The Olbermann Essays

The fifth essay in this series is now available at YouTube. Thanks to FLJerseyBoy for the link

Someday, I hope, pray and expect, we will be able to collect the current series of essays, dubbed “special comments,” of Keith Olbermann, into a short book. We will be able to admire them, study them, and teach them to our children.

Each one has been finely crafted. They are great, courageous writing. And as the series has gone on, I've noticed that Olbermann has slowed in his reading of  them, as though he knows this as we do, despite his occasional fits of modesty.

The essays will not only be his legacy, but an ultimate legacy of our time, a time when the stain of McCarthyism crept right into the Oval Office, where a President became unglued from all civilized norms and we wondered if, perhaps, he might not just unleash nuclear holocaust.

As of this writing, he still might.

Update: And if you doubt Olbermann's courage, someone sent him some imitation anthrax in the mail last week. Could have easily been the real thing.

The best way to savor this extraordinary set of documents, I think, is in sequence.

1. First, his dissecting of Secretary Rumsfeld, the brilliant jiu jitsu of turning his “Munich” warning into the bleatings of the man he thought he was attacking, Neville Chamberlain.
2. Next, his comparison of Bush himself to Joe McCarthy , (go up from the link, which currently leads back to the top of his Bloggerman column) using the words of Joseph Welch at the Army-McCarthy Hearings, a TV event that marked the fall of the Senator's reign of fear.
3. Then, This Hole in the Ground, his angry denunciation of Bush's 9/11 address, turning Ground Zero into a metaphor for everything that has gone wrong with this Administration, ending with the harrowing recounting of a 1960 “Twilight Zone” episode, in which aliens take over the Earth by simply setting men and their fear against one another.
4. Tonight, his ode to Colin Powell in which he forced the audience to contemplate an angry Bush saying “it is unacceptable to think” at a recent news conference, and stated quite clearly how un-American that is.

Olbermann himself feels, I suspect, that he is  undeserving of this moment, and the praise he will get from history for it. He should remember that Murrow himself was hired by CBS, not to run its news division, but its “education” division.

Murrow was not really a working journalist, but by nature an essayist, a student of history and a bureaucratic infighter, thrust onto the stage mainly to entertain, to give “I Love Lucy” and similar shows a high-class gloss, the way a serious actor might do a scene in vaudeville. Murrow also felt wholly inadequate to his time, hiding it behind a wall of intensity, cigarette smoke, and a typewriter, seeking courage in the words he wrote, knowing those words were good, but (sometimes) hardly believing they were his, or that they could become as important as they would later turn out to be.

Olbermann has gone his own rocky way. He came up through the sports department – the home of Runyon and Rice and Breslin and Jim Murray – but surrounded by non-writers whose best work was done with combs in front of their mirrors. He fled ESPN for the "real news" of  MSNBC , then fled there when he became disgusted with covering Monica Lewinsky. His next leaving of Fox Sports Net cemented his reputation for being “difficult.” He was thrown into his current job because his writing was often funny. He was meant to make a vaudeville of the daily news, to laugh with us at squirrels on water skis.

Olbermann never would have survived in Murrow's time. Murrow knew that to quit once was to leave the stage forever, and he put up with nonsense. Olbermann, owing to his talent, has gone from cable net to cable net, somehow always landing on his feet, usually closer to the goal of what he is doing today.

Networks seldom honor writers, although all great shows depend entirely upon them. Olbermann is a writer who was made for this medium, for the small screen, and for this moment, when he became unafraid to say, with feeling and brilliance, the things most of us felt but were afraid to state publicly.

The Emperor has no clothes. The Emperor has gone mad. The President of the United States has become the enemy of everything this country stands for.

Such things seldom need to be said. But they have not been said up until now, not on television. MSNBC let Olbermann say them only because its ratings were in the toilet, its survival in doubt, and it had nothing to lose. Now, with each “special comment,” his ratings rise. They are still far behind those of Bill O'Reilly at Fox, who sniffs dismissively at him, but they're ahead of CNN's numbers in the same time slot. And when you add in the YouTube and Internet numbers, his audience now numbers many millions.

Stay tuned.