CAN YOU TELL ME WHERE WE'VE GONE?
up over the hill, with osama, katie, and
bob.
Today, after seven weeks of illness, one week of
deathbed watch, and one week of relentless planning and preparation, Pittsburgh
laid to rest its late mayor, Bob O'Connor, a man so beloved by his city that he
twice lost mayoral primaries to an incumbent much of the city hated and the rest
could not warm to even if he brought them cookies and milk at bedtime. A man
who, the third time around, finally became mayor by besting a field of
candidates so undistinguished and devoid of charisma that none of them could
have been elected Dog Catcher in Cat Town. A man whose six months in office
were highlighted by walking our streets and shaking our hands, by smiling and
joking and promising
to "redd up" our city, by cheerleading and pep-rallying and getting
some people to believe again in a city most of us believed in all along.
Bob O'Connor was, by all accounts, a good man and a great guy. A good husband, a good father, and a good friend. And he may well have become a great mayor. But if he accomplished anything of true or lasting significance during his six months in office, or if he had any plans to do so in the next forty-two months, it would be news to me and to the rest of the city. During the almost eight weeks of his illness, and especially during this last week of round-the-clock coverage of his corpse -- here it is leaving the hospital; here it is lying in state; here it is riding along Grant Street; here it is at Freyvogel Funeral Home; the only time we didn't see it was during the embalming -- all the video clips any of our breathless media outlets could manage to dig up show Mr. O'Connor campaigning, or thanking Pittsburgh for electing him, or enjoying a laugh with some people behind the counter at Bruegger's Bagels, or walking around and pointing at trash he'd like someone else to pick up. The most significant action shot anyone seems to have -- and Lord knows they all have it -- shows the mayor in a cherry-picker, hard hat atop his signature silver mane, helping to install a wi-fi transmitter downtown. In all the reactions and reminiscences, people talk about the man, not the Mayor; they talk about who he was, not what he did. And that's because, in the six short months he was in office, he really didn't do much of anything.
I don't hold that against him. And, though I did not vote for him and was not exactly overjoyed when he won, I certainly never felt any ill will toward him. I am -- just as I am any time a good man, a good friend, a good husband and father in this world, dies -- sorry for his death, and some small, solemn parts of my thoughts and prayers have been with his family and his loved ones these past few weeks. But I have begun, these past few days, to wonder what the hell we're doing here, elevating and celebrating and damn near sanctifying a guy who, had he stayed healthy, most of us would right now be ignoring or dismissing or maybe even criticizing for piddling away the first year of his long-sought political power with the noble but not exactly visionary pursuits of cleaning streets and covering graffiti.
John Lennnon and John Kennedy have already shown us that your legend, no matter how great when you're alive, grows to Paul-Bunyon proportions when you die. Kurt Cobain, who at least had Nevermind to his credit, taught us that nothing magnifies your legacy nor inflates your importance quite like dying right after rising to prominence. And Ronald Reagan has recently reminded us that no wake is too great, no memorial too long, no media coverage too obsessive when a political leader expires in the early 21st Century. Bob O'Connor was no Reagan, no Kennedy, no Cobain. (I might consider him better than Lennon, but I'm probably in the minority on that one.) And yet the politicians and television stations, the hagiographic columnists and melodramatic mourners, have spent the last week acting like he was some new Lincoln or Roosevelt, some homegrown Washington or Jefferson, with little bits of Elvis and Mother Theresa thrown in for good measure and even better remembrances.
We heard his life story again and again and again. And again. We heard people recount their memories. We saw the same file footage, the same snapshots, the same interview clips. We saw his casket lying in state in the City-County building. For hours. And hours. We learned the details of the funeral arrangements and the memorial service, saw maps and schematics of today's elaborate, serpentine, horse-drawn hearse procession through the streets of the city. We saw interviews with his family. We saw an interview with the new mayor. We even saw interviews with Bill Cowher and Mario Lemieux. We saw live reports from his funeral home, his church, his neighborhood, his viewing. We could watch the broadcast of his memorial service on tv and hear it narrated it on radio. The Pittsburgh media did everything but rend their garments and shout invectives at the heavens. All this for a man whose most memorable and significant accomplishment as mayor will have been to die in office.
