MONDAY: Broadway came to CNN!

MONDAY, JUNE 9, 2025

The key words were "Good luck!" We watched George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck on CNN last Saturday night. 

Overwhelmingly, we were struck by how irrelevant to the current situation that high-profile effort was.

Edward R. Murrow's bout with Senator Joseph McCarthy took place in the fall of 1953—more than seventy years ago.  The television industry barely existed at that point in time!

There was no internet at that time, no 24-hour "cable news." Talk radio as we came to know it in the 1980s didn't yet exist.

There were no podcasts at all, let alone podcasts manned by comedians and the like. Indeed, social media didn't exist! It wasn't easy to hear crazy ideas and nutty claims—you had to seek them out. 

Life was very different then. The nation was almost exactly as described by Laura Ingalls Wilder in the first of her "Little House" books:

Chapter 1

Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs.

The great, dark trees of the Big Woods stood all around the house, and beyond them were other trees and beyond them were more trees. As far as a man could go to the north in a day, or a week, or a whole month, there was nothing but woods. There were no houses. There were no roads. There were no people. There were only trees and the wild animals who had their homes among them.

Wolves lived in the Big Woods, and bears, and huge wild cats. Muskrats and mink and otter lived by the streams. Foxes had dens in the hills and deer roamed everywhere.

To the east of the little log house, and to the west, there were miles upon miles of trees, and only a few little log houses scattered far apart in the edge of the Big Woods.

So far as the little girl could see, there was only the one little house where she lived with her Father and Mother, her sister Mary and baby sister Carrie. A wagon track ran before the house, turning and twisting out of sight in the woods where the wild animals lived, but the little girl did not know where it went, nor what might be at the end of it.

According to experts, that's roughly what life in the U.S. was like when Murrow and McCarthy clashed.

Today, crazy ideas, and disinformation, come at the American citizen from every conceivable point on the dial. The disinformation starts early in the morning and continues into the night.

It was puzzling to hear the Broadway audience applauding various events portrayed in the show. The applause seemed to suggest that the events of 1953 bore some significant resemblance to the state of play which obtains today.

Sorry, Charlie! Our current situation is much more complex—and it's phantasmagorically different. Pleasing tales about a greater American past aren't likely to help us now. The fact that we're eager to swallow such bait may represent a point of concern with respect to our ability to find our way out of this mess.

For amusement purposes only: Good Night, and Good Luck started as an Oscar-nominated 2005 feature film. The leading authority on the film includes this humorous bit of trivia:

Good Night, and Good Luck

[...]

One complaint about the film among test audiences was their belief that the actor playing McCarthy was too over the top, not realizing that the film used actual archive footage of McCarthy himself.

Assuming that story is actually true, something seemed to be wrong with the guy! In those days, as perhaps in these, test audiences apparently thought that couldn't be true in real life.