I’ve just been spending time with Ratty

You easy people don’t know what it’s like being jeered at. My dad did. He was trying to get a job in New York City, with the gods of network television. And all he had to offer was a degree from the University of Podunk Michigan. Who never produced a single celebrity but Tom Harmon. When it came my turn, Dad made sure I went to an eminent prep school. The most boring one. Hotchkiss. It had no reputation for anything, not brilliance, not obnoxiousness, not drunkenness, not nothing whatever but boring guys who went to school every day and every day and then to Harvard. When I went to Harvard I wanted like everyone else to belong to the glamor spires of Eliot, Lowell, or Dunster. But the unspired  awfulness of Adams House is where you went to learn how to defend Alger Hiss and Lyndon Johnson. So I did that too.

They never stopped jeering at my dad. You good people don’t know that. You saw him smash corporate fascists with unanswerable questions and accusations. You didn’t hear the giggles, who claimed that my dad never even asked the questions till after the actual mousetrap interview was in the can. Totally untrue. He had already laid out, in detail, the slam-dunk Gotcha questions to be asked and he was good enough not to want to subject them to his withering contempt in person. He gave them the chance to gasp and sputter and complain about unfair inquisitional setups without the death sentence of his cold, final, ultimate voice.

For this the fascist Republicans pretended my father was a fake and an empty celebrity suit. He wasn’t a fake. If he’d been a fake, I wouldn’t have spent my whole life terrified of his temper, his demands, his contempt.

Where was I? They were sneering and laughing at me from the start. Mike Wallace Junior, only without the balls. I showed them. For years and years and years. 

Then it started spiraling downhill. The Faux Fox gig went bad. They started accusing me of being just a paper machè version of my father, only completely dishonest about my politics in order to be a news celebrity.

Why I did the principled thing and made the hard decision to go to a failing network like CNNT. And then that died almost immediately, like Fate and my dad’s scorn tracking me down to the depths of ruin.

I’d like to point out that Manischewitz is NOT hard liquor. It’s a fairly sweet, not hard wine. I was never a drunk during the CNN+ kerfuffle — and that’s all it ever was — I was just verklempt.

I’m better now. Got back to my roots with an old friend. On an old old willow pond not that far from Hotchkiss…