, the economy is lousy, technology is in transition, the home page on my computer is an Internet daily. It used to take me a half hour every morning to read the paper, then it took fifteen minutes, not long after that, ten. A dropped sentence at the bottom of a column became more common, catching a grammatical error used to be challenging; it became embarrassing.

The slow decline of the paper is akin to watching a loved one suffer. I remember my father losing all that weight before he passed away. The paper, though occasionally bloated with ads, is starved for content that resonates with me. In an odd parallel, I began to see the same person dying two or three times on the obituary page (Printing errors? Editorial issues? Paddles?) Sometimes in a senior moment of my own, I’d think “Do I know that guy? His name is familiar.”Then I’d realize I read the same obituary a day or two before.

Instead of opening the paper, I began to check headlines and obituaries online. I’m not even conscious of the sneaky Netflix ad anymore, and I understand the obituary links don’t raise the dead, but they do raise a little revenue for the Tribune.

As the Tribune’s content became less relevant, my internal equation began to weigh in favor of saving trees. I began to feel guilty, even knowing that newspapers use a high percentage of recycled waste. The Sunday New York Times:worth the trees. The Tuesday Great Falls Tribune: well, maybe not.

I have friends and acquaintances who work for newspapers. They are all more talented and experienced than I am: we knew this day would come, but I didn’t realize how much the Tribune…didn’t care.

My husband’s team loyalties and investment strategies are broad. The Tribune’s sports and financial sections are weak (unless you cheer for Dutton or the Bison). Last summer I watched my man read an editorial page, shake the paper and then shake his head. “Why do we get the paper?” he asked sadly.

To cancel, I dialed a toll-free phone number and spoke to a stranger. She never asked why, didn’t offer us a Sunday-only delivery (I suggested it), and never mentioned the Tribune online.

It’s not just the content—it’s the delivery.

Over the years we’ve hoped the neighbors didn’t notice us tiptoeing from our covered porch to the sidewalk to retrieve a snowy or soggy paper ten feet from our door, and there have been times (understandably) when news was literally scattered to the wind. Sometimes the Trib would be hidden totally under our grimy sisal doormat, or it would arrive too late for early risers.

Occasionally the Tribune would not arrive at all, and we’d have to call Gannett instead of calling our friends a few blocks away. “Please press TWO…”

As a former advertiser, I’ve wondered why, after years of buying big ads, when my latest ad rep quit, no one bothered to call. I liked my old rep. Whenever I asked him how he was, he’d reply, “Fine as frog’s hair.” Ironically, as far as I know, there’s no hair on frogs.

In the last thirty months or so, I’ve learned my demographic isn’t reading the paper anyway. As a jeweler, most of my locals are young engaged couples who get their news online. Precious metals investors seem to find me, and after 17 years in business, referral is booming. Ironically, the slower economy has created more comparison shoppers, which is great for my business model.

Out of continuity, fear of lost revenue, and loyalty to the ‘frog’s hair fellow’, I’d have spent thousands with the Trib. Now it’s just too late.

I log on to the free online paper, get the Sunday edition and I read the rest at the Peak. I hit the gym often, I don’t miss much. It takes five to ten minutes most days, and I never wrest a copy from anyone under fifty.

At forums about the future of media, no one under 35 is wringing his hands: these fellows are too busy downloading, uploading and texting. The guys at Gannett have one fist fumbling with digital media, while the other looks like it’s throwing in the towel on the Great Falls Tribune.