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.

What I Don’t Hear About the Pandemic

The enemy. CDC image from Wikimedia Commons.

“We have to learn to live with this.” So said Gov. Kim Reynolds, R-Iowa, on April 27 when she announced that 77 Iowa counties would start seeing their businesses open.

A columnist for The Gazette, Lyz Lenz, compared her to Lord Farquaad from the movie Shrek in a column about how the governor’s actions show that Iowans apparently aren’t all in this together. The attitude of too many seems to be that meatpacking workers are expendable. Reynolds is a Hamburger Helper Republican, in the camp of President Let Them Eat Meat Trump, whose only use of his presidential powers to intervene in the industrial production part of the economy in an emergency is to make it harder for states or local governments to shut down meat plants for worker safety.

VP Mike Pence visits the Mayo Clinic without a mask. Iowa opens up most of its counties before the pandemic starts to slow down. President Trump continues to wage war, primarily on the media, via tweet storms that do nothing to unite the country and solve the pandemic.

And I’m getting tired.

You know what? My governor, whom I mostly disagree with on everything, does have a point. We do have to learn to live with the COVID-19 virus, and we have to learn to economically function, somehow. A vaccine may or may not be coming in a year or so. But we don’t know for sure when or even if it will arrive, and any vaccine won’t be here soon enough to set our lives aright in the meantime.

So, we have to live with this virus. We have to function. Yet, that should not mean that we sacrifice lives for the economy or for the production of animal protein.

What do I want? I want the media and our leaders to focus on what the sane solution is. Because I think there is one.

And it’s New Zealand. That little tiny country that is less than double the size of Iowa has pretty much crushed the pandemic—without breakthrough medical treatments and without a vaccine.

Leader of the free world.
New Zealand government image from Wikimedia Commons.

Because the Achilles Heel of COVID-19 is that, even if evidence seems to point to an origin in bat viruses, and even if the virus can jump species to cats and dogs, its primary reservoir now is human beings. If we track it, isolate it, keep it from jumping from human-to-human, what then? In a fortnight, it mostly dies out. We can New Zealand it into oblivion if we’re competent and strategic and do the right things, which are mostly not the right-wing things.

I realize there is some need to understand the history of this pandemic. We need to know if it came from a wet market or poor handling of viruses in a Chinese lab. Dark, irrational conspiracy theories about bio-weapons catch hold partly because the Chinese government is not allowing enough science on the origin of COVID-19.

Still, while I think we need the answer, it’s not our most pressing need. Because the Hamburger Helper wing of the GOP is using the origin mystery to justify xenophobia and to change the subject from how badly and chaotically our government responded and is still responding.

There’s no reason that the United States needs to be the hot spot of a respiratory virus from eastern Asia, except government incompetence. And true, while I mostly blame the tangerine tribble at the top, he’s not the full problem, either. The CDC’s test debacle of 2020 doesn’t make government bureaucracy look intelligent and efficient.

But even if Trump is not the entire problem, he sure knows how to pour gasoline on a fire.

And that’s not what I want. I don’t want states having to sneak around and bargain for supplies and hide them from the feds because who knows when the feds will swoop in and confiscate states’ stuff. I don’t want idiots poisoning themselves because they are dumb enough to listen to a discredited, impeached president who doesn’t know anything but is sure willing to share it. I don’t want that president spending his time being bitter, bumbling and muttering dark theories from the corners of his sick mind.

I want New Zealand.

I know, we’re not a small island nation. We can’t obliterate the pandemic as easily as that tiny nation has already almost done. And even in New Zealand, it’s likely COVID-19 will be back, because even the kiwis can’t completely isolate themselves from the rest of the planet.

But we can get our testing act together. We can start quickly building contact tracing infrastructure. We can mandate, rather than lamely suggest, practices to protect food workers, healthcare workers and old people in nursing homes.

If we had the will, and the leadership, we could crush this thing.

COVID-19 can’t live without our help. Right now, idiots among us are protesting stay-at-home orders due to fear, frustration and fakery (some of the protests appear to be right-wing AstroTurf).

And I want more media stories that ignore the dumpster fire political show and focus on how we “live with it.” How we learn to treat this virus, this quiet foe, as the foe that it is.

