The boards here today seem to belie an undercurrent of sadness and disillusionment. Olbermann feels hurt. Obama supporters feel betrayed or compromised. Long-time bloggers feel unloved. It's just a sorry place to be on a Friday of the first full week of Summer.
But, in a larger sense, we are grieving about the very real possibility that our way of life is changing completely and forever, and even though our society and our world have reached the point of critical mass where such change is not only inevitable but preferable, this does not help to mitigate the fear which accompanies any journey into terra incognita. After all, most living Americans cannot remember a time when travel was anything but discretionary and distance was no obstacle. Nor can we envision a world where most families rent their homes or spend most of their household income merely feeding themselves.
As our security ebbs away, so too do the icons of the old world, human symbols of comfort and order and a stable world outside ourselves: Carlin, Russert, and a parade of faces both solid and familiar and seemingly eternal.
And so we grieve.
This sociological phenomenon of public grief is quite perplexing and even more annoying. This world is chock full of good people who cherish their children's futures and sacrifice their dreams for the comfort of their families. And many of these people are stalwart souls who lead principled lives of integrity and honesty, who receive good reports from friends and associates alike for their admirable conduct and notable kindnesses.
But these people invariably go the way of all flesh and their passing merits the tersest of notices. And we strangers to their intimate circles are most often peeved or downright frustrated when our business is delayed by the protracted mourning of the bereaved. Sometimes we even dare give voice to our earnest observation that such mourning amounts to childish self-indulgence.
So I am just a bit peeved myself by Olbermann's persistent resurrection of the Russert death as a justification or excuse for a host of things -- absences, omissions, petty squabbles among business competitors, etc.
Look, I'm not against true expressions of grief, although I will admit to coming from a generation where grief was considered among the most intimate of emotions, jealously to be hidden from public view. So I find this phenomenon of protracted and seemingly endless wakes for the high-born dead to be distasteful and just a tad bit cynical, if not overtly commercial. The Princess Diana phenom was perhaps an historical aberration, but the almost ceaseless self-congratulatory funereal rites following 9/11, followed by the political masque which constituted the Reagan funeral, affirmed only one thing: We Americans are grieving about something fundamental, something we sincerely believe to be gone from our world forever, and we are looking for almost any surrogate to serve as talisman or focus for expression of that grief.
Frankly, I think it is the lost innocence of childhood which so many of us are really grieving for.
But enough already! Sure, Russert was, as lawyers and journalists and corporate executives go, an exemplary man who loved his family and performed his job admirably. But it strikes me as ironic that a man characterized by his public optimism and his indefatigability should become in his passing the excuse for a protracted paralysis of the collective will amongst his friends and colleagues.
I am not dismissing Russert so much as I am rejecting the self-serving and self-affirming celebration which NBC gave itself using Russert as an excuse.
It serves as proof positive that the "journalistic" community has become insular, incestuous and completely isolated from the "everyman" public which it cites so authoritatively yet knows and appreciates only through the interpretation of demographers or statisticians. Their community has become yet another "painted sepulchre" in the necropolis of a stagnant society where the denizens sit endlessly in sack cloth and ashes, bemoaning losses which have long ago ceased to possess a discrete form, even in memory.
The movement politics which has emerged and coalesced in this election cycle is, in my opinion, the antithesis of a nostalgic grief for a past that never was. We are being called by the forces of History to create a better future. Where hope reigns, there is no grief.