Get Up Early

When I was a kid, the only time we could listen to the radio in the morning was on those days when SCHOOL MIGHT BE CLOSED!!!! and we would tune into WCCO radio - the gigantic AMer in this market since before I was born - to hope and pray that Bob DeHaven would read the name of our school.

When television came around, well, we didn't have one...not for years until Alastair Cooke arrived with "Omnibus, and the old man relented...but never, ever, in the morning.

In recent years, I've found that my morning conversation with Islay the Scottish terrier has become repetitive:
I want to go out...
I want to have breakfast....
I want to go out....
l have to go out...
I want to play....
I want to go out.....

Et cetera.

To my surprise, I discovered a program on MSNBC called "Morning Joe," led by thoughtful conservative Joe Scarborough, ably assisted by Mika Brzezinski, daughter to Zbig, and Willie Geist, son of Bill Geist, along with a revolving panel of liberal and conservative cranks, especially Mike Barnicle of Boston.  All of them brighten my morning, and they never need to be let out or brought back in.

But then.....

Then I discovered "Up with Chris Hayes," also on MSNBC early on Saturday and Sunday mornings (check your local listings).  Hayes is the "really smart kid," you remember not quite liking from your childhood -  intense, supremely well-informed, excellent sense of humor, and each weekend morning he puts together a panel of "bright young things," to meander through stories of the day, emerging issues, and newly published books.  It is a veritable feast for an old crank like me.

If you doubt the future of our country, if you feel you cannot trust those under thirty-five, take hope.  A couple of weekends watching "Up" will put the spring back in your step, lift your expectations about the future, and put you into a world of ideas and information worth being put into.

It's a new show, and if the powers-that-be at MSNBC have any brains, they will leave it alone and let the guy find his way unaided by focus groups, committees, or any sort of "group think."

I thought about recording the program so I could watch it at my leisure, but I concluded, oh,what the hell, "you know who" likes to get up before dawn and go out to confirm her world view so how could I start a weekend morning any better than with "UP with Chris Hayes," a steaming cup of coffee...with real cream, and a contented scotty dog...?