The morning starts out fine: up before the sun, get breakfast going, feed the cats, take a breath of air with a cup of coffee, watch the birds, think about how nice it is not to have to think about anything for another 20 minutes or so.
I could have easily prolonged the moment for at least a little bit longer, but I couldn’t stop myself. My finger followed a mind of its own to the power button on the television, flipped to NBC. An instant shock to the system, better than an ice-cold shower for clearing out the weekend’s cobwebs. A half hour of New England Cable News goes down a lot easier, is more fulfilling, but NBC’s Today show is guaranteed to get my blood moving, my veins popping.
While I clean up my dishes, brush my teeth, stuff my pockets with cell phone, wallet, car keys and reading glasses, I ingest small doses of the network’s cavalcade of celebrity news. In the span of only five minutes, I see a People magazine’s worth of famous people: Sarah Palin, who’s pushing her new TV show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska; Karl Rove, the ex-Bush advisor, who’s pushing the idea that Sarah Palin lacks the “gravitas” required of anyone who would be President; the Pinocchio-esque Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who’s pushing his new book, Leadership and Crisis, an indictment of Barack Obama and his handling of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf; Barack Obama and his longtime advisor David Axelrod, who are pushing a confusing and apparently still fluid plan to extend or not to extend, temporarily or permanently, the Bush era tax cuts.
Yes, each of the aforementioned persons is a politician, but they are mixed so seamlessly into the Today show format—blended smoothly with a spot on Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who plays Harry Potter, a piece about the world’s largest building (Dubai’s Buri Khalifa), and a long report on the “dueling engagement” of former couple Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson—that what they do for a living hardly matters.
Sufficiently over-stimulated, sure that my cynicism, no matter how justified, is bad for my health, exhausted by the obvious pointlessness of it all and ready to throw in the towel before the day has even started, I reach up to shut off the television just in time to see stock footage of ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, followed by stock footage of new House Speaker John Boehner, followed by fresh, up-to-the-minute footage of Heath Shuler, a former NFL quarterback and two-term U.S. Rep., who’s just told NBC’s sister station MSNBC that he plans to challenge Pelosi for the position of House Minority Leader.
Shuler, it turns out, is a Blue Dog Democrat from North Carolina who sees Pelosi as too immoderately left-wing. “We’ve just come off the largest loss for the Democratic Party in almost a century,” Shuler sputters. “And to be able to put Speaker Pelosi as minority leader is truly—it’s unacceptable for our party, to move our party forward in a moderate direction.”
I consider Shuler’s remark as I fire up my Ford truck and head off to work.
On the way down I-91, I listen to my old radio colleague Chris Collins, who is midway through his show on WHMP. He’s taking calls from listeners. The subject of the day is a bit of controversy brewing on the Northampton City Council, where Ward 7 Councilor Gene Tacy has come under harsh criticism from his colleagues for asking questions (and allegedly “grandstanding”) about city spending on fire and ambulance service. Caller after caller cheers Tacy not only for asking questions about city spending, but for remaining calm as his colleagues kick the tar out of him.
One caller is particularly pointed in his criticism of Ward 2 Councilor Paul Spector, whose claim to be a progressive Democrat who wants to help blue-collar folks rings hollow, the caller says, when he goes after someone like Tacy, who apparently epitomizes blue-collar folk. From the context Collins supplies, I get the sense that Spector has decried Tacy for fanning the flames of popular discontent with government—the voter anger that was on display in the midterm elections a few weeks ago. It doesn’t surprise me that Spector and Tacy are going at it in Northampton—Spector is to Nancy Pelosi as Tacy is to Heath Shuler, I guess—but suddenly I feel horrible.
I haven’t even digested my breakfast and my day is already filled with a sense of hopelessness. Maybe tomorrow I’ll start my day with ESPN.
