Thursday, May 25, 2006

Mr. Rogers Goes to Washington

In 1969 the US Senate had a hearing on funding the newly developed Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The proposed endowment was $20 million, but President Nixon wanted it cut in half because of the spending going on in the Vietnam War. This is an video clip of the exchange between Mr. Rogers and Senator Pastore, head of the hearing. Senator Pastore starts out very abrasive and by the time Mr. Rogers is done talking, Senator Pastore's inner child has heard Mr. Rogers and agreed with him. Enjoy.


Video: Won't you be my neighbor?


(via metafilter.)

10 comments:

esther said...

JA - Thank you. The video made my day. Perhaps Mr. Rogers is my religion....

asher said...

I never realized how slowly Mr. Rogers spoke and how he always sounded like he was about to cry.

JA, hate to clue you in..but Fred Rogers was an ordained minister.

Jewish Atheist said...

swurge:

You're welcome. :-) It's nice to see such a great human.


asher:

JA, hate to clue you in..but Fred Rogers was an ordained minister.

So are a lot of great people. Some of whom I've previously blogged about. Some of the best people I know are religious. I've never said otherwise.

Laura said...

I LOVED Mr. Rogers when I was a kid. His speech made me think about all the crap that's out there for kids, and how there's truly a hole left unfilled. Sure they show reruns of his show, but no one is out there really doing what he did - truly caring about his program. I remember reading somewhere that he would get very angry at anyone who tried to demean his show - because he truly cared about what he was doing. That's so rare, especially now.

Sadie Lou said...

I've noticed that certain kids are entertained by Mr. Rogers and other kids are bored to death. My son, who has problems keeping focus, never liked Mr. Rogers. My daughter loved it.
I loved it too. I liked it better than Sesame Street.
I'm with Laura, there are not any shoes that have replaced Mr. Rogers--he truly cared about his target audience.

stc said...

Very moving, spiritual even. Thanks for sharing that. I'm going to mention it to Mary P. (who writes a blog about child rearing), and I expect she'll blog about it.

Ben Avuyah said...

Wow, very moving, he was a true believer in what he was doing. The funny thing was that I now realize...he wasn't playing a character on the show....that was realy him !! I half expected him to pull off his shoes and change into sweater at the end of the video !

stc said...

Mary P. pointed out that Rogers was implicitly speaking out against the Vietnam War (Nixon's budgetary priority). He talks about men learning to resolve their disagreements, and the song lyrics talk about stopping when we realize that we're doing wrong.

Maybe everybody else caught that, not just Mary P. But I admit, it went right over my head.

Jewish Atheist said...

q:

Thanks for mentioning that. I didn't catch it, either.

Anonymous said...

Super color scheme, I like it! Good job. Go on.
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