From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large
January 29, 1986
On the Road
By Charles Kuralt
G.P. Putnam
$16.95
Made in America
By Peter Ueberroth (with Richard Levin and Amy Quin)
William Morrow
$17.95
Reviewed by Patrick D. Hazard
Juxtaposition can be the midwife of invention. Thus when my
hand made a beeline for the new Charles Kuralt on the non-fiction rack at the
local library, it brushed past Made in America, by Peter Ueberroth (His Own Story).
Rarely have the visages of disparate American characters
been so patently on view. The Redskin Kuralt—shit-kickin’ (shit-eatin’, it
turned out) grin, open-collared safari shirt, the yellow center line of a
back-country open road behind his balding pate, inviting Brendan Gill to burble:
“Charles Kuralt is a latter-day Whitman, taking to the open road with the
purposeful relish that Whitman did and reporting what he finds out there with
the same accuracy and high spirits.” Hmmm: New Yorker sophisticate affirming egalitarian camaraderie.
Juxtapose the primly smirking Paleface Ueberroth—rep tie
over pale blue (eminently televisable) shirt, proper dark blue business suit,
against a backdrop of David Wolper’s canny upstaging of the military antics at
Moscow: a single flash of 140 flags of the teams competing at the L.A.
Olympics.
The only thing more disgusting than that tight smirk was the
year-long toothsomeness of Mary Lou Retton selling breakfast cereals and
supercharged batteries. Even the groupie prose of the multiple authorship set
my teeth on edge, as if “his own story” could be told only with the help of his
press agents.
But the title caught my attention because it was identical
with the classic that has most influenced my view of America, John
Kouwenhoven’s still superb Made in America: The Arts in Modern Civilization (1949). I scooped Ueberroth up with Kuralt, maybe to
prove to myself how far America had unraveled in fewer than 40 years. Little
did I suspect what an ironic reversal I was setting myself up for.
Kuralt’s Sunday Morning TV
show, I realize in retrospect, had become for me a kind of very low Mass, a
secular substitute for not going to church (itself a simulacrum for the ritual
Sunday Times, long since
abandoned). Well, I do declare, Kuralt doesn’t hold up without the audiovisual
ingratiation.
To conclude a piece on a hex-sign painter in Pennsylvania,
he ruminates about the symbols’ alleged power to keep away the witches: “Along
the way we saw a multitude of starbursts and rosettes and whirligigs and
flowers. And I got to thinking. Pennsylvania Dutch are among the country’s most successful farmers, after
all. And you hardly ever hear of witches in their barns.
“Be that as it may, we bought a hex sign, a rosette for good
luck, and hung it on the bus. That afternoon, coming around a curve, a ten-ton
truck just missed us. Missed us, I say.
“Of course, he might have missed us if we hadn’t had a hex
sign.”
This is hokum, I say, pure rubese: in fact, looking closely at his chipper put-downs of
modern America by comparing it with the pockets of purity he finds way off the
beaten track, Kuralt’s ploy is “rube-rue.”
Oh, rue the day when blacksmiths went out of style, when
folks put their interstates above their covered bridges. This is but TV’s
version of the Saturday Evening Post’s Norman
Rockwell—good-old-daze genial humor on the editorial side while the Curtis
Publishing Company’s ad salesmen went lickety-split, undermining the old
verities with new merchandise. Like Henry Ford’s facile pipe dream, Greenfield
Village, a nostalgia-ridden memorial to the rubeosities that his Model T kicked
off the face of the planet.
And how’s this for crocodile tears? “Drive across the
country and you find that hardly anybody makes anything. I think of my own
friends and neighbors. One of them sells insurance, one of them takes pictures
for a living, one’s an actor, one’s a lawyer—none of them makes anything. I
talk on television. I don’t make anything either. … Years ago, nearly everybody
in the cities made something—harnesses, wagon wheels, hats, violins. …”
And 99 and 44/100s of them died at an early age, burnt out
from overwork, making things.
What’s better, now the country’s crawling with hobbyists,
people making what they want to make on their own time—that free time the
symbol-peddling society has democratized.
(Although a lot of them, true, could be better off spending
time making things, human and non-human, than watching this instant nostalgia.)
Even his twitting of the youth cult seems bogus to me, “I
find myself,” he confides in the section portentously entitled “Passing the
Torch,” “drawn to old people. My friends back at the office kid me about this
endlessly. They say I never do a story about a man until he has lost his hair
and his teeth. … Old people are more interesting than young people, that’s
all.” That’s just the silliest generalization I’ve ever heard a middle-aged man
utter.
Tell it to Peter Ueberroth—and the 72,000 fellow employees
and volunteers he galvanized into making a success of the 1984 Olympics, or to
the 40 million Americans “who stood by the roadsides to cheer on the Olympic
torch.” Ueberroth comes across as an all-together Jeffersonian guy—slightly
shallow perhaps—whose gut reactions under pressure really impressed me, in
spite of myself.
When a WASPish delegation visited to complain, in a
mealy-mouthed way, that he had too many Jews in top positions, he told them to
get the hell out of his office, which he would continue to staff with the best
possible people, irrespective of credential or connection. And when the
equestrian-set snobs harassed him with their unearned sense of importance, he
basked in Prince Philip’s lack of arrogance.
By Kuralt’s standards, Ueberroth, that water-polo major from
San Jose State with a graduate degree in surfing from Waikiki, never made
anything either—except budget travel packages for all those symbol-pushers in
America’s post-rube age. And now he’s doing his damnedest to keep baseball, the
national pastime, from being too much past its time.
But he does it with the energy, the lack of false moralizing
that makes Kuralt merely look deep. It’s
go-getters like Ueberroth who make Kuralt’s van and network-financed odyssey
possible. It’s amusing sometimes, the Ripley “Believe It or Not” stuff that
Kuralt turns up in his easy-going peregrinations. But spare us the
deep-thinking commentaries.
Those good old days were a mess—blacksmiths or not—as,
indeed, are our times, with computer whizbangs banging away on their high-tech anvils. Rube-rue just adds the false patina
of false philosophy to his archaeological digs.
Come to think of it, all this current brouhaha about Edward
R. Murrow as the statesman of television leaves me colder and colder. Murrow
went too quickly and too glibly from Harvest of Shame to Person to Person, that telepreparation for People magazine, for me to think much of him as a heavy
thinker. Television’s heroes lead me to formulate Hazard’s Law: A desolate
valley of mediocrity makes a foothill look like a mountain.
Damn. That’s the trouble with reading books. You never know
where the darn things are going to lead you. A mind is a painful thing to
change.
Patrick Hazard emanates from the St. Paulish area of the
Midwest.
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