Catharsis or where are Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John clones cuz the Frank Burns' clones are everywhere!
So as I am watching these 47 Senators, too stupid for their own good let alone the country’s good, dominate the headlines, I see Tom Cotton morph into Frank Burns. Seriously, I did. I shook my head to awaken my conscious mind. But then I wondered: so where are Hawkeye and Trapper?
More after the orange squiggly!
For you younguns’, Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John were the television heroes of my youth. M*A*S*H was THE show we all watched at a time when the country did not get to choose when we watched or on what device. It was on the one television in our house. We watched together. Parents, adult kids, teen kids, little kids. Some times we gathered, aunts, uncles and cousins and watched together taking turns at one relative's house, as we had done with Laugh-In for the previous four years.
My parents were hardly flaming liberals (although if they were alive today they definitely might be). They had come of age in 1920's and 1930's as children of immigrants, adored FDR (my dad and his brothers went of to the CCC camps during the depression); but they also had voted Eisenhower (cause he promised to end the Korean war). Voted for JFK. But during the protests and in their minds, (they saw protests as “riots”), they were pulled to the right. However, shows like “Laugh-in” and then M*A*S*H pulled them back using humor.
Anyway, dufus pols like Cotton would have been great fodder for that humor. Yes, we have the Daily Show, which is brilliant, but like most shows now, it is not watched “together” (as a country) therefore, the discussions are within one’s own cadre.
Don’t know where I am going with this except that I cannot for the life of me understand how half of our country, too many of that half my age, got so stupid!!! Did all our Hawkeyes and Trappers die prematurely??? My generation had our share of Frank Burns, in government in the form of W, Cheney, Wolfowitz, et. al., and as of late, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney. We had/ have our Hawkeyes and Trappers too. In government Bernie Sanders, Sheldon Whitehouse, Elizabeth Warren. In media we had the Smothers Brothers, the shows I mentioned; and in music from Peter, Paul and Mary to Woody and Arlo Guthrie to Dylan to John Lennon.
Tom Cotton, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz are this generation’s Frank Burns. Where are the Hawkeyes and Trappers? John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Larry Wilmore are doing their part on cable. But what about in music? In congress itself.
I am frustrated and wondering if we can stop this disaster of idiocy running our congress at all. In my mind, we need to be galvanized, brought together……music, media, news, leadership. We need a multitude of Hawkeyes and Trappers visible to all, uniting us, young and old TOGETHER as we were at one time. Is that even possible anymore???? Are we doomed to have our country viewed around the world as one giant Frank Burns????