Jimmy Breslin: 'The aimless babbles of this Beck'

Jimmy Breslin is a national treasure. Born in 1929 (or 1930), he's perhaps the best journalist I've read in my life. He's got Mike Royko cred and an ear like an angel.

(Sample: "The first funeral for Andrew Goodman was at night and it was a lot of work. To begin with they had to kill him.")

At age 79, his style has entered transcendence. He's just written in Harpers about "this Beck" and what he's connected to. You see, Breslin was in the kitchen when Bobby Kennedy was shot. He's one of the guys who smashed Sirhan Sirhan to the ground.

Here's Breslin on Beck and crew, just a taste of this marvelous piece:

[N]ow in New York they are turning an empty lot of the old World Trade Center and a mosque that isn’t built and probably never will be, into national fear. Omaha fights the mosque in Manhattan! Some foamer named Jones says he burns the Koran, and he actually is treated as news. All day on television yesterday you had the aimless babbles of this Beck, who looks like he eats Bibles.

They all come with the double barrels of a Low IQ and High Color Fear let loose on cable stations and e-mail, of which yesterday you read in disbelief.

Let me tell you what a life spent running after news like this has left me remembering....

And remember he does. This short piece is filled with well-told stories. Here's how it starts:

There are these sudden loud noises in the hotel kitchen, one, two, three, probably a tray falling, and then there is so much screaming and a hand holding a gun high in the air and Robert Kennedy, who had walked into the gun, is on the floor with his eyes seeing nothing. On this June night in 1968 he has just won a Presidential primary and suddenly he is fit only for a gravedigger’s dirt.

Please, if only for the style, read this piece. ("Some foamer named Jones" — magic.)

GP