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For those of us of a certain age, the image of Walter (avuncularity) Cronkite, sitting behind his desk, telling us about the world "the way it is," remains an enduring image of television news. One thinks of that teletype-machine sound behind him. (Was that fake, or was that the working office sound?)
Here are three Cronkite quotes worth recalling.
I grew my mustache when I was nineteen in order to look older. I never shaved it off even though it overran its usefulness many, many years ago. Once you get started in television, people associate you with your physical appearance — and that includes the mustache. So I can’t shave it off now. If I did, I’d have to answer too much mail.
People who understand music hear sounds that no one else makes when Frank Sinatra sings.
There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.
Christopher, why do you find the third quotation worth recalling? I find it pseudo-profound. Obviously, there are degrees of freedom, even among slaves. Frederick Douglass, working as a ship caulker in Baltimore was freer than a slave working on a cotton plantation in the deep South. Cronkite is free to say that therefore Douglass was not free, if he wants to define freedom to mean "all free." As Humpty Dumpty said, "When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less." But who is all free? What would being all free even mean? We're not free to flap our arms and fly through the air. We're not free to invade the Capitol Building in an attempt to overturn an election, unless, perhaps, we're the president.
ReplyDeleteI am reminded of Isaiah Berlin's distinction between positive and negative liberty in his essay "Two Concepts of Liberty." Neither can be total.
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DeleteA slave working as a ship's caulker has more elbow room than a slave on a cotton plantation. But since at law he could be relegated from the one status to the other at his owner's whim, this is emphatically not free. And I think there is room for a quite binary distinction between being one's own owner and being owned by somebody else. Being in prison and instructed to work, by one's prison's officials, is a remaining example of the latter status, specifically preserved as such by an infamous caveat in the 13th amendment.
DeleteAs evidence of the complexity of the question of freedom, consider this quotation from the first-person narrator of Thomas Mann's "Confessions of Felix Krull," commenting on his school days: "The only conditions under which I can live are freedom of thought and imagination, and that is why the memory of my many years in prison is actually less disagreeable to me than that of the shackles of bondage and fear clapped upon my sensitive boyish soul by the reportedly respectable discipline of that chalk-white, box-like building down in the center of town."
ReplyDeleteI have a high opinion of Berlin's writings on the subject, too. As it happens, the positive/negative distinction as he laid it out owes a good deal to Benjamin Constant's distinction between "ancient" and "modern" liberty, where Constant in the era of the First Bonaparte, emphatically sided with what he called the modern notion of liberty, the value of being left alone by the world's Napoleons, or by Athenian majorities for that matter. And on that point, there is a binary distinction that Cronkite hit on the nose.
DeleteI do not see how Cronkite's dichotomy between being all free or not free is the same as Berlin's or Constant's dichotomy between negative and positive liberty.
DeleteMy fondest memory of Mr. Cronkite was the characterization made, regarding him as the most trusted man in America. I don't care what anyone says. It doesn't get any better than that.
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