Mr. President, if you think you’re a wartime leader, start acting like it. If you want a model, her name is Jacinda Arden.

Or maybe another female role model is in order: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. During quarantine, I’ve been re-watching episode of that show—and in most episodes, some surprise demon always appears, the Buffy gang has to scramble and get information and some secret is unlocked that lets Buffy save the day.

I do all my image shopping at Wikimedia Commons, safely, at a social distance.

Sarah Michelle Gellar
at the Dubai International Film Festival 2004.
User "Saudi" on Wikimedia Commons.

She doesn’t just trust her gut. She doesn’t drink Lysol. And if she were running the show, I think we’d all be in better shape. If Jacinda, with her cozy sweatshirts and comforting Facebook talks is not your style, maybe Buffy, with her zingers, is more what you have in mind.

But while Buffy might have been impetuous at times, she learned in each show the importance of listening and teamwork.

And besides knowing that Americans can beat this pandemic before a vaccine arrives to permanently knock it down (we hope), another thing I want is for us to recognize that this is a global, human struggle. When I say “we” can beat the pandemic, I want the “we” to include more that white Americans. All you homo sapiens can carry this virus, but all of you can help beat it, too.

Sure, find out what mistakes the Chinese government made. But don’t blame Chinese people. Just because our orange-skinned president is a buffoon, it’s not true that all Americans are as cray as that. And no one citizen of a country is responsible for all the real or imagined mistakes of that country’s governments—so if you abuse or mistreat any Asian looking person due to your own fears, shame on you.

We need to do better. We need to be better. We need to live with this virus, but not by tossing up our hands and opening stuff up with no plan. We need the intelligence of Willow and the faith of Xander and the maturity of Giles.We do not need the greed and raw incompetence of Donald, nor the corruption of Kim.

We need to understand our enemy and outsmart it.

Sadly, I don’t see enough signs that we’re doing that. And don’t let President (or Governor) Hamburger Helper off the hook for making a hash of things since this crisis began.

And Now My Blog is Fit to Share

Facebook symbol from Wikimedia Commons.

For the past several weeks, this media blog has been forbidden on Facebook.

I don’t know why. True, I do express political opinions here—but also true, they’re pretty mild opinions. In my commentary on American media, I opine all the time, and I’m not very kind to President Donald Trump in this venue.

But being anti-Trump is still allowed, not against the law. Yet. I certainly have not engaged in any discourse here that is iffy from a First Amendment point of view—no true threats, no fraud, no libel. Calling Trump an idiot is not libel—mostly because he’s a prominent politician and is thus open to public criticism. And, also, he’s an idiot; truth is a defense against libel.

Yeah, I’m having some fun as I write this. I am feeling a little liberated. Over weekend, several Facebook friends tried to post links to my blog, and all were blocked. They all got the “violates community standards message” from the company.

Well, being OK with the First Amendment doesn’t give me the right to have my blog promoted on Facebook. It’s a private company, and sets its own rules. On the other hand, one reason the site is so popular is that it is a fairly open venue for expression. I don’t mind that Facebook attempts to establish some rules—let’s hope the election of 2020, unlike the one of 2016, is not hijacked so much by fakery spread by Facebook.

The story changed this morning. I was tagged in a post that linked to a blog post of mine--I was back on Facebook! I posted a link myself to be sure, and it was not blocked. So, thanks, Facebook. You’ve let this mostly harmless little blog back in to your Marketplace of Ideas. I think that’s great.

But it was inexplicable that the AI bots at Facebook blocked me in the first place, with no explanation other than a generic “this post does not meet our community standards.” I did read those standards, and found nothing relevant to this blog.

As inexplicably as it appeared, the Facebook ban evaporated. Bravo? Score one for mild free speech?

Thanks, Mary Vermilion. Your post was the first sign Iowa Media Life was Facebook safe once more.

 Still, it leaves me feeling a bit odd. The ban descended mysteriously. It wasn’t quite as mysterious why it was lifted—family and friends played a role—but still. It’s a reminder that Facebook is a private reserve, not a public park. It has a lot of importance in our lives and politics, but is not under any public control.

