Remember Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchor of Evening News whose commentary about the first man on the moon was relayed live all over the world in July of 1969? He even has a school of journalism and mass communication named after him. Known as the ‘most trusted man in America’ and affectionately nicknamed ‘Old Iron Pants’ for his unflappability under pressure, there sat Cronkite, 86, captivated by Carmen, the gypsy who stole everyone’s heart but never let any man interfere with her free spirit in Georges Bizet’s brilliant opera called after her. In her haunting melody of love, Carmen sang of the “intoxication of freedom” even as her jilted lover, Don Jose, put a knife through her.
Performed at the Metropolitan Opera in Lincoln Centre on Broadway in Manhattan — a crystal canopy of star-studded chandeliers with gold-buffed accoutrements, swirling stairways swathed in royal crimson plush carpet with matching fabric walls, Americans of the wealthy variety glided past in their tux and ties, silks, furs and jewels during intervals, sipping champagne and dripping with class.
Inside, exuding grandeur, were the five-storey, red-and-gold balconies filled with people protruding out in the centre of the hall where Cronkite sat motionless with his wife, Betsy, watching Carmen. It was difficult not to be distracted by this media icon. Would that I could catch him during the many intervals, but the couple continued to sit glued to their seats for the full 150 minutes, never taking a single break.
Around midnight when the show ended, I did catch up with him.
A journalist who has smoothly choreographed world affairs over the last 60 years, Cronkite scoops up terms that George Orwell used in his book, 1984. These Orwellian warnings of ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Newspeak’ are the antithesis of freedom that Cronkite most loves and admires. “Big Brother has become a common coinage for ubiquitous or overreaching authority, and Newspeak is a word we apply to the dehumanizing babble of bureaucracies and computer programmes.”
Orwell’s words “vibrate powerfully when we allow ourselves to sit still and think carefully about orbiting satellites that can read the license plates in a parking lot and computers that can tap into thousands of telephone calls and telex transmissions at once and other computers that can do our banking and purchasing, can watch the house and tell a monitoring station what television programme we are watching and how many people there are in the room,” says Cronkite of the new Total Information Awareness (TIA) launched by Pentagon recently. “We think of Orwell when we read of scientists who believe they have located in the human brain the seats of behavioural emotions such as aggression, or learn more about the vast potential of genetic engineering.”
The constant demand for greater security makes Americans recognize that “security may come at a substantial price in freedom, that law and order can be a doublethink version of oppression, that individual liberties surrendered for whatever good reason are freedom lost,” says Cronkite.
On another level, intoxication of freedom is a luxury that tragically will never touch an average Pakistani where freedom from fear; freedom from hunger and want, freedom from ignorance and intolerance and freedom to choose are unknown. Pakistan, today, is an economic funk that can hardly flush out any kind of freedom to its millions.
“It’s the economy, stupid!” was Bill Clinton’s clarion call against George H.W. Bush, that drew angry Americans to the loquacious pug-nosed bright spark, albeit a political upstart to dislodge George Herbert Walker from the White House. Eight years later, his firstborn, George Walker Bush, rose to avenge the father’s defeat and embark on his dad’s unfinished agenda.
But this time around, searing on the American mind is the economy again! Last month, one million newly-unemployed Americans filed for social security. George W’s palliative $674 billion “economic stimulus” is meant to make the champagne life of the rich richer. For the little guy across America, life continues to spiral downwards, with no relief in sight.
The contrast between the rich and the poor is razor sharp in a city such as New York. A subway straddle is an eye-opener. Minorities — Blacks, Latinos, Asians and even some whites sit inside the trains looking like zombies — fatigued, sleep-deprived, poor and miserable. Rarely does one come across a smile.
Move on to Lincoln Centre and you rub shoulders with the rich of the world’s wealthiest. They are men and women with lots of silver in their hair and a healthy glow on their ‘aristocratic’ brows. Privileged to have enjoyed one of the most prosperous 20-year era of wealth in American history, President Bush’s economic proposal will further help these well-off, all zillions of them, because they no longer would have to pay taxes on their stock dividends and when they die, their heirs will not lose chunks of their inheritance (as was the case previously) to Uncle Sam in estate duties, but pocket everything themselves.
But this has already triggered off a class war between the have and have-nots in America. “When is President Bush going to realize that job creation needs to be his top priority?” says an exasperated Nancy Pelosi, the House of Representatives Democratic leader. Meanwhile, Americans against war with Iraq have lashed out at the “President’s men” who have compared the war, estimated at $200 billion, to a new product. They’ve timed it “from a marketing point of view” (Andrew Card, Bush’s chief of staff made this gaffe!)
While America is teetering on the brink of renewed recession, the Bush administration has launched a multi-million PR campaign in favour of ousting Saddam. “People are hurting. People are scared,” say peacenicks who claim that for the first time in 10 years, the median household income is down, poverty rates and unemployment are up and the gap between the rich and the poor is growing.
“Is anybody up there paying attention?” ask many concerned business leaders whose businesses have already taken a hit. “Do they think their war will fix things? How can blowing up buildings and killing people be good for business, unless it’s the body-bag business? War will just burn up the money that could fix things.
Imagine what could be done with $200 billion?
Worried Americans have brought out full-page advertisements against the war: “Bombing, slaughter, collateral damage will make recruitment posters for a new generation of terrorists. The final winner of the war with Iraq will be Osama bin Laden,” these growing voices warn.
“Virtually, no other nation in the world really wants this war. Most of them dread it. We can buy their (read Pakistan) silence, cajole their leaders, ram war down their throats, but the world’s eyes are open: far from showing the ‘decent respect for the opinions of mankind’ our Declaration of Independence requires, the President is showing his contempt.”
“There are over 12 million boys and girls in danger of going hungry across America,” cries Larry Jones, who works for a non-profit organization to feed the children, “I think that’s outrageous. It sickens me.”
The poor of the world will thus never know the intoxication of freedom.
Remember Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchor of Evening News whose commentary about the first man on the moon was relayed live all over the world in July of 1969? He even has a school of journalism and mass communication named after him. Known as the ‘most trusted man in America’ and affectionately nicknamed ‘Old Iron Pants’ for his unflappability under pressure, there sat Cronkite, 86, captivated by Carmen, the gypsy who stole everyone’s heart but never let any man interfere with her free spirit in Georges Bizet’s brilliant opera called after her. In her haunting melody of love, Carmen sang of the “intoxication of freedom” even as her jilted lover, Don Jose, put a knife through her.
