PRIME TIME

PRIME TIME

REBEL YOUTH GANG ATTACKS PREZ

by Richard C. Walls

Recently I tuned in CSpan, always a risky venture—sometimes you get the boring drone of officialdom and sometimes (and this is also true of the CBN and PTL Networks) you get something that seems to have been scripted by an especially cruel National Lampoon graduate. What I got was a program being presented by the Close-Up Foundation (don’t ask—I don’t know) which had a group of wellscrubbed, clean-cut, nonoffensive high school students from all.over the country (mostly white, but with a respectable sprinkling of the various minorities) who were asking questions of lo and behold! the actual presidential guy, Mr. Ronald Reagan. Ron had eschewed a podium for a stool, presumably to put the young folk at ease, and he seemed to be having a ball—though from my couch vantage point, spread out Full Potato, it was dull, dull, deadly dull. The questions, encouragingly enough, were often quite good, and covered a range of not uncontroversial subjects (or subjects that have been made controversial by the current administration), but the Prez was as vague as ever. We’re talking major waffling, each question being deflected with a puff of smoke and an inspirational homily, delivered in those senile cadences that so many of our stress-filled citizens find so reassuring. The only remotely interesting thing said during the hour was a little headline-making pearl of wisdom which our fearless leader adlibbed—that if there were any hungry people left in this great country club of ours, it’s because the poor wretches don’t know how to find the food stamp offices (this is like saying that if there’s a lot of dead farmers in Nicaragua, it’s because they didn’t know how to get out of the way of the bullets of American-funded goon squads). This bit of untempered right-wing deep-think was a little too raw for the general public and to counterbalance it the Prez was persuaded to reverse his decision not to participate in the well-meaning but sadly ineffective “Hands Across America” spectacle...which means that the White House’s original explanation that Reagan would not participate for security reasons was either a lie or else they figured that it was worth risking the old man’s life for a little much-needed positive PR.

Back to the show. A depressing presentation, and it served me right for watching, I know, but there’s more. After the program, when the president had departed, C-Span presented a follow-up show with the same student audience, asking the questioners one-by-one, what they thought of their encounter with His Magnificence. And one-by-one these clean-cut, etcs., got up and said, “Like, he seemed like a nice guy and all, but, like, he didn’t answer my question." After about eight of these, the Close-Up Foundation’s official adult and moderator, realizing that it’d be a cold day in South Africa before the Prez would appear before such little ingrates again, lunged for the weenie-of-the-year award by offering this excuse: “But golly kids, imagine how difficult it must be to have to come up with precise answers to such a wide variety of topics.”

This was a wonder to behold, but it got even better when CSpan decided to open it’s phone lines. C-Span is forever “opening its phone lines’—this is a touchstone for them, empirical evidence that, despite everything, democracy still flourishes here. Unfortunately, 80 percent of what comes through these open phone lines is such moronic dribble that you begin to fear not only for the future of democracy, but life on the planet. To be fair, a few complimented the students on noticing the king’s nakedness, but more typical were the callers who sounded ready to lynch the little SOB’s for the heinous treachery of asking questions and expecting answers. Ah, C-Span, it’s so educational.