It’s just a reality to keep in mind. It points to a problem for Facebook, when it's rules appear capricious and it's actions can frustrate its users.

What Helps Me Escape from TRMS

TRMS—the Rachel Maddow Show—has become almost required viewing for my wife and me this COVID-19 season. She is the liberal news explainer, and I appreciate that.

Lately, she’s been on a bit of an editorial crusade, sounding the alarm about infections at the nation’s nursing homes. It’s a worthwhile cause.

And I find I rarely watch Fox News these days. As a journalism professor, I used to try to catch at least a bit of that network each week, just to sample it—I don’t have the heart any more. Any part of the Trump Universe alternative right-wing media zone of delusion is just too much for me at the moment.

So, I read The Gazette, my local paper. I listen to NPR. I catch the president’s briefings when I want a small dose of crazy, and I always feel WTF after a few seconds. And then there is Rachel.

But I also have to escape. What is my relief when life and a pandemic brings me down?

Lately, besides TRMS, my wife and I have become fan kids of a new NBC show. You can’t exactly call it a comedy or a drama. It’s sort of like a sitcom in that it has a situation and a fair amount of comedy, but it’s a mixed genre show.

Publicity image from NBC.com. Jane Levy as Zoey.

It’s that girl from Suburgatory, Jane Levy, all grown up and coding in San Francisco. It’s “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist.” From my own limited experience visiting high tech sites in the Bay Area, the set isn’t really over-the-top. The cafeterias at Facebook (which won’t post this post because my media blog is inexplicably banned) are way better than the cereal bar, by the way.



Besides Ms. Levy being talented (catch her practicing saying “hey” in the latest episode), there are other gems in this cast. Superstar Mary Steenburgen is mom. Peter Gallagher, years after being in a coma in that Christmas movie, gets to act with his eyes as her fading father.

I don’t know if the characters are “real” in any real sense. But it feels real. Mostly, the show is an old-fashioned Broadway musical using contemporary pop songs. The show is also commenting on contemporary high tech life, the feeling of it before the pandemic of 2020. It's kind of sad to think of all those characters now being stuck in their over-priced apartments.

On this blog, I’ve written before about music and how it expresses emotion. I’ve used it as an assignment in several classes—having students parse the reason a particular song touches them or has meaning. And the musical covers of pop songs on Zoey are watchable and fun.





So, I recommend it. The duet between Steenburgen and Gallagher at the end of the latest episode may make you cry. It did me, and it felt good.

Finally, worth the mention even though he always mentions news, is the incomparable Randy Rainbow. I need a smile now and then, and his latest video certainly delivers:

When News Makes You Cry

I think it’s all getting got me. The news is hard to consume these days, and it is a tragedy that the sad news won’t stop.

Twice in last two days, news reports left me a sobbing mess, weeping alone for strangers I don’t know, but whose loss for some reason touches me.

It happened first during the MSNBC wrap-up of COVID-19 news. A report, “Inside One Nurse’s 13-hour Shift in the ICU Hot Zone,” followed the experience of one nurse—and she reported on the loss of a hospital employee. She chocked up, as did I.



Whew. Maybe it’s cleansing to shed some tears—but sadly, I’m afraid we’re in for way more cleansing in days ahead.

Then this morning, I was listening to “Morning Edition” on NPR, and they presented their remembrance of John Prine, the great American singer-songwriter.

“Hello in there.” Here comes the rain again.

The song itself, "Hello in There," is worth listening too, if you can handle it right now:



And, a few days ago, the co-founder of Fountains of Wayne, Adam Schlesinger, died. The cost of this pandemic continues to mount.

I have turned away from the news, to some extent, when I can’t handle it. Bike rides help. But I don’t want to unplug completely.

Credible news is something that’s being hit hard by this crisis—another round of retraction and layoffs is bound to hit American newsrooms.

Well, I’ll shed some tears today. But I will carry on and not lose hope.

In the wake of 9/11, Fountains of Wayne appeared on Conan O’Brien’s late-night TV show to sing a cover of a Kinks song. Conan replayed that clip recently—and it’s message is important, too, especially when the news makes me cry: