I finally got a chance to catch up with the excellent HBO miniseries John Adams this weekend. The series is over now, but my father has been taping it for me (I don’t get HBO) and I watched the first couple of episodes this weekend. It’s based on the equally enjoyable (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) book of the same name by historian David McCullough, who seems to have a particular interest in the Founding Fathers era of our nation’s history. More on that later.
Would today’s media even allow a curmudgeonly politician like John Adams to exist?
A quick aside: I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. McCullough a few years ago at an event at the Kennedy Library in Boston. It was about the time the movie Amistad had come out, and a replica of that ship had come to Boston in coordination with McCullough speaking at the library. I was working as a stringer for the Patriot Ledger and I have a vivid memory of myself and the photographer for the Ledger sitting in the rain while McCullough got a private tour of the Amistad replica, hoping to catch him on the way out. I did have the chance to speak to him for a few minutes, and I even got a small scoop about the topic of his next book (I’m not 100 percent sure, but I think it was when he was working on 1776.) Very nice guy, extremely intelligent and passionate about his subjects.
If anybody has a chance to catch the series, it’s very well done –– it’s one of the most perfectly cast things I’ve seen in a long time. Paul Giamatti is perfect as Adams, portraying him as intelligent but obnoxious. Laura Linney is GREAT as Abigail and I even liked David Morse’s reluctantly regal George Washington. (If you watch the film, they put a false nose on Morse, it really makes him look like a dollar bill.)
What this all made me think of is this: What an amazingly lucky thing it was that all these great minds –– people like Adams, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson –– were all alive at the same time and wound up in the same place as our fledgling nation spread its wings. Every time I read a book or watch a movie about the origin of America, I’m always struck by how close it came to never happening at all.
The other strong thought I was hit with: Where are all these men now? (Or women, of course, no reason such a person has to be male.) Our country needs people like Franklin, Adams and Jefferson now more than ever, creative passionate people who believe in our basic freedoms and aren’t afraid to speak out.
Further more, could such people even exist in the world today? If Ben Franklin were alive today, all we would ever hear about are his faults, his womanizing, etc., nothing about his ideas or his contributions to society. That’s a scary thought. Everytime I turn on the coverage of the current presidential election, all I hear about is who lived next to a radical hippie 30 years ago, or who MIGHT have given who the finger at a debate –– or are they scratching their nose? It’s so sad, because I believe we have three (including Sen. McCain and both Democratic contenders) extremely intelligent, good people running for the nation’s top office. This could have been a great election, a real intelligent, productive conversation about where this country is headed. Instead it’s been an unwatchable train wreck of stupid questions, inane details and desperate scandal-dumping. We have lost a great opportunity to have an intelligent conversation as a nation here. Most would lay the blame squarely at the feet of the 24-hour media, and they deserve the lion’s share of blame to be sure, but they wouldn’t be able to print it (or televise it) if people didn’t watch it. To some extent, this is what we want as Americans, and that’s terrifying. We’d rather talk about Hillary’s husband, Obama’s preacher, or McCain’s age that face the real issues. I don’t presume to know how to fix that, but it has to be fixed. Maybe there is another John Adams or Thomas Jefferson somewhere in the country, or another Ben Franklin. But would we let them speak, or even listen to what they have to say?
Whitman-Hanson School Committee 5.20.08
EPA ruling against Dunham Farm contractor
