It's not every day that a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian swears on national television, but it happened yesterday on CBS' Face The Nation.
Edmund Morris -- who is promoting Colonel Roosevelt, the newly released concluding volume of his Theodore Roosevelt trilogy -- used the full word of the term "BS" to describe a question from CBS' Bob Schieffer:
SCHIEFFER: What would Teddy Roosevelt think of today's politics, Edmund?
MORRIS: You keep asking these present-less questions, Bob. ... As the immortal Marisa Tomei said in My Cousin Vinny, that's a (EXPLETIVE DELETED) question. Because you cannot pluck people out of the past and expect them to comment on what's happening today.
I can only say that what he represented in his time is what we look for in our presidents now -- what we hope for in our presidents now, and we're increasingly disappointed. He was somebody who understood foreign cultures.
He represented the dignity of the United States. He was forceful but at the same time civilized. And what I really feel these days is we've become such an insular people. And I'm particularly sensitive to this, as I suppose Arianna (Huffington) is, as an immigrant, because I represent -- I come from another culture. I can call myself legitimately an African-American.
And I'm aware of the fact that people elsewhere in the world think differently from us. I can, sort of, see us, us Americans, with their eyes. And not all that I see is attractive. I see an insular people who are insensitive to foreign sensibilities, who are lazy, obese, complacent, and increasingly perplexed as to why we are losing our place in the world to people who are more dynamic than us and more disciplined.
Well, now.
My Cousin Vinny, by the way, is a 1992 film, a courtroom comedy for which Marisa Tomei won an Oscar as the sassy Mona Lisa Vito.
The Oval loved the first two volumes of Morris' TR biography -- The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex -- and has high hopes for Colonel Roosevelt, a look at the subject's post-presidential years.
We just hope it's a little more eloquent that Morris' television appearance Sunday.
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