Some Aminals Is More Important

Grammar and spelling have never been the long suit of your faithful correspondent. There are times that one wishes that there were a Bermuda shorts dialect of the Queen's English. Pidgin may be a viable alternative but for the fact that one would be only understood in New Guinea or Burma or Shanghai. So please excuse the misspelling and grammar faux pas on the title of this post.

Now, to get to the point. A couple of weeks ago the ABC network national news anchor, Peter Jennings died. The news industry, being an oddly unified, while being diverse industry (think light: particle or wave?), and an industry that determines for us, the plebes, no matter what our societal status may be, lord or beggar, what we should know and care about, spent an inordinate amount of time covering and remembering a man, who, while a good reader and vaguely handsome, was really not much more than a puppet. He may have written some of his own news copy and he may have chosen what stories he wanted to report, but, let's face it, he was no Ernie Pyle, Edward R. Murrow or even Jack London (an under rated journalist if ever there was one -- read his reports of the London poor or the Russo-Japanese War).

But we got the whole nine yards about a man who was on the radio in Canada as a child, who's mother hated the US and who had been married four times for no good apparent reason except that perhaps he got bored by his wives.

The death of Peter Jennings is a sadness for his family and fans, but, let's face it, in the long view his death will make no difference for the heritage of the nation. The same holds true for most of us. Our families may mourn. A few friends may shed tears. But in the final analysis, most of us really haven't contributed to culture to the point of having seemingly endless hours of television and radio, and gallons of ink spent on telling the world what great fellows or ladies were were. We may have contributed to the concrete world (building in some way, or engineering), but culturally we've contributed nil. Nobody remembers the stone masons of Notre Dame, or even the architects, but people remember Thomas Aquinas and Hildegard of Bigen (sp?) let alone the journal keepers of the time.

This past week the American fiddler Vassar Clemens died at the age of 77. Clemens started his career as a bluegrass fiddler and went on to expand into a jazz and rock fiddler. He was, in a sense, the American Paganinni. He played uniquely American music on his instrument. His work added the grace notes to recordings by Jerry Garcia, the Dirt Band and innumerable bluegrass bands. And the American musical scene has lost a talent that is, in the foreseeable future, is irreplaceable. And result from the news industry has been --- an obit on the back page of the LA Times.

The irony is that years from now people will be listening to recordings of Clemens playing Will The Circle Be Unbroken? or Orange Blossom Special while catching their collective breaths at his virtuosity while having less idea of who Peter Jennings was than Richard Harding Davis.