Posted on 03/18/2012 2:10:23 PM PDT by the invisib1e hand
[snip]
For one serendipitous weekend he was Mr. Rogers’s actual neighbor.
[snip]
He asked about the young man’s job at MTV and got him talking about his parents’ divorce two decades earlier...an MTV senior vice president with a shrine of Mr. Rogers mementos above his desk...a self-described “PBS mind in a jump-cut, sound-bit MTV world.”
Mr. Rogers listened, then offered, “I feel so strongly that deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex,”...
[snip]
He took that suggestion to heart after Mr. Rogers’s death in 2003, teaming up with his brother, Christofer, 43, a television editor, to make “Mr. Rogers & Me.” ...“The me in the title is you, it’s all of us,” he said.
[snip]
“There is no person in this whole world who is a mistake,” he said. “No matter how different that person may seem, each person is fine.”
[snip]
Tim Madigan...wrote ...“I’m Proud of You: My Friendship With Fred Rogers” (2006).
[snip]
Amy Hollingsworth..in the first interview where he spoke publicly about his faith...write “The Simple Faith of Fred Rogers” in 2006.
...National Public Radio correspondent Susan Stamberg...said her last-minute jitters about doing live television were vanquished by a call from Daniel Striped Tiger, one of Mr. Rogers’s puppet characters.
[snip]
“He tapped into the frightened child in me,” Ms. Stamberg recalled. “By the end of our conversation I was practically sucking my thumb! He had the most extraordinary sense of loyalty to the feelings of childhood.”
[snip]
...an ordained minister, he did not have a congregation and never spoke on his show about God.
[snip]
“He was adamant he didn’t want a Fred Rogers museum just to honor him, but a working center that would help parents and children.”
[snip]
As far as I’m concerned, we’re spreading the message.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
the take away, if I may suggest, is how the man has influenced some in the media to perhaps act as though they might actually have a human gene.
Spent far too long trying to selectively excerpt this. Sue me if it doesn't make any sense.
Mr. Rogers, if you’ll forgive me, there is an exception:
O One
B Big
A Ass
M Mistake
A America
Almost everyone I knew thought that Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood was corny. I thought it was absolutely great. He was at ease, he had values, he took his time, and he was a completely contrast with what you might call the Spirit of Hollywood. And it was a very healthy show for kids to watch.
In contrast, Sesame Street was fun, cute, brilliantly produced, but underneath all that it was liberal and destructive.
More, this was the TV generation, the first generation of kids who grew up watching TV all the time, and it fried their brains. Sesame Street was one of the worst offenders in that regard.
Marshall MacLuhan had came out with his brilliant book, The Medium is the Message, pointing out the perils of TV. One of the worst problems is that no one who watched it full time could concentrate on anything for longer than about 10 or 15 seconds—the amount of time the camera rolled before switching to the next shot. Sesame Street supposedly taught kids how to count and spell, but what it really did is unhinge their minds, so they couldn’t concentrate on anything for longer than that proverbial 15 seconds.
Mr. Rogers was exactly the opposite. Check out the camera techniques of these two shows.
I'm still trying to get my head around "Understanding Media." In fact, it comes to me in little bits, and it's phenomenal. We take media for granted, and probably can't fully appreciate how it completely distorts reality -- even something as simple as a photograph is completely out of context by its very nature and susceptible to being reinterpreted by its viewer(s) in ways that have little connection to the reality of the event it portrays. That sort of power is not to be abused...but alas...
Marshall MacLuhan was an almost unprecedented phenomenon—a hugely popular media star who was also a genius with traditional moral values. The only one of his kind in the postmodern world, unless maybe you turn to someone very different like Flannery O’Connor.
I’ve read several of his books and essays. That one is the most significant, but they’re all worth reading. And underneath it all is someone with very traditional religious views—but he managed to phrase them in such a way that the religion-hating intellectuals were taken in.
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