This Is "News"?

On her radio show this morning, Laura Ingraham played a few clips from, and made fun of, Tom Brokaw's NBC News special about that new phenomenon: Evangelical Christians. The special was called, "In God They Trust," and went to "the epicenter" of evangelicals, Colorado Springs, CO. Judging by the title (In God "They" Trust?) and by Brokaw's introduction, which included a statement along the lines of, "I'd go to parties and people kept asking me, 'Who are these evangelicals?'" it was clear that Brokaw and NBC News saw evangelicals as some kind of alien species that had come to inhabit America. Recently.

So they produced this show to explain the the new phenomenon of evangelicals participating in American life and politics. The only problem was, as one of Laura's callers pointed out, that NBC News produced a special 17 years ago explaining who these evangelicals are.

And if Colorado Springs is the epicenter of evangelicalism, then does that mean that the strength of faith or political interest fades as you move away from there? Am I a weaker evangelical because I live in Southern California and not in Colorado? Epicenter is a strange choice of words, because it implies not only centrality (and evangelicals are certainly not centralized) but also disaster. Odd that Brokaw sees the "They" of his news story as so foreign and so dangerous. And so new.

Last time I looked, evangelicals were a normal part of America and had been for a long time.

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George Takei, who played Mr. Sulu, the helmsman on the original Star Trek, has come out as a homosexual. This is hitting the news today.

Now, I'm not on the cutting edge of anything. I'm just a regular person working a Monday to Friday job just as I have for over 25 years, and I knew about Takei 20 years ago. One of the men I worked with in 1985 told me that Takei had hit on him at a Star Trek convention some years before that. My co-worker declined, and that was that.

But the fact that this is news to the world when it's old news to me is just like when Rock Hudson died of AIDS, also in 1985. I heard about Rock Hudson and Gomer Pyle being an item on the playground in fourth or fifth grade (in the late '60s) from another girl whose father told her. Everybody said, "Eeeewww!" and never came back to the subject. So I figured if I knew, then the whole world must already know. After all, I went to school in a mostly Navy-enlisted, lower-middle class neighborhood in a San Diego suburb--not the kind of place that would be in-the-know about Hollywood insider details.

But the rest of the world was shocked when Rock Hudson died of AIDS, just like the news media seems shocked now to learn that Sulu is gay. But it's old news.

The story for me about George Takei, since I know how long it's been since he approached a young man at a Star Trek convention, is how hard life must have been for him, hiding the truth about who he is and what he does and always being afraid of discovery. By taking this step, Takei is now free of that fear. And freedom from fear is a freedom unlike many others.