The Oppenheimer Report 6/4/18

The other day, I watched a CNN special called 1968, recounting the tumultuous year that ushered in Richard Nixon as President of the United States. LBJ’s escalation of the Viet Nam War made a bad, unwinnable war even worse. Nam veterans, unlucky enough or poor enough to be drafted against their will, came home from the war broken and suffering from PTS, to an unappreciative civilian population conflicted about the war. Iron-fisted Chicago Mayor Daley put the hammer down on the protest marchers during the Democratic National Convention. It was the year Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. It was also the year of loudmouth yippies like Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and the SDS and other militant anarchists blowing up buildings. There were race riots in LA and elsewhere, and war protests across the nation.  I was 13 at the time, and I vaguely remember those troubled times, and I remember fearing that my country was coming apart at the seams. I think it is simplistic to make parallels between that troubled time in America and the situation we find ourselves in today, but clearly, 2018 is not the first time America has faced a crisis in leadership. For me, one difference between then and now is that I still believed what I heard and saw on the news. I trusted guys like Walter Cronkite. These days, everyone so clearly has an agenda, and I don’t trust or believe most of what I hear or read.

Last week, comedienne Rosanne Barr imploded on Twitter, going on record with her overtly racist comments. She denies that her words were racist, and blamed her hurtful remarks on Ambien, a sleep medication she was taking. I chuckled when Sanofi, the pharmaceutical company which makes Ambien, immediately put out a damage control press release, assuring that Ambien does not cause users to become racists. Perhaps they should put it on the label. ABC immediately pulled the plug on Barr’s new show, and I think that was the right move. The bigger problem for me is the lack of remorse, and in some cases indignation on the part of the offenders. I didn’t mean what I said. I wasn’t responsible; I had no idea sleep medication would make me say what I believe. Celebrity’s a bitch, and sadly, the general public does pay attention to what the stars say. 

Increasingly, we live in a world where we don’t take responsibility for our actions. We blame our leaders for the atrocious mess we are in, and we judge everything, oftentimes without the facts. Why aren’t we accountable? I make mistakes every day, but I’m trying harder to own up to them. I’ve said a lot of mean, insensitive things in the past (just read some of the early Opp Reports), and I've been called out for some of those irresponsible words. I don't think I've been hateful, but these days I temper my disrespect. I find social media very useful, especially for the promotion of music, but it is also an indelible record of every stupid thing I say or do. That drunk video you posted of you dry humping a statue of Smokey the Bear might have seemed funny at the time, but maybe it won’t seem so funny in five years. We  seem to be lowering the bar for tolerable behavior and, while we all screw up, there seems to be less and less inclination to show genuine remorse for bad behavior. Ironically, we live in a world where those mistakes are permanently recorded for the public to see and judge.

I don’t know if Rosanne Barr is a racist. She may just be another unbalanced comedian who crossed the line for a laugh. I do think that the number of us who are racists is growing not shrinking, and this saddens me. I don’t know how you teach people to love, but I suspect it is by example.    

   

    - Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2018 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED