The 2020 New Year Edition Highlights from 2019 PY-O-MY Letters and My 2020 Wish List
My wishes for the New Year
Healthy 2020 to everyone I love and have loved:
-my biological kids, their two kids
-my four stepchildren and their ten kids (in Alaska, Montana and Highland Park)
-Eleanor and her three (in Brooklyn and Kentucky)
-And finally, I hope it’s a terrible year for Mitch McConnell.
For me in 2020 I hope:
– to play tennis at least 52 times
-Media Burn has its most productive year ever
-the movie of our jungle exploration will be available on Netflix or somewhere you can watch it
-my book will be published so anyone can see it
-the White Sox will be fun to watch and become a contender
Now, for the highlights from 2019’s 12 Py-O-My letters:
From January 1, 2019
best wish for the new year:
From February 1, 2019: TV As Reality
I was there when TV started. As the first TV generation, we were hard-wire-imprinted to the Magnavox (then the Admirals and Zeniths). From 1947 to 1958, I watched everything all the time. A big part of the attraction (addiction?) was that it was LIVE, actually happening as we watched. TV took us places and showed us stuff never possible before. It defined our reality.
We never thought about how our media world would become entirely different over time. But, change is always happening. The digital generation probably assumes the way it is now is the only way it can be.
I’ve spent my life (I don’t call it a “ career”) watching and producing TV and video that’s about and with real people. I can’t help filtering the world through TV. It’s what I’ve done, thought about, taught about and read about. I’ve been a true believer that it isn’t real unless it’s on TV.
Now, in 2019, almost no TV can be believed as real (except some sports–definitely not including the Super Bowl.) For most people, particularly under 35, TV is not where they spend their media time. The world is now based on global digitality. It has taken less than 12 years for the cell phone to conquer. I marvel every day about the worldwide impact of having a computer and camera on all of us.
But I can make a case that TV still dominates how people perceive the world. It goes a long way to explain who Trump is. He’s the first leader to communicate primarily by tweeting. Countless hours of TV are reporting on his digital output. If his tweets weren’t on TV, would they have the impact? (i.e., if a tweet falls…) I say NO. Content aside—and that’s a huge assumption—he is the master at bridging digital media with TV to get what he wants.
Trump is from my TV Generation. He is a creature of the power of TV. He was a TV star with his own prime time network show for 14 years doing a reality show that had absolutely no relationship to reality. But I have to think it became HIS reality. He communicates with the world by Twitter but governs by TV. The advisors he trusts the most aren’t generals or politicians, scholars or lawyers.
It’s people like him who filter the world through TV. Mark Burnett is Exhibit A. He just about created Reality TV. He was the all-time “genius” who produced every episode of The Apprentice, 185 of which starred Donald Trump. Burnett was (IS?) Trump’s mentor and billionaire partner. I actually think that even though he always knew it was acting, the Trump character came to believe that Reality TV was REAL after spending so long doing it and getting recognition and hundreds of millions from it.
And think about Don Jr. He was on The Apprentice every week during his 30’s. And Ivanka appeared weekly with her dad from when she was 25 until 34. It’s the Kool-Aid of the family. And now the world has been forced to drink it for two years and counting.
Though this President is a creature of TV, the irony is that his primary weapon is emotionally attacking the very mediums he has mastered. His concentration on media people who do their best to tell it straight has appeal to millions.
How long can it last?
It feels to me that when he’s on TV every day, he digs himself in deeper.
But, so far he’s still winning.
From March 1, 2019: Live from Washington, It’s Wednesday Afternoon
It was a captivating TV event, the hearing with Michael Cohen testifying to the House Oversight Committee. The effect of him blasting Trump reminded me of the day in 1973 when John Dean, Counsel to the White House, went before the Watergate Committee He was the first administration official to accuse Nixon of direct involvement with Watergate and the resulting cover-up. Of course, it eventually led to the only resignation of a U.S. President in history.
There’s nothing quite like the real-life drama of hearings like this. The first one I remember ended on my tenth birthday in 1954. I didn’t understand why it mattered so much or why my parents were glued to the TV, but the power and drama of live TV made an indelible impression. Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn, his chief counsel, who were hunting for Communists using whatever tactics they could.
McCarthy was later censured by the Senate and Cohn went on to private practice in New York for 30 years. Among those he represented were Rupert Murdoch, George Steinbrenner and various Mafia figures like Tony Salerno. Cohn was Donald Trump’s lawyer and mentor (in major misdeeds, I say) starting in 1973 until Cohn was disbarred in 1986.
As one of my mentors, Peter Drucker, used to remind us about karma: “What goes around comes around.” Santayana had it right: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Nobody asked me, but there’s far too much repeating and too little learning from the past at the moment.
From April 1, 2019: Not an April Fool’s Joke
Today, what looks to me as a likely smoking gun for the Trumps and the current White House was fired by a woman who has been in the White House security office for 18 years. Patricia (“Tricia”) Newbold has come forward to the House Oversight Committee. Baltimore Congressman Elijah E. Cummings (D, MD) is the chair. The committee and its legal team want to know who got highest level security clearances from the White House and how they got them after being denied by the staff (civil service) in charge (Ms. Newbold). They will subpoena anyone and any documents on their list if the White House doesn’t voluntarily offer them to the committee.
Newbold has been officially designated a “whistleblower” with all the protections that go with it. She has told of the disregard and discrimination she has been subject to in the past two years after her decisions had been overruled.
It so happens that she is a small person who has been constantly subjected to workplace harassment by her superiors. She testified under oath to the committee that her bosses moved sensitive files so high she couldn’t reach them in her office:
As little as I am, I’m willing to fight and stand up for what I know is right, and they’ve always respected that about me. And it was hard for them to see me in a situation in which I kind of had to submit to my subordinates and ask them, would you mind going to get me that file? It’s humiliating to not be able to independently work and do the job that you need.
We will remember the Patricia Newbold story, 2019. I expect the ripples from this historic revelation will turn into major waves and bring about big changes, even if it takes until November 2020.
From June 1, 2019: Binge Drinking
When I was teaching in college for 12 years, starting in 2001, I realized I didn’t know much about the real lifestyles of the students. One thing I was amazed about was the extent of binge drinking. When I asked them, about one in three told me that they drank more than six drinks within a two-hour period over the previous weekend. Many drank lots more.
Maybe I was naïve. Maybe it’s not a surprise to you. The stats from the National Institutes of Health bear it out. They reported that in 2016, “37.9 percent of college students ages 18–22 reported binge drinking in the past month.”
I won’t moralize or make generalized conclusions about the state of this generation or our country. Though I must say it is really disturbing to me that they’re spending their lives this way. And what about the other 65% of 18-24-year-olds who are not in college? Do they binge drink less, the same or more? It seems unlikely that their habits are much different than the college students.
From September 1, 2019
This comment came from a regular PY-O-MY House Organ correspondent, a Nicaraguan native who spends his time between his companies in Nicaragua and Miami. He is adamant about the horrors the current strongman President, Daniel Ortega, who was originally part of the junta that followed the revolution in 1979, but has, with his wife, become as oppressive and corrupt as the regime it replaced four decades ago. His comments (name withheld):
My friend, thank you for e-mailing me your interesting Organ, I enjoyed it very much. I learned a lot [and it] is a great piece of literature that I like very much. I have been following and worried about what is happening in Nicaragua. We Nicaraguans hope this is going to be solved sooner than later. This guy Ortega and company after killing so many students and civil and peaceful unharmed people protesting, no longer has the trust of the Country.
I’ve traveled to Nicaragua more than a dozen times in the last 42 years. The situation now is a terrible tinderbox. People are constantly scared for their lives. Resentment of Ortega and the government is everywhere. But of course, he has the military.
No surprise, the United States is still officially supporting the leader/dictator who has changed the constitution so he can essentially serve as President for life. He’s 73.
From November 1, 2019
A quote from H.L. Mencken with scary contemporary resonance is from the pages of the Baltimore Evening Sun, nearly 100 years ago.
No comment necessary…
From December 1, 2019
Most Americans probably believe that Trump is corrupt.
But, apparently, it doesn’t matter. Trump is television. And television has no responsibility to be moral. TV exists to sell products. Like Trump.
He has sold his stuff continuously for 18 years—four on Fox & Friends, 14 on the Apprentice, and the last four on the one-man show, I’m The President on nearly every channel every day and night.
The thing that’s historically unique about Trump as TV is that it has its own roadshow, a traveling medicine show more than 300,000 Americans have gone to see in person in 2019 alone…more than a million in four years.
This year, he has done three big arena shows in Florida, two in Texas, North Carolina, and Louisiana. One each in Michigan Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Hampshire, New Mexico, Minnesota, Mississippi and Kentucky.
None in California, New York, Illinois, or New Jersey.
Each rally Is major production…like a free concert by the TV idol. (They do pay for parking, food, and drinks.)
I wasn’t around to see Mussolini’s rallies, but they had a similar look.
I’ve watched a couple Trump rallies on CSPAN lately. The closing credits remind us that it is brought to you by “Trump for President Inc.”
I understand it in a way I hadn’t before…the link between this TV star and personal appearances.
A sampling of what he says at the rallies:
Will our country be ruled by the corrupt Democrats who get their support from the horrible corrupt fake news?
The greatest nation in the history of the world and we are making it greater than ever before. Proud citizens, like you, helped build this country and together we are taking back our country and we’re taking it back from some very very bad people. We are returning power to you, the American people, with your help, your devotion and your drive.
We are going to keep on working, we are going to keep on fighting and we are going to keep on winning, winning, winning. We are one movement, one people, one family and one glorious nation, under God. Our beautiful America is thriving like never before and, ladies and gentlemen, the best is yet to come. Together, we will together make America wealthy again.
Tune in next year to see how long this dog and pony show lasts.
Watching the beaches on Lake Michigan wash away and the record-high levels causing waves to pummel Lake Shore Drive, I’m thinking about the generation who will inherit the damaged planet we’re handing over to them…too big and depressing a subject for a hopeful new year.
Here’s who makes it a joyous 2020 for us:
PY-O-MY 