Generation Kill: O’Reilly Goes the Way of the Steam Locomotive

Prime Time icon Bill O’Reilly has unceremoniously left the house. The Fox House, the one that evidently doesn’t guard its hens too well. The past 10-12 years have been divisive ones and O’Reilly being coldly factored out of the show he created is just one example of the reset that is occurring everywhere. Who can forget WWII heroes Winston Churchill and Douglas MacArthur, for example being pushed to the side once the issue was settled? They say that generals are always planning for the last war, but it seems like those who reached their apogees in that war are the ones who fall soonest. O’Reilly, self-appointed ‘Culture Warrior,’ has waged his battles against the degeneracy of trends, and must be viewed as having been a leading exponent of eventual presidential winner Trump. That battle now past, O’Reilly, Moses-like, will be denied entry to whatever Promised Land lies ahead. Or so it may seem.

For me, personally, O’Reilly was an acquired taste, as has Trump been. I have never been too fond of the bullying, blustering methods they both seem to employ. Perhaps it’s because I don’t tower over most people as they do, with Big Man Syndrome, the opposite of Napoleon Complex. One imagines that a combination of talent, wit and size are major influences in the persona of each. It doesn’t make them bad people, just reducible phenomena. They seem presumptuous about others in ways that appear haughty. In their generation, half of one ahead of mine, what is now thought of as sexual harassment is probably encoded more as manliness. The steam locomotive imagery of the title and of course, the unironic appellation Trump Train are apt for Type A behavior. Not long ago, I watched a couple of classics on YouTube, one from The Outer Limits and another, a B or C movie called Hot Rods to Hell. In each, the men behaved in a forward fashion with women, not as a social statement, but as if it was the most natural thing in the world. And to see it, you have to watch those contemporaneous presentations versus something like Mad Men, which, however well-done it is, still knows today’s standards. Mid-Boomers, like myself were very young for the majority of the sexist era and the adjustment to modern sensibilities has not been overly difficult, though I am sure I have been thought of as a chauvinist here and there. 

When mid-Boomer Obama was elected, I’d felt it was like when you first realize that baseball players are younger than you and it’s kind of the first warning of one’s youth having passed. I didn’t think that we’d ever see another president whose sensibilities were forged in the ‘50’s. Yet we were offered only that choice with Trump vs. Clinton. Apparently there must be some unfinished business still in the purview of Boomers if it’s an intelligent universe. 

In my Amazon.com review of Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Kennedy, I noted that the author maintains a parochial outlook on the event as a freestanding, non-conspiratory mishap, itself a peculiar kind of thinking that is closer to what is wished than what is evident. I go on to quote the words of John F. Kennedy himself,

"We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light a candle that can guide us through the darkness to a safe and sure future. For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do."

Really, O’Reilly’s departure is a way marker on the path to a decentralized news media. And with his large following, do not be surprised if he doesn’t reappear with a YouTube channel all his own, though the current clientele for such venues (outside of me, it seems) is generationally removed from him by at least a couple. All I ever wanted was news. I have my own opinions.