The Spoken Word

Sunday Morning has always turned a critical eye toward television and the movies. When it comes to choice (if sometimes polysyllabic) words about the popular culture, the anchors of Sunday Morning know just the critic to turn to -- John Leonard.

Maybe the time for language and literature has passed, though not at Sunday Morning. Maybe we no longer need stories where intelligent action and moral purpose are made coherent -- the little narratives of causality and continuity, of gunpowder and the fork; and the great narratives of class struggle, scientific progress, the sorrow songs and the Oedipus complex.

Sunday Morning never got this memo. Maybe words are guilty of association with rational comment, abstract ideas, the history of human thought and the library of human feelings, home truths and collective memory. Sunday Morning keeps writing compound sentences.

Nowadays, privileged at the computer and the plasma screen, looking down as if from elephants or zeppelins on a discourse of jingles and insults, slogans and clichés, brand names and bumper stickers, with multiple views of Paris Hilton in intimate focus or broad scan and an IV feed of lewd data, who wants a worrywart making distinctions, a spoilsport making connections, or a storyteller making magic?

We might as well just grunt and ogle. Except at Sunday Morning, where 25 years ago Charles Kuralt knocked on our front door and asked if the human mind could come out and play.

Originally aired Jan. 25, 2004