I woke up this morning to a pot of Grand Pecan coffee (my wife deserves to be dipped in bronze) and a bruising WSJ Opinion Journal editorial by John Hillen blaming the military for what we’ll call “The Geraldo Phenomenon.” Seems the Pentagon’s post-Vietnam adversarial relationship with the press — and its disinclination to raise individual soldiers to celebrity status (Pfc. Billy Smith just loves his Chunky Soup…) — leads inexorably to bushy faux-feral ‘staches (Geraldo’s, not Christiane’s) and gingham war scarves, khaki safari vests and tubed jerky beef, hard-edged tobacco-and-guns commentary and video footage of unshaven reporters geraldo-ing it over mud-and-rock — all to bring us more shaky footage of mostly-abandoned battlefields (Typical breathless line: “If you look over my left shoulder, you’ll see what appears to be an empty box of Tide…a-and what looks like a child’s discarded bicycle, though it could very well be a steaming pile of al Qaeda entrails…”)

Hillen writes, “Relentlessly narcissistic and buoyed by cloying network anchors at home [Hear that, Shep?], reporters such as these have used dramatic license to heighten the sense of personal danger to themselves and thus tacitly direct their reporting towards the inevitable conclusion–“ain’t I a hero?”

Well, that may be so, John…but nothing goes better with a cup o’ Grand Pecan coffee than a tasty, flamboyant, self-important human danish like Geraldo. Love him or hate him, there he is, morning after morning — dustcovered and tucked in some hellish Asian crevice — our macho proxy-in-the-field, hard-boiled and ready for action. And through the miracle of (western) technology, he’s feeding us live reports from half way around the world, from a country that, let’s face it, is hardly immediate to most of us. In short, he’s keeping us tethered to our purpose, and — in his own Banana Republic-and-whiskeysour kind of way — he’s helping to steel our resolve. Take a bow, Geraldo. You can take a dunk in my coffee any time.

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