Watching POTUS deliver the SOTU on FNC, I grumbled here on NRO about the sappy, irrelevant (to the state of the Union) ”hero of the hour” (HOTH?) segment that now seems to have entrenched itself as part of the format. A reader blames–aaaaargh!–Ronald Reagan.
Derb: Reagan started this, 25 years ago this month. In January 1982 a Florida airline crashed into a bridge and river (the Potomac?) in DC, didn’t get its wings de-iced enough. A lowly postal worker, a white ethnic guy, jumped into the partly frozen river to help rescue one of the few survivors. This was all caught on TV with dramatic pictures (a helicopter not designed for such rescues was attempting to throw life preservers into the rivers attached to lines to drag people to shore).
Reagan had the hero sit with his wife and had him stand up. It was part of Reagan’s attempt to buck up the morale of “ordinary” Americans, and I think it worked to some degree. It was like a scene out of a Frank Capra movie, really hit home to me, I loved it at the time and understood some of what Reagan was doing. I was a teenager and had met Reagan in a “hand shake” line during his campaign. In his inaugural address a year before, he had a section on “ordinary Americans” as heroes. I think this was really in response to the “cultural despair” that the 60s Frankfurt school was pushing.
Plus the SOTU was just coming up after the Florida Air crash, so it may have just been good timing. For this one event, it seemed an “authentic” bit of theater. for some time, Presidential speech writers referred to those singled out during SOTU speeches as “Lenny Skutniks” after the first such one.
[Derb] I have always had the greatest respect for Reagan’s theatrical skills (I recall some media person commenting in the obituary tributes that “you never had to tell him where to stand”), and so am reluctant to second-guess him on a stunt like that. Perhaps it did cheer the country up. I wish it hadn’t become a permanent feature of SOTU, though.