Editorials/Stupefying Imbeciles/NBC's "Yesterday" Show
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
NBC'S "YESTERDAY" SHOW As an assiduous viewer of the Republic's three major morning talk shows I should like to tender a public-spirited suggestion to the producers and directors of NBC's "Today"...
...There one would never know that for the past six years American GNP has grown annually at 4 percent, that today's GNP is approximately 26 percent higher than it waswhen Ronald Reagan arrived in office, that without a nuclear freeze or any of the other quack panaceas of the left Moscow is again cordial toward Washington, dismantling missiles and withdrawing from countries it overran in the days of the Carter grin...
...They have no new literature, no new wisdom, only their fat paychecks...
...A bumper sticker finely tuned to their sentimental weirdness might be "A Brain is a Beautiful Vegetable...
...Now they have the Reagan prosperity, their BMWs, and their bumper stickers...
...Apart from Peter Collier and David 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1989 Horowitz, no American admirers of Castro, Ho Chi Minh, or Mao have in the 1980s admitted to being duped...
...The program's name no longer conveys the character of the show or the reason that viewers turn to it...
...Those malcontents who in the 1930s returned from abroad extolling the virtues of Stalin, Mussolini, and even Hitler occasionally confessed quite eloquently to their error...
...They are the only malcontents in the history of the West to have learned nothing from their dalliances with totalitarianism and failed Utopia...
...Hightower showed us was more like the dustbowl of the 1930s than the Texas George Bush and his people come from...
...Instead most of yesteryear's enrages have now gentled into the middle-class amenities that Reaganism provides in such abundance and kept their old prejudices intact and impenetrable...
...I do not make this suggestion in pursuit of snickers or rude gestures at NBC's expense...
...Consider Muggeridge, Orwell, or Koestler...
...The Texas that Mr...
...Certainly the brains that govern the "Yesterday" show are beautiful vegetables...
...And who was ourguide to George Bush's Texas...
...Viewers do not watch it to be informed of events today but to be informed of the way things were yesterday...
...Watching the "Yesterday" show is like watching the "Today" show, say, in the spring of 1975—except for one thing: recent history has demonstrated that radicalism's infantile sneer at the American way of life is no improvement on reality...
...Hightower's explication of Texas was one unrelieved tour of misery and penury: farms foreclosed on, huge office buildings vacant, a grizzled good old boy wheezing something about George Bush's being a wimp...
...It is a nostalgia broadcast...
...Once again NBC was not telling us about today but rather about yesterday...
...NBC'S "YESTERDAY" SHOW As an assiduous viewer of the Republic's three major morning talk shows I should like to tender a public-spirited suggestion to the producers and directors of NBC's "Today" show...
...A decade ago today's yuppies had only their idealism, their herbal soaps, their earth shoes, a loony prof as a guru, and their bumper stickers...
...When will "Yesterday" cover the 1980s...
...His urgency was somewhat startling, considering that only two months ago 53 percent of the electorate were for Bush, and polls indicate that an even higher percentage of nonvoters supported him...
...In the interest of accuracy I suggest that NBC rechristen this swell assemblage of all the sentiments, the prejudices, the bugaboos of the 1970s (occasionally the 1960s too) "Yesterday" with Bryant Gumbel and Jane Pauley...
...Hightower's warning that George Bush had better "get in touch" with the people...
...Yesterday's" visit to Texas was a fantasy and it ended with Mr...
...Why, Jim Hightower, Texas's "populist" agriculture commissioner who gained fleeting fame for being one of the most florid abominators of George Bush at last summer's ill-starred Democratic Convention...
...The "Yesterday" show is, I know, a success...
...My guess is never...
...Hightower boasts of his left-wing rigorism by saying things like "the only things in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead armadillos...
...Every morning there are a million or so yuppies out there gobbling vitamins, sipping vegetable juices, prayerfully spooning their way through mounds of disgusting bran, and vastly enjoying NBC's stroll down memory lane, where Presidents are always under imminent threat of impeachment and untrustworthy corporations are subverting noble Third World showcases of the socialist political science...
...The other morning, when I tuned in, one of "Yesterday's" features was a piece on Texas whence, we were told, so many powers in the Bush Administration will be drawn...
...Apparently its producers are attempting to create a museum of the 1960s-1970s...
Vol. 22 • March 1989 • No. 3