On the front page of this morning's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, lost beside a story on the parade route and the ritual preparations for the memorial service -- The cathedral will sparkle today, said a spokesman for the Pittsburgh Catholic Diocese; he did not, however, say why the cathedral doesn't or shouldn't sparkle for the funerals of every other soul whose body passes through those doors -- and the obsession with photo-opping and micro-managing this day as though it were some sort of inauguration into the office of the afterlife, is a story by Gary Rotstein on how Bob O'Connor's funeral will echo, then exponentially surpass, the remembrances of two of Pittsburgh's most beloved (and accomplished) mayors. One of those men was David L. Lawrence, arguably the greatest and most influential political figure in the city's history: four-term mayor; one-term governor; father and political architect of Pittsburgh's Renaissance; forger of the modern city and region in which we live and work and mourn today; the man who really had to "redd up" this dark and nearly hopeless city; one of Pittsburgh's true and towering legends. When Lawrence died at the end of a long and monumental political career, and before he was laid to rest in the same cemetery that today found a final home for Bob O'Connor, 2,000 mourners attended his funeral and others paid their respects in several days of visitation. No horse-drawn procession. No six-day production of a funeral vigil. No orchestrated, choreographed, stage-managed grieving. And, you can bet, nowhere near the amount of monarchical tricks and trappings that Pittsburgh saw today. Perhaps because he was a different man in a different day. Or perhaps because it was a different time and a different city -- a day and an era and a culture not nearly so full of themselves and their own high drama.
Also in the pages of this morning's PG, bobbing to the surface in a section-to-section sea of Bob O'Connor coverage, was a little item by Senator Rick "Some, Quote, Politician" Santorum, a guy who lately seems to be thinking and speaking a lot about different days and eras and cultures, trying to convince us all that we're reliving the political ghosts and military boogeymen of the years directly preceding David L. Lawrence's first term as mayor. Rebutting an editorial that took him to task for the desperation of his bogus Islamo-Fascist rhetoric, the good Senator invokes Orwell and Hitler and triumphantly declares that the fight against Islamic fascism is the great test of our generation. It occurred to me this morning -- when I'd stopped laughing -- that Rick Santorum really does believe what he says. He wants to inflate the War on Terror and the War in Iraq and the War on People Darker and Scarier Than Him not just for political gain but also for personal and rhetorical glory. He wants to imagine this day and age and accompanying political hysteria as a great, retro, World-War-II-style call to arms and freedom and liberty for the world. Like the Liberal hippie-wannabes he so openly scorns, the ones who came too late for the 60s and wish more than anything else that they could have been there, if only for the cheap dope and easy sex, Rick Santorum came way too late for the 40s but wishes to the depths of his twisted soul that we could somehow relive them, so that he and his neo-con colleagues could get all the glory of sending other men to fight and die and finally to defeat a great, evil force the size and scope and sheer, terrifying depth of Hitler's Nazi Germany. Lacking that chance for true importance, and having only a couple of hundred guys in headwraps and fake passports scattered across the globe to rail against, with a war far more concentrated and much less competently managed than the one fought against real, live fascists sixty some years ago, Santorum and his ilk must resort to slippery metaphors and sensational pronouncements, hoping we won't notice that their view of the world is a hell of a lot more fragile than ours, and that, just as no amount of funereal majesty can make Bob O'Connor the heir to David Lawrence, no amount of ideological hysteria will convince us that Osama bin Laden is another Adolf Hitler.
And yet, for all his rhetorical sleight-of-hand and ideological fork-of-tongue, Santorum is not nearly as hopeless nor inveterate a loon as CBS President & CEO Les Moonves, who, a couple of columns to the left of the Senator on this morning's op-ed page, proved that no television executive -- especially one with a new product to sell and a new corporate strategy to justify -- should ever be allowed to talk about history. Describing his new evening news anchor, the $15-million-woman Katie Couric, Moonves declared: She's the Jackie Robinson of network news. You'd like to think that he was misquoted. Or that he was drunk. Or that the fear of one more news-division fiasco has rattled him to the point of dementia. Because you can't begin to imagine what he was thinking when he was foolish or flippant or just plain fucked up enough to suggest that a much-beloved, veteran female broadcaster, sitting alone in 2006 where many women (a whole lot of whom were alone at the time) have sat before her -- at a desk in front of a camera in an industry filled almost to bursting with smart, perky, telegenic blonde women -- is somehow comparable to, in 1947, a black man joining a team full of white men, in a sport full of white men, in a stadium filled with white men, many of whom would have preferred to see him hanging from a tree instead of running around the bases. Somehow I doubt there were scores of people, including some of her crew own crew, jeering just off camera calling Katie a cunt or yelling at her to go back to the kitchen, bitch! Her position is important, and her ascension to it is a considerable accomplishment, but no amount of marketing melodrama or metaphysical mysticism can turn her into a Jackie-Robinsonesque pioneer for her gender or her industry, much less for our humanity.
As I drove to campus today, past police barricades staged and waiting to be placed along the parade route, with news helicopters beating and hovering overhead, listening to the hushed voice of a radio announcer, sounding like someone broadcasting from the 18th green at the U.S. Open, or from deep in the basement of a World War II safe house, describe the burning of incense and the sprinkling of holy water on the mayor's casket almost two hours after the funeral service began, thinking about the production, the disruption, the epic lack of proportion for the day and the event and maybe even the world, I could only sit and sigh and wonder where we have gone. And worry that we will not be going back.
We live in complex and interesting and sometimes difficult times. We can mourn them or celebrate them. Perhaps we could even try to improve them. But we would do well, I think, simply to recognize them. To understand them. And then to put them in perspective. Because this new and restless discontent with the scope and power and meaning of our world, our people, even our lives and deaths, seems to me as untoward as it is unwarranted. And almost as silly as it is profoundly sad. Not content to sit and wait for greatness to rise on its own, we're constantly looking, searching, trying to create and inflate it where it most certainly does not live. Or die.
Bob O'Connor was not a king. He was not a president. He was a man who was hardly even a mayor, and if he deserves something more for that, surely he deserves something less than this. He was, we are still being reminded, a man of the people. If that is true -- and I have no reason to believe that it is not -- then I can not help but think that wherever he is today, somewhere over the hill and beyond the horizon and in that much-fabled better place -- a place, perhaps, where people are welcomed for who they were and remembered for what they actually did, not for what our drama and our vanity would wish for them or for ourselves -- he is at least a little embarrassed by this display, this exhibition, this pageant of pomp and circumstance befitting someone else who was neither by nor for the people. I imagine him tonight in the warm embrace of his God, standing, perhaps, in the pleasant company of David Lawrence and Jackie Robinson, looking down on us and our silly excesses, smiling that big smile and laughing that hearty laugh at what we have done to ourselves and to our ever-dwindling senses of perspective.
Bob O'Connor was, by all accounts, a good man and a great guy. A good husband, a good father, and a good friend. And he may well have become a great mayor. But if he accomplished anything of true or lasting significance during his six months in office, or if he had any plans to do so in the next forty-two months, it would be news to me and to the rest of the city. During the almost eight weeks of his illness, and especially during this last week of round-the-clock coverage of his corpse -- here it is leaving the hospital; here it is lying in state; here it is riding along Grant Street; here it is at Freyvogel Funeral Home; the only time we didn't see it was during the embalming -- all the video clips any of our breathless media outlets could manage to dig up show Mr. O'Connor campaigning, or thanking Pittsburgh for electing him, or enjoying a laugh with some people behind the counter at Bruegger's Bagels, or walking around and pointing at trash he'd like someone else to pick up. The most significant action shot anyone seems to have -- and Lord knows they all have it -- shows the mayor in a cherry-picker, hard hat atop his signature silver mane, helping to install a wi-fi transmitter downtown. In all the reactions and reminiscences, people talk about the man, not the Mayor; they talk about who he was, not what he did. And that's because, in the six short months he was in office, he really didn't do much of anything.
I don't hold that against him. And, though I did not vote for him and was not exactly overjoyed when he won, I certainly never felt any ill will toward him. I am -- just as I am any time a good man, a good friend, a good husband and father in this world, dies -- sorry for his death, and some small, solemn parts of my thoughts and prayers have been with his family and his loved ones these past few weeks. But I have begun, these past few days, to wonder what the hell we're doing here, elevating and celebrating and damn near sanctifying a guy who, had he stayed healthy, most of us would right now be ignoring or dismissing or maybe even criticizing for piddling away the first year of his long-sought political power with the noble but not exactly visionary pursuits of cleaning streets and covering graffiti.
John Lennnon and John Kennedy have already shown us that your legend, no matter how great when you're alive, grows to Paul-Bunyon proportions when you die. Kurt Cobain, who at least had Nevermind to his credit, taught us that nothing magnifies your legacy nor inflates your importance quite like dying right after rising to prominence. And Ronald Reagan has recently reminded us that no wake is too great, no memorial too long, no media coverage too obsessive when a political leader expires in the early 21st Century. Bob O'Connor was no Reagan, no Kennedy, no Cobain. (I might consider him better than Lennon, but I'm probably in the minority on that one.) And yet the politicians and television stations, the hagiographic columnists and melodramatic mourners, have spent the last week acting like he was some new Lincoln or Roosevelt, some homegrown Washington or Jefferson, with little bits of Elvis and Mother Theresa thrown in for good measure and even better remembrances.
We heard his life story again and again and again. And again. We heard people recount their memories. We saw the same file footage, the same snapshots, the same interview clips. We saw his casket lying in state in the City-County building. For hours. And hours. We learned the details of the funeral arrangements and the memorial service, saw maps and schematics of today's elaborate, serpentine, horse-drawn hearse procession through the streets of the city. We saw interviews with his family. We saw an interview with the new mayor. We even saw interviews with Bill Cowher and Mario Lemieux. We saw live reports from his funeral home, his church, his neighborhood, his viewing. We could watch the broadcast of his memorial service on tv and hear it narrated it on radio. The Pittsburgh media did everything but rend their garments and shout invectives at the heavens. All this for a man whose most memorable and significant accomplishment as mayor will have been to die in office.
On the front page of this morning's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, lost beside a story on the parade route and the ritual preparations for the memorial service -- The cathedral will sparkle today, said a spokesman for the Pittsburgh Catholic Diocese; he did not, however, say why the cathedral doesn't or shouldn't sparkle for the funerals of every other soul whose body passes through those doors -- and the obsession with photo-opping and micro-managing this day as though it were some sort of inauguration into the office of the afterlife, is a story by Gary Rotstein on how Bob O'Connor's funeral will echo, then exponentially surpass, the remembrances of two of Pittsburgh's most beloved (and accomplished) mayors. One of those men was David L. Lawrence, arguably the greatest and most influential political figure in the city's history: four-term mayor; one-term governor; father and political architect of Pittsburgh's Renaissance; forger of the modern city and region in which we live and work and mourn today; the man who really had to "redd up" this dark and nearly hopeless city; one of Pittsburgh's true and towering legends. When Lawrence died at the end of a long and monumental political career, and before he was laid to rest in the same cemetery that today found a final home for Bob O'Connor, 2,000 mourners attended his funeral and others paid their respects in several days of visitation. No horse-drawn procession. No six-day production of a funeral vigil. No orchestrated, choreographed, stage-managed grieving. And, you can bet, nowhere near the amount of monarchical tricks and trappings that Pittsburgh saw today. Perhaps because he was a different man in a different day. Or perhaps because it was a different time and a different city -- a day and an era and a culture not nearly so full of themselves and their own high drama.
Also in the pages of this morning's PG, bobbing to the surface in a section-to-section sea of Bob O'Connor coverage, was a little item by Senator Rick "Some, Quote, Politician" Santorum, a guy who lately seems to be thinking and speaking a lot about different days and eras and cultures, trying to convince us all that we're reliving the political ghosts and military boogeymen of the years directly preceding David L. Lawrence's first term as mayor. Rebutting an editorial that took him to task for the desperation of his bogus Islamo-Fascist rhetoric, the good Senator invokes Orwell and Hitler and triumphantly declares that the fight against Islamic fascism is the great test of our generation. It occurred to me this morning -- when I'd stopped laughing -- that Rick Santorum really does believe what he says. He wants to inflate the War on Terror and the War in Iraq and the War on People Darker and Scarier Than Him not just for political gain but also for personal and rhetorical glory. He wants to imagine this day and age and accompanying political hysteria as a great, retro, World-War-II-style call to arms and freedom and liberty for the world. Like the Liberal hippie-wannabes he so openly scorns, the ones who came too late for the 60s and wish more than anything else that they could have been there, if only for the cheap dope and easy sex, Rick Santorum came way too late for the 40s but wishes to the depths of his twisted soul that we could somehow relive them, so that he and his neo-con colleagues could get all the glory of sending other men to fight and die and finally to defeat a great, evil force the size and scope and sheer, terrifying depth of Hitler's Nazi Germany. Lacking that chance for true importance, and having only a couple of hundred guys in headwraps and fake passports scattered across the globe to rail against, with a war far more concentrated and much less competently managed than the one fought against real, live fascists sixty some years ago, Santorum and his ilk must resort to slippery metaphors and sensational pronouncements, hoping we won't notice that their view of the world is a hell of a lot more fragile than ours, and that, just as no amount of funereal majesty can make Bob O'Connor the heir to David Lawrence, no amount of ideological hysteria will convince us that Osama bin Laden is another Adolf Hitler.
