Who would ever have predicted that Walter Cronkite would have outlived Michael Jackson?

Last night when I came in from the Chico DeBarge & Joe show @ the Keswick (Chico Debarge was off the chain btw, serious hard core combo Marvin Gaye/D’Angelo ultra phunky neo soul action), I flipped on CNN. And it was wall to wall Walter Cronkite as I sat & watched, I thought about several things…

1. How many people under the age of 40 even know who/ what/why Walter Cronkite?

2. The time I met Walter Cronkite (at the Ed Bradley Memorial Service) and how he seemed like such a tiny person.

3. Telling the “truth”

I also thought about a research paper that I had done for my High School AP Amerikan History class. We were studying the Army McCarthy Hearings. We did it “Our Town” style where we were given roles and had to act out each person. In order to be able to accuratly “act out each person,” we were also required to write a 10 page research paper on the person.

I was assigned to do Edward R. Murrow and I was pretty happy about that, since Edward R. Murrow was kinda the “darling of the liberal media,” since he was a journalist who was seen as a crusader because he did things like take on the evil Senator McCarthy and fight for humanitarian treatment for migrant farm workers and more. Murrow was a dashing figure who could also just as easily be seen on TV doing a fluff interview with Marilyn Monroe as challenging the evil Senator McCarthy.

In the course of my extensive research on Edward R. Murrow, I learned that Walter Cronkite was none of these things. Although Walter Cronkite had been a contemporary/colleague of Edward R. Murrow at CBS News he was the complete and total antithesis. Walter Cronkite gave you the news straight, he seemingly had no opinions on anything. I had no idea if Cronkite was a Democrat, Republican, Liberal, Conservative, Straight, Gay, Anti this or Pro that. The only thing that I can remember Walter Cronkite being in favor of was the Space Program.

I mean, with Cronkite you just didn’t know what he thought about anything. But you could pretty much be assured that he was giving you the “truth.” And therein was the power that Walter Cronkite wielded on our society.

People want the “truth,” to help them to shape their own “opinions.”

That is far different from today’s world where it doesn’t seem to matter what news outlet or who the reporter is, you will always get the news, but it is always filtered thru the “opinion” of the reporter. Which means that “the truth’ is always elusive. All of the TV news reporters of today are more like descendants of Edward R. Murrow, because we know what their opinions are about most everything. None are like Walter Cronkite, whose opinions we never knew. BTW….I have no problem with news people giving their opinions on things, just as long as I don’t think that their opinions aren’t “brought & paid” for by some corporation. In other words, I even want their opinions to be the “truth” (i.e.; what they really think)

People want the “truth,” to help them to shape their own “opinions.”

And once they become convinced that you are potentially a source for the “truth,” that is trust that will remain forever, as long as you ever become perceived as being a “sell out.”

And that was & is the perception of Cronkite, whatever he said was the “truth.”

That point was driven home to me last night during the Chico DeBarge/Joe concert @ the Keswick. At the concert, a dozen or more people came up to me @ the Soul-Patrol table, many of them brand new subscribers to the Soul-Patrol Newsletter who said to me; “Mr. Davis I just wanted to let you know just how much I appreciated you telling the truth in your review of last week’s concert. Dwele wasn’t worth sh*t and you told it like it was. I agreed with every word that you said.”

Earlier this week there were a number of people who were in “mourning” because of the announcement that VIBE magazine was going to be shut down.

I wasn’t one of those people. Personally I wondered how VIBE could have possibly lasted this long? I had long ago stopped reading VIBE, in any form (with the exception of Mark Anthony Neal’s blog), simply because as far as I was concerned, VIBE had long ago stopped “telling the truth.” In my opinion they had “sold out” to the very same people who had destroyed Black culture and had in fact become “part of the problem,” not “part of the solution.” Their financial support was coming from the very same people that we as
readers were looking to VIBE to provide honest commentary about. As a result even their opinions couldn’t be trusted.

When I attended the memorial service for Ed Bradley at Riverside Church a few years ago, someone introduced me to CBS newsman Randall Pinkston and he in turn introduced me to NBC newsman Lester Holt. They introduced me to CBS newsman Steve Kroft, who in turn introduced me to Walter Cronkite.

I am only 5’9″ so you can imagine my surprise when Walter Cronkite
extended his hand to me and I saw that he was several inches shorter than me. We shook hands and all I could think of was how it doesn’t matter how tall you are if you are a badd mf and tell the truth, you are a giant!!

