Katie Couric is Engaging
This Howard Kurtz piece on the totally amazing and serious Katie Couric is getting some attention for this unfortunate passage:
. . . Couric has spent recent weeks in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is touring what she calls “this great unwashed middle of the country” in an effort to divine the mood of the midterms.
Therein lies a key reason why Couric has sometimes struggled in her current job. She’s always seemed constrained by the rigid, 22-minute format, a far cry from her freewheeling Today performances over a decade and a half. So she has devised ways to slip out of her $15 million-a-year prison—launching a Web show, engaging on Twitter, and getting out in the field.
Well. If you can name the crime that will get me committed to a $15-million-a-year-prison, I will endeavor to commit it posthaste. But perhaps the reason she’s struggled is contained in her quote: the middle of the country suspects she regards them as hobnailed dirt-smeared dullards. It fits with the idea that real America - smart, credentialed, urban, sophisticated - exists in a thin crust on either coast, with the rest of the country a parenthetical insert in the national narrative. Unwashed. Criminey.
No, amend that. “Real America,” according to the coastal cultural viziers, is middle America, and that’s the problem. "Better America" is what you get in New York. But only between certain cross-streets.
(By the way, the line "the great unwashed" came from Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the Victorian writer who also gave us the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night.”)
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Jun '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
George Savage
Speaking of rodents, and apropos of James's reference to "It was a dark and stormy night," I give you the 2010 winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, Molly Ringle:
Oct 26 at 12:47pm
What! No musckrat love? Where's the Captain?
Jul '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
After reading this, I felt the need to take a shower. So now I am relatively washed.
But I remain confused. Is she saying that residents of Philly and Chicago are unwashed (in which case, I'm good), or just displaying profound ignorance over what "The middle of the country" actually means? Or is the algorithm that the farther away from Manhattan one resides, the more likely one will have mushrooms growing out of one's ears? Ears growing on a big, dense, ignorant skull?
I'm serious, she confuses me! On the other hand, I'm guessing she confuses herself even more.
Jul '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
By the way, Publius, I'm a Massachusetts boy. Boston is full of slobbering masses. Ever been to Dorchester?
Jul '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
What a joke. No doubt on her stops she'll hear many sentiments she might have heard outside the CBS News studios in New York. She'll be left wondering why a number of candidates won when no one she met planned to vote for them (to paraphrase Ms. Kael).
Jul '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
What? You never heard of the Boston Commons?
Sep '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
This article about Katie Couric would be well placed in The Onion, perhaps under the headline: "Scientific Breakthrough: Katie Couric discovers unwashed territory west of the Hudson via Twitter" Or, better, the piece should somehow be incorporated into E.J. Hill's "Are you elite?" quiz.
May '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
Beyond a dazzling display of ignorance regarding geography, she shows amazing balance in visiting super blue areas in order to gain perspective.
If this were written as fiction it would be rejected by readers as unbelievable.
Oct '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
James, my parents grew up in Throggs Neck in the 40s and 50s. Pop actually graduated from Maritime College just over the Throggs Neck Bridge (talk about the unwashed...a military guy!). I can report that the 2 of them will be among the Great Unwashed next Tuesday who will be throwing the Great Washed out with the bathwater.
Jun '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
George Savage: Speaking of rodents, and apropos of James's reference to "It was a dark and stormy night," I give you the 2010 winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, Molly Ringle:
Oct 26 at 12:47pm
How about this winner in the 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Detective Category: "
"She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida - the pink ones, not the white ones - except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn't wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren't. "
Sep '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
Intrigued by James’ tidbit about Edward Bulwer-Lytton, I did a little digging. Mr. Bulwer-Lytton is also known for the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword” and is often given credit for the term “almighty dollar”. The Wikipedia entry for “almighty dollar” has examples of its influence in the modern arts community. Two made an impression me.
The first concerns a dope smoking rap artist/up-and-coming economist: "’Almighty Dollar’ is…the name of a Devin The Dude song from the 2007 album Waitin' To Inhale. It is a lament both of a marijuana user's lack of money and the declining buying power of the U.S. dollar.”
The second was -- to bring this full circle, I suppose -- about someone who definitely qualifies as unwashed: "’The Almighty Dollar' is also the name of an Ozzy Osbourne song from the Black Rain album. The song argues that money and greed are destroying the planet by blinding people to problems such as global warming and pollution.” The entry does not mention whether the British Mr. Osbourne regrets selling music in the United States or his plans for disseminating his fortune estimated at 100 million pounds.
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
tabula rasa
George Savage: Speaking of rodents, and apropos of James's reference to "It was a dark and stormy night," I give you the 2010 winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, Molly Ringle:
Oct 26 at 12:47pm
How about this winner in the 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Detective Category: "
"She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida - the pink ones, not the white ones - except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn't wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren't. " · Oct 27 at 11:58am
TR, speaking as a native Floridian, many thanks for the much needed belly laugh.
Aug '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
Couric is a bore, and any moments spent watching, discussing, or thinking about her constitute time that could be more interestingly and productively spent in a coma.
That cannot, however, be said about the delightful Bulwer-Lytton competition, the mention of which by several commentators here being the sole element of interest attending a post devoted to the analysis of a mind-numbingly dull (albeit gratingly perky) yawn.
My all-time favorite entry from years gone by?
"The sun rose sulkily in the dark and leaden sky as a giant fiery furball uneasily coughed up by an enormous unseen cat."
What hope has Ms. Couric of competing with that?
Oct '10
Re: Katie Couric is Engaging
New Brunswick? You mean the Canadian province?