And yet, for all his rhetorical sleight-of-hand and ideological fork-of-tongue, Santorum is not nearly as hopeless nor inveterate a loon as CBS President & CEO Les Moonves, who, a couple of columns to the left of the Senator on this morning's op-ed page, proved that no television executive -- especially one with a new product to sell and a new corporate strategy to justify -- should ever be allowed to talk about history. Describing his new evening news anchor, the $15-million-woman Katie Couric, Moonves declared: She's the Jackie Robinson of network news. You'd like to think that he was misquoted. Or that he was drunk. Or that the fear of one more news-division fiasco has rattled him to the point of dementia. Because you can't begin to imagine what he was thinking when he was foolish or flippant or just plain fucked up enough to suggest that a much-beloved, veteran female broadcaster, sitting alone in 2006 where many women (a whole lot of whom were alone at the time) have sat before her -- at a desk in front of a camera in an industry filled almost to bursting with smart, perky, telegenic blonde women -- is somehow comparable to, in 1947, a black man joining a team full of white men, in a sport full of white men, in a stadium filled with white men, many of whom would have preferred to see him hanging from a tree instead of running around the bases. Somehow I doubt there were scores of people, including some of her crew own crew, jeering just off camera calling Katie a cunt or yelling at her to go back to the kitchen, bitch! Her position is important, and her ascension to it is a considerable accomplishment, but no amount of marketing melodrama or metaphysical mysticism can turn her into a Jackie-Robinsonesque pioneer for her gender or her industry, much less for our humanity.
As I drove to campus today, past police barricades staged and waiting to be placed along the parade route, with news helicopters beating and hovering overhead, listening to the hushed voice of a radio announcer, sounding like someone broadcasting from the 18th green at the U.S. Open, or from deep in the basement of a World War II safe house, describe the burning of incense and the sprinkling of holy water on the mayor's casket almost two hours after the funeral service began, thinking about the production, the disruption, the epic lack of proportion for the day and the event and maybe even the world, I could only sit and sigh and wonder where we have gone. And worry that we will not be going back.
We live in complex and interesting and sometimes difficult times. We can mourn them or celebrate them. Perhaps we could even try to improve them. But we would do well, I think, simply to recognize them. To understand them. And then to put them in perspective. Because this new and restless discontent with the scope and power and meaning of our world, our people, even our lives and deaths, seems to me as untoward as it is unwarranted. And almost as silly as it is profoundly sad. Not content to sit and wait for greatness to rise on its own, we're constantly looking, searching, trying to create and inflate it where it most certainly does not live. Or die.
Bob O'Connor was not a king. He was not a president. He was a man who was hardly even a mayor, and if he deserves something more for that, surely he deserves something less than this. He was, we are still being reminded, a man of the people. If that is true -- and I have no reason to believe that it is not -- then I can not help but think that wherever he is today, somewhere over the hill and beyond the horizon and in that much-fabled better place -- a place, perhaps, where people are welcomed for who they were and remembered for what they actually did, not for what our drama and our vanity would wish for them or for ourselves -- he is at least a little embarrassed by this display, this exhibition, this pageant of pomp and circumstance befitting someone else who was neither by nor for the people. I imagine him tonight in the warm embrace of his God, standing, perhaps, in the pleasant company of David Lawrence and Jackie Robinson, looking down on us and our silly excesses, smiling that big smile and laughing that hearty laugh at what we have done to ourselves and to our ever-dwindling senses of perspective.
Posted: Thu - September 7, 2006 at 10:47 PM
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Published On: Jan 16, 2009 04:50 PM
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Published On: Jan 16, 2009 04:50 PM