Having come back to Earth, this is God talking.
I've just been out jogging, or rather walking,
which is not that much of a breeze
when you have painful knees,
which can cause more than a little rancor
even for a now sedentary TV anchor.
But I'll interrupt any further news reports
while I put on my makeup and change out of my shorts.
As I do so, there will be a brief commercial break--
a few ads during which water will become wine,
all Human behavior will be loving and fine
and zealous vegetarians smilingly eat steak.
Of course,
as I could tell thee --
or is it thou?--
none of this is true
but anyhow,
it pays for the TV,
as well as me,
and so, to continue:
Perhaps you will recall that a few millennia ago
I mentioned that Mankind would be damned
by its perpetual desire to know
in order to be intellectually free.....
and that they'd be much better off if they planned
to continue to have Faith and just believed in ME.
So, even if I exaggerated a little about that Flood
as well as Noah's Ark and even Mt. Sinai...
and, later, perhaps it wouldn't taste very good
if wine had really turned into blood--
still, here's one thing you can't deny,
even if I did exaggerate
things, these days, are really not that great--
So,whatever else you may or may not confess,
right now you really need some God to bless
because the world's is in a Hell of a mess.
hzl
2/9/15
WATCH: Brian Williams Is Back
The Huffington Post | Katherine Fung | Posted 11.04.2013 | Media
Read More: Video, Brian Williams Back, Brian Williams Knee Replacement, Brian Williams Return, Brian Williams,Brian Williams Knee Surgery, Media News
Brian Williams returned to the anchor desk on Tuesday night almost a month his knee operation. The host, who had been living with chronic knee pai...
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Brian Williams and the God Complex
BY KEN AULETTA
Brian Williams, the NBC News anchor, is taking himself off the air for, what he says will be, “several days.” He presumably hopes that the media firestorm surrounding claimshe made about his reporting experience in Iraq will subside. He will probably be able to hang on—just as the Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino did. (I’m reminded of Marino because he just appeared on my TV screen as a pitchman for Nutrisystem.) In January, 2013, it was revealed that he had fathered a child out of wedlock with a CBS production assistant and had reportedly paid her millions of dollars, in part so his wife and six kids would not hear of it. Marino kept his sportscaster job at CBS. While caught in a different caliber of scandal, it is safe to say that Brian Williams will treat his time away from the news desk as a period of reflection. He will almost certainly cancel his scheduled appearance on CBS’s “Late Show with David Letterman” this week. And, if captured by cameras, he will likely appear somber. But anyone capable of a long view knows there are often second—and third—acts in American public life.
However, there are some scenarios in which he does not survive as an NBC anchor. One: if more fabrications surface from the work of hundreds, probably thousands, of amateur detectives online—eager to prove that Williams was not telling the truth when he claimed, for instance, that he saw a body floating beneath his hotel window in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. NBC’s probe by its own sleuth, investigations producer Richard Esposito, could also unearth more headline-making material. Senior NBC executives fear that Williams will fail to better explain what he did, and why his explanation last Wednesday on air was more spin than truth, to his audience. And if Williams comes back to the anchor’s chair and his Nielsen ratings plummet, his NBC bosses will have more reason to decide, as management did with Dan Rather on CBS a decade ago, that his image in the minds of too many viewers has been irrevocably damaged.
But, while the spotlight is on Williams’s transgressions, a word about the complicity of NBC and the other networks’ marketing machines. The networks have a stake in promoting their anchors as God-like figures. By showing them in war zones, with Obama or Putin, buffeted by hurricanes, and comforting victims, they are telling viewers that their anchors are truth-tellers who have been everywhere and seen everything and have experience you can trust. On his helicopter in Iraq, Williams was accompanied by an NBC crew. Did they not speak up to correct the record for fear of undermining the powerful anchor? NBC had a stake in promoting Brian Williams as all-knowing, just as a promo ad for ABC anchor David Muir I saw today portrayed the lightly experienced forty year old as worldly. Brian Williams has valuable experience reporting from the White House, but unlike ABC’s Peter Jennings, or Dan Rather for “60 Minutes,” he has never been a correspondent overseas. (Anchoring a broadcast from Baghdad or Moscow is not comparable.)
In addition to the marketing campaigns, something else happens that often induces anchors to think of themselves as God. Each of them is seen in roughly eight to ten million homes nightly. They are seen by many more people, and more frequently, than any movie star. To walk down a street with an anchor is to be stunned both by how many people recognize them and how many viewers call out to them about specific stories. There’s a respectful familiarity different from the awe displayed to Hollywood celebrities. The anchor is treated as the citizen’s trusted guide to the news. As a result, they can feel expected to dominate discussions, to tell war stories, to play God. It’s a short distance from there to telling fantastic stories—and maybe actually believing them.