I don’t think that there are many folks under the age of 40 who know or care about Walter Cronkite. If someone is 40 years old today, then they were about ten years old in 1980 when Walter Cronkite retired from the CBS Evening News. I wonder if they think that “AndersonCooper BillO’ReileyChrisMatthews” are telling them the “truth?” Can their “opinions even be trusted, not to be “brought & paid” for by some corporation?

Anyhow….

….both Joe and Chico DeBarge gave very good perfomances at the Keswick last night. Chico DeBarge in a “black bohemian, I just got outta jail but don’t worry cuz I still got it kinda way & btw I got a new CD” and Joe in a “vegas/ghetto ya may not like it but I’m just about as good as it gets for mainstream R&B in 2009.”

(& dat’s the TRUTH)

RIP Walter Cronkite…

As I sit here this morning watching the CNN of Michael Jackson I am swelling with pride in the accomplishments of “mah people.” These folks directed themselves towards excellence and were able to demonstrate that excellence on the world stage

–Michael Jordan (did it with a frown)

–Magic Johnson (did it with a smile)

–Colin Powell (did it with a uniform)

–Oprah Winfrey (did it with information)

–Michael Jackson (i’m not really sure how he did it)

–Barrack Obama (i’m not really sure how he did it)

These people of course (and others) achieved something that I will call “universal mainstream acceptance.” These great individual achievements of course did not occur in a vacuum, they were achieved on the back of those who came before them.

For example, Obama’s candidacy could not have happened, had it not been for Jessie Jackson’s candidacy 25 years earlier. Colin Powell’s success in the military and in government could not have happened had it not been for the careers of men like Gen. Benjamin O. Davis & Ralph Bunche. Magic Johnson & Michael Jordan’s “universal mainstream acceptance” wouldn’t have happened without the careers of Julius Erving, Earl Monroe & others.

My point is that these achievements happened because of the blood, sweat & tears of other people that created opportunity for talented/hard working people to use as a springboard for their own unique success.

I was discussing this concept with someone here yesterday and he reminded me that although this is quite true of Black American’s who are in the public eye, it’s also quite true of Black American achievement in general over the last 20 years.

The one thing that all of these success stories have in common is that these achievements all come from individuals who are born of something that I will refer to as “the civil rights generation.” That is people who were brought up in a manner and thus have a mentality that suggests that they have a role to play in the overall struggle. That somehow their success can quite literally be traced back to other people who sacrificed in order for them to have a chance to achieve excellence. These people are driven towards excellence and when you tell them that what they want to do can’t be done, they then proceed to accomplish the impossible.

I too am a member of this “the civil rights generation” and as a kid growing up in Brooklyn, the achievements and sacrifice of “local heroes” people like Jackie Robinson, Louis Armstrong, Elston Howard, Adam Clayton Powell, Spider Lockhart, Constance Baker Motley, Lew Alcindor, Bob Teauge, Willie Mays, Lena Horne, Gil Noble and others were certainly “rammed down my throat.”

In addition to those local folks, there were many others that my family made sure that I met and whose “secrets for success”, I internalized. Successful Black Americans who were teachers, artists, doctors, engineers, policeman, and more. These are people whose names would be unknown to the general pubic, but who all sought and achieved “excellence” within the scope that they were permitted to do so.

All of these people (famous and not famous) had an influence on me and my behavior as I moved forward in the world and tried to establish my own mark within it.

On a day like today I am reminded of that and I remember those people and their struggle.

But I am also reminded of just how much things seem to have changed.

It seems to me that over the past 10-15 years, we have moved from “the civil rights generation” and the pursuit of excellence to an era where we are in the “pursuit of mediocrity.”

And it seems that we are perfectly content to “pursue mediocrity” with a vengeance. In fact we aren’t just content with “mediocrity”, but we are overjoyed when we achieve “mediocrity.” It makes me sick when I start to dwell on it for more than a few moments, just how far we have fallen. Some folks love to dwell on the “self-mutilation” that Michael Jackson did to himself. I think that the “self-mutilation” that Black Americans have done to themselves over the past 10-15 years is far worse than anything that Michael Jackson did to himself.

In the work of Michael Jackson we saw the attempt and very often the achievement of excellence. That was a part of his make up, even when he was a little boy, it was there for everyone to see and of course we could all see it. And we can certainly see it in the work of others from his generation, both famous and not famous.

It’s clear to me that we went wrong someplace. It’s even more clear just when and how we went wrong.

“We have met the enemy and it’s us…”
–Pogo