Where have you gone, Cary Grant? Before reading Salon's Richard Speer, I don't think I'd understood how the death of Peter Jennings registered in the symbolic realm:

When Peter Jennings succumbed to lung cancer on Aug. 7, the world lost more than a news anchor; it lost an archetype. Above and beyond his contributions as a journalist, Jennings held an appeal in the popular mind owing as much to the Golden Age of Hollywood as to the "Big Three" glory days of network news. The essence of that appeal, his smooth urbanity and air of cultivation, was the precise charisma that had made film stars Frederic March, Cary Grant and David Niven such icons of sophistication in their day; and it is this same appeal that now, with Jennings gone, is utterly missing from a news universe populated by smarmy Shepard Smiths and hipper-than-thou Anderson Coopers.

Peter Jennings and the death of panache

"Discriminating viewers in recent years had but one choice if they sought an evening news presenter who would deliver the day's stories intelligently and with a lagniappe of soul-soothing panache," says Speer: myself, I suppose I was never "discriminating" enough to realize I was making a primarily aesthetic choice when I flipped on the network news. I can't recall ever watching any of those programs for the "soul-soothing" qualities of their presenters, either—I shudder a bit at the thought of having a soul that might be soothed by one of the talking-haircut tribe, no matter what the degree of male suavity exhibited. But then, I stopped watching network news (to the extent that I ever watched habitually enough for it to be something I actively stopped doing) a long time ago, given how limited the actual information payout was from that 22 1/2 minutes (or whatever it now is) of non-commercial airtime. I can think of lots better ways to kill a half-hour, if it comes to that.

Doghouse Riley, while giving Jennings his due as a "pretty good newsman" and "by far the best of the lot in the aftermath of 9/11," has the appropriate specific response to Speer:

Peter Jennings will always represent, to me, the rapid downward spiral of television news from, well, news to entertainment. He's not Cary Grant; he's the guy in the prop Burberry reporting from London in case the semi-literate couldn't figure out why it was called World News Tonite.

But what I really like about DR's post is how the Speer piece leads him to meditate on the peculiar horror of Other People's Nostalgias:

Reading someone waxing nostalgic about Peter Jennings makes me wish that someone somewhere had explained nostalgia to me the same way they explained the Galactic Red Shift, with a balloon covered in dots. You blow the thing up and all the other dots recede from you. This is your nostalgia. But those other galactic dots contain populated worlds full of people born later than you, and their nostalgia will be your Painful Enough To Live Through the First Time. And it will never get any better. First disposable commercial anachronistic "fun" like Freedom Rock or the return of Disco will zoom past you accompanied by Doppler sound effects, and you think that little shudder you felt was just the breeze it created. Next thing you know, that audience is in its thirties and getting down to the serious business of pining away for its lost youth, and people are actually remembering Queen fondly. Or elbowing each other in the ribs about some Commodore 64 screen capture. Once that one whooshes by you you know those goosebumps aren't due to a temporary temperature drop. It's the chill of the grave. And under the circumstances it doesn't seem all that bad.

I don't usually rip off somebody else's posts quite this shamelessly, but damn that's good. I'm putting it up here so I don't forget about it.

posted by michael  12:47:45 PM  
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