Forbes.com - Thankfully, That's Not The Way It Was

http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/20/walter-cronkite-obituary-media-opinions-contributors-mediocrity.html

I've always had a problem with Walter Cronkite. He had this mind-meld grip on the brain of everyone, including me, who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, with his subliminal promotion of mediocrity and complacency that kept an entire generation in the doldrums. And no, I'm not talking about his views on the Vietnam War and LBJ's line "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America." That was just noise.

Look, the guy could read the news okay. It's not rocket science. "Uncle Walter" had the anchor seat on the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981, back when people actually watched the news on television. How quaint. Seven o'clock, right after the local news. Like clockwork, finish dinner, put on Cronkite. And he was good--heck, he was the master. He taught himself to speak slowly, with a half regal, half Midwestern accent, so he could penetrate American minds, and infect them with his mystical powers of persuasion.

Am I talking about liberal media bias? No. C'mon, stay with me here. Every night, right after the news stories and vignettes on acid rain and student protests and Dan Rather in the jungles of Vietnam and crumbling cities and heroin epidemics and exposés on Watergate and fraud and corruption and burning slums, Walter Cronkite would turn to the camera, and with almost undisguised smugness, tell me, right to my face, "... And that's the way it is."

Liberal schmiberal. That was a cover. He was the voice of the establishment, The Man trying to keep us down. And there's nothing we could do about it because that's the way it is. And I believed him. We all did. A conspiracy by advertisers on his show? Who knows, but it took me a long time to break out of his trance.

The 70s were a smog-filled haze. Upward mobility was a pipedream. Stock markets stagnated and all the moon-walking Space Age dreams of the 60s were shattered with layoffs and plant closings and Rust Belts and urban unrest. You were told to do well in school and maybe you could get an entry level job at a big company and wear a white short-sleeved shirt and work your way up over twenty or so years, so you could buy that little house in the suburbs and squeeze out 2.3 kids and afford a station wagon and … well, that's the way it is.

Someone else has all the money and you don't. That's the way it is.

Unknown forces control your life. That's the way it is.

Governments are corrupt. That's the way it is.

Society is divided into classes, and you're stuck in yours. That's the way it is.

The American Dream is dead. Go back to work, you sorry little cretins.

Fortunately for me, for you, for everybody almost everywhere, Walter Cronkite was wrong. "Most trusted man in America"? No way. That wasn't "the way it is." Not even close.

In fact you couldn't rely on anyone else--no school, no company, no institution, no company, no industry, no media, nobody was going to raise you up. The trick was to destroy each and every one of these existing systems. Blow it all up. Invent the future by destroying the past.

Not blow it up literally. Abbie Hoffman was a bozo. The Black Panthers were terrorists. It wasn't civil unrest that created change. That was a sideshow. It wasn't hippies or free love or exotic drugs (too bad, all that was kinda fun). All these things destroyed lives and never built anything new. Same for every beneficent government program and professor's teaching. Worthless.

Instead, what it took was a few little microchips (Ted Hoff at Intel), and a couple of funky pieces of code (Bill Gates at Microsoft) and a few smart people (Steve Jobs at Apple and Larry Ellison at Oracle and thousands of others), who weren't content working for The Man. Each of them dislodged "the way it is" and got a few people asking "why is it this way?" and declaring "think different" and "eat my dust," and bang, the status quo crumbled. You could create your own future. Power shifted out of the hands of conglomerates like Gulf & Western and Engulf and Devour and away from centralized bureaucrats running faceless government operations. Instead, power ended up in your hands, my hands, all of our hands. To do what we wanted.

Computers escaped air-conditioned rooms and ended up on our desks. Banks gave way to mutual funds. The New York Stock Exchange gave way to Nasdaq. Brokers gave way to Web-based trading and on and on.

So what did we want? To change the world, for the better, increase the size of the pie, bring the rest of the world onto our wealth grid. And not by building huts in Costa Rica but by taking down those obstructing progress, those leeching off the rest of us, holding us back, milking the present for their own benefit rather than standing aside and letting wealth-creating innovation increase everyone's living standard. Those "that's the way it is" types needed to move over. But they didn't move on their own, so we either had to wait for them to die or just destroy them. Seek and Destroy. Music companies. Travel agents. Insurance brokers. And we're not done--the hard work has just started.

It took me a long time, well into my life, to get Cronkite's words out of my head and realize that not only is anything possible (thank you Kevin Garnett), but that I was the one that had to make it happen. There were no gifts, no trailblazers to follow. We all have to invent the future by destroying the past.

Sadly, the old mentality is back. Citibank is too big to fail. That's the way it is. The government needs to bail out the automakers. That's the way it is. Taxes are going up. That's the way it is. Carbon dioxide will boil the oceans so we need to live in cities and walk to work. That's the way it is. Elites like Robert Reich and Paul Krugman and Al Gore will tell you what you'll be paid, how much health care you'll get, how much risk you can take, what kind of car you can drive, how much water you can use to flush your toilet, because … That's The Way It Is. He may have passed away last week, but Walter Cronkite will never die.

Comments

[Grier Graham]

Cronkite hailed from an era of innocence before Watergate and believed he was Dragnet's Sergeant Joe Friday ("Just the facts, please"). Cronkite always left commentary to Eric Severeid and the end of the show. He believed he could tell a straight, unbiased story and let people form their own opinions. Cronkite deemed Vietnam an important story and brought it into our living rooms so that we could form our own judgements. Cronkite gave Watergate prominent play on the news and catapulted it to the realm of important news. His signature sign off, "and that's the way it is," was a call to attention and implicit in that is that, if you don't like, change it. He never said, "and that's the way it has to be."

[Jeff Eckles]

Anything is possible. The pillars of mediocrity will crumble... are crumbling before our very eyes. In a way it's a blessing we don't have Uncle Walter's pacifying platitude to lure us into a bovine stupor. Before the new house can be built, the old one must be razed. In order to tear 'er down, you gotta make some dust, noise and mess. Let's roll up the shirt sleaves, grab our sledge hammers and get to work. She's not gonna fall on her own. Anything is possible.

[Frank MacMillan]

Amen, Andy. From your mouth to God's ear. (BTW, Walter declared the war over after Tet, the biggest victory of the war.) Also, those little microchips coincided with "Morning in America" - dramatically slashed taxes to incentivize growth, a growth which lasted almost without rest for over 20 years. We are where we are today, back to Walter's nanny state, because an uninformed American public confused choosing the next "American Idol" with voting for a new Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. it was a deeply unserious act by a celebrity besotted electorate. it will not happen again and we will return to our entrepreneurial high spirits, hopefully not too late.

[Kevin Kauer]

Excellent points, as ususal.

[Jeff Gaus]

Andy, you've nailed it. Cronkite was right out or "Farenhiet 451"; the talking head on the video wall telling us what to think. Journalists are supposed to challenge and expose, not lull us into a stupor.