~a column by Colleen O’Brien
The first televised presidential address aired Oct. 5, 1947. President Harry Truman broadcast a speech from the White House.
At that time — 1947 — there were only about 44,000 TVs in the country. People got their news from the Motorola radio in the living room, from Movietone News at movie theaters and from daily newspapers tossed onto the front porch. But Truman’s little-seen broadcast too soon altered the relationship between the government, the media and us. All of Truman’s addresses from then on were televised — this was all to the good and merely another version of the radio chat instituted by President Roosevelt. But in 1949 Truman became the first presidential candidate to pay for a political advertisement.
So, along with our own Jefferson resident George Gallup, who originated the idea and the practice of polling the American people, the idea and practice of pols advertising on TV has jerked our outlooks considerably.
To ask the question if it’s better to be without one invention or discovery or another is silly, for we could ask this about everything from gunpowder to cooked eggs to Coca-Cola. The very gray world of Yes and No resides in just about everything in our postmodern world. I like both fireworks and Coke, but I’m agin explosives as weapons and too much sugar in anything. And then there’s the cooked egg versus the raw egg. No contest now in this era in which we find that some raw eggs are killers via the Salmonella bacteria, even though a raw egg is more nutritious than a cooked one. (This is a hollow argument if you’re Salmonellosis dead.)
We compromise our lives away, but it’s okay: we can’t hardline everything. If we did we’d never make it. Everything’s a compromise — marriage, relatives, getting along with other nations and next door neighbors, eating what’s good for us or just eating. If only Congress would compromise. It is how this country came into being in the first place. Being a hardliner about everything that ultimately affects us makes even the unimportant difficult. And Congress — which means the country — may not survive this non-compromising position that so many Representatives and Senators take now.
Ah, the problems of being human. They’re often too much for us humans, as the world situation has told for as long as we’ve been recording our deeds . . . and of course before then, before we could write or draw pics on cave walls; perhaps even before we had language more complicated than grunts. It would be so nice if we had advanced in behavior as we have in weapons.
I realize that I am stuck on Congress and the discord of the process they’re supposed to be good at. I guess it’s the season. We are inundated with politicians taking out ads and hiring polls to help them get into Congress or the White House. It would be okay with me as they use all this energy convincing us of their worthiness if they really were.
