Farewell to Carl Reiner, a Giant in a Generation of Giants

From Wikimedia Commons, a 1970 NBC publicity image, Goldie Hawn and Carl Reiner who appeared together in an episode of "Laugh-In."

When I teach media history, we usually spend some time watching clips from “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” The early 1960s sitcom is notable for several reasons. It’s witty, it presents a married couple who deeply love each other but, unlike idyllic home comedy couples of the 1950s, also fight and disagree. In that way, it’s the second decade’s “I Love Lucy,” a trend-setting show for its time.

In “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” Mary Tylor Moore wore slacks. She struggled and rebelled against the constraints of the American nuclear family. The show as also meta-media content—media content that comments on the nature of media.

And it was associated with an entertainment giant, Carl Reiner, who was part of a generation of giants, and who among a pantheon of comedic geniuses stood out.

Think of Reiner performing the “2,000-Year-Old Man” comedy routine with Mel Brooks. Sure, Brooks was the title character, but even he noted that it was Reiner who, as the interviewer, drove the routine.

It may not be great, edgy cinema of its era, but I am a fan of the 1966 movie “The Russians are Coming! the Russians are Coming!” I saw it when it ran several years later on TV, and it was a classic movie that my family and I enjoyed, a film my wife and children and I would view now and then on video. It’s partly notable for the comedic giants who assembled in that cast—including two of my favorites, Alan Arkin and Carl Reiner.

In comedy, Reiner was usually the straight man, but in that movie, it was Arkin’s Russian naval officer, Lt. Rozanov, who was the calm one against Reiner’s panicky Walt Whitaker. Whitaker is a comedy writer, and to have a director, writer, producer, comedian and actor play him seemed like a brilliant casting move.

In this early scene, watch the interplay between Reiner and Arkin:

And late in the movie, Reiner’s and Arkin’s characters finally come to some peaceful coexistence:

Reiner was born in the 1920s, and was thus is a member of my father’s Greatest Generation. He was behind the scenes in that generation's war—in fact, ended up sort of in theater—as a corporal in the Army Air Corps. Like many of his generation, his future path was set in motion by his World War II experience.

I am a fan. Almost anything he was associated with was worth watching. Late in life, he was one of my favorite characters in the Ocean films. He didn’t mind playing an old man as an old man.

I think some human touch, some realization of the possibility of being a genuine person but still extracting insight and comedy from the moment, was a mark of a Carl Reiner project. That’s what made “The Dick Van Dyke Show” so great. Sure, Dick Van Dyke had something to do with it, too. But a key to making that and to so many other Hollywood projects work was the gentle, brilliant humanity of Carl Reiner.

Goodbye, Carl, we will remember you and we already miss you.

Democracy on the Edge on this Freedom Holiday

Freed woman statue in Austin, Texas, image by Jennifer Rangubphai, from Wikimedia Commons.

On the eve of the relaunch of the Trump presidential horror show, I’m worried.

Polls, which have caused him to rail against not just CNN, but also Fox News, are showing that President Trump’s campaign has struck the iceberg and is fast taking on water. Maybe Trump can suck down some of his GOP cronies with him.

But it’s June. Polls now don’t mean much. If we’ve seen anything in this bizarre year of 2020, it’s that reality shifts rapidly in these turbulent times.

Paging Julie Nolte her videos in which the Canadian comic explains the pandemic to her past self:

So, Democrats, Libertarians, Socialists, independents, sane Republicans: Don’t let your guard down. This is the orange monster who lost the popular vote by millions in 2016 and still got the ticket to attempt and fail to lead the Free World. He could do it again, if his enemies are divided and complacent--and division and voter suppression are his strategies.

And wounded Trump is clearly dangerous Trump. As racial unrest has roiled the nation, Trump has played divider rather than any kind of unifying figure. For example, he set a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Juneteenth. Public pressure forced him to change to June 20, and he acted like he is the Marco Polo of holidays, bringing Juneteenth to the light of day when one of his Secret Service agents explained it to him.

It was news to the president that his own White House has released a Juneteenth statement every year. I encountered the holiday as a young reporter in Missouri in the early 1980s, and it was a deficit of my white Iowa education that I had not heard of it before—but at least I’m not so naïve that I need it explained to me more than a generation later.

Then again, Trump has repeatedly shown that, whatever happens on Tuesday, he won’t remember it on Thursday even if there is a video.

And once again, the monster-in-chief is hogging the media oxygen at a time when too many of us can’t breathe. Whether it’s due to official violence or a respiratory pandemic, the breath of life is in too short of a supply. Truth is being constantly chocked by nonsense and violence.

I worry. Wounded Trump has issued not very veiled threats of violence against protestors in Tulsa on the eve of his rally. He has celebrated a holiday of emancipation by disrespecting attempts to petition for redress of grievances. Let freedom ring?

Meanwhile, big issues still face us. The virus has not gone away, nor will it magically disappear. Global warming, despite a massive economic downturn that reduces pollution, hasn’t become a problem of the past. Racial injustice is a tough reality for us to figure out how to equitably fix. The world economy faces challenges that it would be difficult for an intelligent leader to face, let alone one who both knows next to nothing and is convinced his is the best brain in the room. (Donald, no, just no).

Masks, which are a key to slowing the spread of a new, potentially deadly disease, are politicized. Clumsy fake videos that seek to discredit CNN are tweeted by our Dear Leader. The Supreme Court has the gall to read the law and attempt to apply it, which causes nuclear Don to go to DEFCON Rage.

A friend of mine posted recently on Facebook one of those anti-media memes. I don’t recall the picture, but the text was “when did the Media become our enemy?”

They never did, but we’ve learned to easily label the news media as an it rather than a them, and to think of “it” as a singular, enemy force for writing or covering things we don’t like.

The media became our enemy when we decided that it was too hard to face hard truths. And we have a lot of hard truths that badly need facetime. We’re being led down multiple paths of disaster.

So here is my Juneteenth wish. May this holiday, that celebrates the news of freedom reaching the edges of the failed Confederacy not be too overshadowed by the insane rejection of reality that threatens to shackle our democracy once again. Let freedom be free. And the price of freedom is not just bought by soldiers who die in our wars, but also in the work of citizens who pay attention, discern facts, face hard truths and then vote.

The Loud Echoes of 20th Century History

I can’t recall where I saw it—Facebook or Twitter, probably—but someone else observed that 2020 is becoming the unholy combination of 1918 and 1968.

The pandemic isn’t history, yet. We’re waiting to see if a second wave will crash over us, and it seems kind of likely, unfortunately. In 1918, it wasn’t the first wave of the flu that killed more people than World War I did—it was wave number two, and I sure hope that sad history does not repeat with this latest virus—which, by the way, we should all know by now, is not the flu.

From Wikimedia Commons, 1918 image of U.S. Army camp in Kansas.

As states open up, friends, please be as safe as you can be. If you’re going to be close to other humans, stay as distant as you can and wear your mask. Don’t touch your face. Wash your hands. Sure, your mask does not protect you all that well, but if we all cover our faces in tight places, we’ll protect each other.

And my nightly binge of news watching this week has been full of people in the streets. Something is happening here, what is not yet exactly clear, but as this country has lost two Vietnam War’s worth of lives, suddenly the specter of America’s original sin—our troubled history of systemic racism—explodes once again

1968, April, soldier guards site of riot after King assassination. Library of Congress image from Wikimedia Commons.

As America’s cities burns, our incompetent, tone-deaf, man child president pours gasoline on the fire. He wants to be tough and revels in “tough” gestures. He can’t console, bring together, calm down, empathize—anything that this country needs right now.

June began with the heavy-handed clearing of protesters so an old white man could strut across the street with his all-white posse and awkwardly hold a book he’s never read—The Bible—in front of a church where the church officials were caught by surprise.

I don’t want to judge another man’s heart—but the whole event felt icky and weird. It’s wrong for an American politician to be waving the Bible that way in a clumsy media faux event. Seeing the images and video of this president standing before the church ought to be the media content that, like Michael Dukakis in a panzer, finally settles this election contest and causes us to rise up and wash Trump and his party away in a righteous flood.

I can only hope. Unfortunately, Trump playing the law-and-order card might not fail. And he’s pouring the gasoline partly because the riots in the streets at least help us forget the other story—Trump’s massively incompetent handling of the pandemic.

Anyway, 1918 and 1968, all at once. With 1929 tossed in there for extra seasoning. Is America great again, or what?

What is new is how swiftly events move and change and become movements via social media. Cell phones captured the tragic end of George Floyd’s life, and suddenly there is a wave of protest.

And reporters are also under attack. Many of the police have been in the Trump camp, and dangerous rhetoric about enemies of the people is coming to fruition, even as the president is ready to militarize the response.

Democracy hangs in the balance this year in the cradle of modern democracy. Social media and politics are colliding in a unique year that will define us for generations. 2020. It’s bigger than 1918, 1968 or 1929, and this year will reveal who we really are.