"The Darkness on the Edge of Town"
This past Thursday (December 9, 2021) the veteran journalist and news anchor Brian Williams signed off as host of MSNBC’s The 11th Hour, thus ending his 28-year run with NBC News. In his final 3 minutes and 51 seconds on-air, Williams delivered a highly reflective valedictory which, if it had had a musical backdrop, would undoubtedly have come from Paul Anka’s My Way, featuring the lyric Regrets, I’ve had a few/but then again, too few to mention/I did what I had to do/and saw it through without exemption . . . But more than that, he spoke out for his greatest fear: the future of America:
After 28 years of Peacock logos on much of what I own, it is my choice now to jump without a net into the great unknown,” he said. “As I do, for the first time in my 62 years, my biggest worry is for my country.
The truth is I am not a liberal or a conservative, I am an institutionalist. I believe in this place, and in my love of country I yield to no one. But the darkness on the edge of town has spread to the main roads and highways and neighborhoods. It is now at the local bar and the bowling alley, at the school board and the grocery store. And it must be acknowledged and answered for. Grown men and women, who swore an oath to our Constitution — elected by their constituents, possessing the kind of college degrees I could only dream of — have decided to join the mob and become something they are not, while hoping we somehow forget who they were. They’ve decided to burn it all down with us inside. That should scare you to no end.
Williams announced he would be leaving NBC News back on Nov. 9, bringing to an end a relationship that began in 1993 when he joined the network. Before moving to MSNBC, Williams served as chief anchor and managing editor of NBC’s Nightly News, succeeding the legendary Tom Brokaw in 2004. In 2015, he faced scandal and a six-month suspension over false claims about his helicopter being hit by a grenade in March 2003 while covering the Iraq War. He was later replaced by Lester Holt in the anchor role, and made his transition to the 24-hour cable network.
To Brian Williams’ detractors, the scandal and suspension represent the entirety of his nearly 3-decade career. Sadly, that’s the way things go in the modern world; one’s detractors make sure their audience never forgets the foibles of the fallible who happen to occupy the opposite side of the whatever aisle divides them, all the while turning both a deaf ear and a blind eye to the imperfections of those they support. A handful of mistruths from Brian Williams make him lower than Lenin in the minds of the Fox/News Max/OAN/Breitbart crowd, while the 30,000+ whoppers told by Boss Tweet matter neither whit nor farthing.
Like many on our/my side of the aisle, I found Brian Williams' valedictory to be terse, his words well crafted and his message scary as hell. His message - and what today we increasingly refer to as “messaging” - hit the nail on the head. “Messaging” is a fairly new concept, and means something like: the ideas or messages conveyed either explicitly or implicitly by a politician, advertising campaign, etc., or the way in which this is done. Williams’ political messaging, in a nutshell, conveyed a great truth: We need more people WITH A PLATFORM to step up and say, “Hey folks, we’re on the ledge of losing our imperfect republic, our highly flawed but great democratic experiment. Open your eyes. We are hanging on by our freaking fingertips.
Writing about Williams’ messaging in The Daily Kos, progressive Stella Ray noted “There will be those who say this is hyperbolic---but I now think those are the same sort who didn’t see Hitler coming, even after the Brown shirts had arrived. And make no mistake about it, the Brown shirts have arrived in the United States of America. They just go by different names these days. All sorts of names, but most disturbing of all is this name: the Republican Party. There is no ‘both sides do it’ in this ultimate game, despite my opinion on the many imperfections of the Democratic Party. I
I think there is no doubt this is who Williams was talking about. Think about it: so much of what is driving Americans apart and democracy down is due to things such as:
The promotion of anti-vaxxing, anti-masking lies in the name of “preserving individual freedom,”
The passing of countless pieces of state and local legislation making voting terribly difficult - if not impossible - for the poor and people of color . . . and this in the name of safeguarding against electoral fraud;
State-after-state enacting laws which make abortions next to impossible for all but women (or families) of means;
The perpetuation of a solid slate of lies concerning the dangers posed by refugees, asylees and non-white immigrants;
Perpetuating myths and lies about the teaching of Critical Race Theory; fostering bullying against children who are LGBTQ;
Denying climate change;
Spreading conspiracy theories about virtually everything in order to keep their base close at hand;
Convincing a vast portion of America that anything they disagree with is the product of a Socialist/Communist revolution in the making.
Democrats have long been unsuited to repelling Republicanism. Hells bells: Democrats have long been unsuited to fighting fire with fire, to calling a spade a spade or showing anger. For too long, Democrats have strapped on lace gloves for any lethal Mixed Martial Arts battles they’ve entered. For the past couple of decades Democrats have held on to the canard that “working across the aisle” is the best way to survive, succeed and progress.
It seems to me that if Democrats are going to succeed - to continue occupying the White House and leading both the House and Senate, they are going to have to shine one whole hell of a lot of cleansing megawattage on that “Darkness on the edge of town” of which Brian Williams spoke during his final segment of “The 11th Hour.”
Democrats are going to have to pump ungodly amounts of cash, courage and energy into races for POTUS, Congress, governorships, state legislatures, county commissions and boards of supervisors and education across the country. We are going have to flood airways with visuals and actualities of what such political miscreants as Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley et al have been vomiting out for the past several years . . . mostly as an act of obeisance to their cult leader, Donald J. Trump. In addition to being the one party running on a platform of political possibilities, Democrats will have to point out their opponents’ lies, conspiracy theories and penchant for scaring the daylights out of the citizens of America. Anything less will spell not only loss at the polls, but the loss of democracy in cities, towns and farmlands of this once great nation.
Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone