What is the Frequency Dan?

Dan Rather, last of monolithic super anchors, signed off from the center desk at CBS Evening News Tonight. It was a tense affair, Dan tried to be relaxed and sentimental, but he has been trying to relax since the Tet Offensive with no discernable results. Tight lipped to the last and with a suppressed sense of anxiety I kept waiting for Rather to break the ice one last time by showing us how many lit cigarettes he could cram into his mouth.
Give Dan credit though, he tried to hold onto the myth of the lone reporter-anchor well into an age dominated by vacuous robots (Tom Brokaw) and naive' frauds (Brian Williams). Ah but what were the great anchor men really? Merely the physical manifestation of the Big Three Network's nigh Soviet style domination of the American zeitgeist. The news has changed, a single anchor is no longer a cost effective filter for the days events, not with everyone from Joshua Micah Marshall to Eric Alterman turning themselves into do-it-yourself commentators.

Dan came in back in the Early 1970's when the motif' was "The Beverly Hillbillies", he departs on a night given over to the gruesome antics of real life drunken heiress Paris Hilton. And for a while there he was also the anchorman the rightical chic loved to hate. On a good day somewhere in America some shameless shit like Laura Ingraham was blaming him for the "loss" of South Viet Nam, Nixon's resignation, and Reagan's senescence.
Rather hardly seemed up to the job being to humorless and constrained by the network's interests to answer his critics. But then this is the American Right we are talking about, none of whom ever went bankrupt from an excess of beating up on an easy target.
Still and all that, he TRIED to hold together the vanishing general interest in "objective" journalism. A few weeks of Brian Williams' droning and buzzing will soon enough fill us with a poignant nostalgia for Dan Rather at his twitchiest.

Such is the Kingdom of Heaven,
On the Congressionally Licensed Airwaves
And Elsewhere
3-9-05 7:55pm EST
God Save the Commonwealth
God Save the Republic.