The website Youtube is an inexhaustible source of video nostalgia. Recently it’s been calling my attention to the late astronomer and smart person Carl Sagan, particularly to his appearances in the mid-1970s on The Tonight Show, starring Johnny Carson. Among the many conversation topics was the movie Star Wars, just released at the time. Sagan pointed out that the power structure in the movie is composed only of white-skinned humans, an unscientific conceit for an intergalactic tale. He also faulted the story for not awarding a medal to Chewbacca the Wookie, as it does to Han and Luke.
I don’t know if George Lucas was watching Johnny’s show that night, and Sagan was hardly alone in his criticisms. Nevertheless, future installments of the series would tacitly address both issues. Lando Calrissisan (played by Billy Dee Williams) would appear in the next movie, and other non-caucasian humans would follow. Chewie had to wait 40 years, but he finally gets his medal in The Rise of Skywalker.
In his last book, Carl Sagan wrote the following passage. It’s been cited quite a bit, for reasons I’ll let readers figure out.
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries, when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority;…unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness.
I think I am able to recognize what’s true, or at least, that I can apply evidence to analyze statements and arguments, and to be correct a healthy percentage of the time. All of my experience in science and math—both studying the fields and then writing about them—has provided me some useful skills in logical reasoning, or so I like to think.
To me it’s blisteringly obvious that our current president is a deceitful demagogue who has surrounded himself with toadies, cowards, and defecto fascists. I can cite boatloads of evidence to support this view, beginning with Trump’s personal denial of support for Project 2025 during the campaign, followed by the enacting of its agenda once he was elected. One of the project’s key authors was the guy now running the FCC, he who has engineered the suspension of liberal talk-show hosts.
I also take strong exception to the slogan, Make America Great Again. Like so much else that Trump offers, it’s a false promise, an empty claim, a lie. I can’t think of a single action that the Trump administration has taken that is making anyone in America greater than they were before, with the possible exception of a few billionaires. The rest of us are getting a higher cost of living, less health care, challenges to our freedom of speech, a sucker’s chance of being shot by a madman, and if we happen to be Hispanic, the possibility of being accosted on the street, arrested and humiliated, and then shipped to prison or out the country.
But that’s just me pontificating. Fans of Mr. Trump—like the man himself—think they are the Keepers of the Flame, and they deem complainers like me to be loony liberals. I can’t imagine my arguments winning them over. Certainly hasn’t happened yet.
I think the biggest villain in this current chapter of the Story of America is not Trump himself, nor any subgroup of his supporters, but rather, that beast called Fox News. If we need an actual human representative for this institution, let’s nominate its founder, Rupert Murdoch.
For several decades now, Fox News has been pumping out what feels good at the expense of the objective truth, and it has shaped the minds of its audience accordingly. Messengers may come and go, slogans may rise and fall, but Fox News seems poised to continue defining the world for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful, which is the only way that their philosophy makes any sense.
As far as I can tell, only one type of event is able to wrench a Trump supporter out of their mindset. That event is Trump’s policies causing them personal harm or distress. I’ve read reports of farmers quitting Trump because of his cancelling USAID, the program supplying their livelihood. I’ve read about Hispanic Trump supporters quitting the cause after ICE starts harassing their family. Some government workers had supported Trump, but not after he fired them.
Well, so be it.
Of course I miss Carl Sagan, but the man whom I think we really miss was the one interviewing him.
Johnny Carson has been off the airwaves for more than three decades, and gone from the world for the past two. American politics and culture has changed remarkably since Carson’s time, and I think not for the better.
The Tonight Show was extremely popular back then, and that’s because of its host. Johnny would welcome pretty much any decent soul to the stage, from ordinary folks who could imitate bird calls and sing along with their dogs, to a pantheon of celebrities ranging from conservative icons John Wayne and Bob Hope to counterculture liberals like George Carlin and Richard Pryor, and let’s add women like Joan Rivers, and Charo, and Joan Embery, from the San Diego Zoo. Whether real or just an act, Carson found common ground with all of his guests and invited the viewer to do likewise. At the same time, viewers had barely an inkling of where Carson actually stood politically. Maybe he was in the center between the conservative Ed McMahon and that goofily-dressed hippy band leader, Doc Severinsen. But we never knew.
It’s impossible—absolutely impossible—to imagine any politician of the time heaving insults at Johnny Carson, let alone pushing publicly to remove him from the air. Carson was American culture, or at least a healthy chunk of it.
Today, we’re all fragmented. We have our niche cable networks and television hosts and country clubs and suburban subdivisions, with fewer shared experiences and common values.
I hope the country can find a way to come together. Hope, as said by Emily Dickinson and disabused by Woody Allen, is the thing with feathers. The Democrats are working on a document they’re calling Project 2028. Maybe, after the voters recover from the sticker shock of their medical and grocery bills, they’ll take a good look at the ideas.
