Poor Phil apparently felt shackled by the moral absolutes that informed church doctrine — so much so that his struggle to cast off all traces of his religious upbringing would last well into adulthood.
Then along came the Sixties, wondrous decade of self-indulgent baby boomers
proclaiming that they — not their mothers and certainly not their fathers — knew best about how the world works, or ought to work, and never mind five thousand years of recorded human history and the customs and conventions that developed over millennia.
This flouting of traditional standards, coupled as it was with a sniveling disregard for all forms of authority, found a home in the hearts of college students across the country (not all, or even most, but enough to attract the kind of heavy — and largely celebratory — media coverage that served to permanently identify an entire generation with the burgeoning counterculture).
But callow, college-age youth were not the only Americans to fall under the spell of the anti-establishment, revolution-for-the-hell-of-it pied pipers of the countercultural left; there existed no shortage of adults who, lacking the perspective and wisdom usually associated with age, loudly let it be known that, hey, maybe the kids were on to something.
Phil Donahue was just such an adult: Outwardly a mature, married man with several children, but inwardly a shallow bucket longing after the empty cliches and sham pieties mouthed by scruffy, sandaled “flower children” and ignorant dormitory “revolutionaries” living off generous allowances and trust funds.
An eager imbiber of the waters of New Consciousness, an avid believer in any hip nostrum expounded by the lead singer of that week’s hot rock ‘n’ roll band, Donahue was emblematic of a phenomenon that swept the country in the late Sixties and early Seventies: the utter intimidation of the white establishment ruling class by its young.
This surrender of the culture to a small but extremely vocal segment of the population would change America in a manner so profound that the American MIAs who returned home from Vietnam in 1973 could barely recognize the nation they’d left behind just a few years before; as one of the repatriated soldiers lamented, “Everything is different — the way people dress, the way they act, even the way they think; this is not the country I once knew and loved.”
Phil Gets a Talk Show
It was during this time of great social ferment that Donahue began his career as a television talk show host in Dayton (over the years he would move the program from that relatively small Ohio city to more impressive zip codes, first in Chicago and later in New York); thanks to syndication, the program would eventually be carried to stations across the country and Phil even found himself appearing on covers of national magazines, toasted as a man of uncommon talent and rare intelligence.
Perceptive viewers noticed a change in the show’s tone sometime in the mid-Seventies: Yes, Donahue could still be counted on to provide a forum for serious discussion of substantive matters, but such exercises in integrity became more and more infrequent as the host’s fascination with all things abnormal grew at an astonishing pace.
Not that this was this by any means an objective fascination — something like, say, an anthropologist’s dispassionate study of social and cultural curiosities — that drove Donahue; no, this was an all-out fixation (shared by the legions of liberals of that era who raised the white flag at first sight of the onrushing counterculture) on the notion that objective truth is nonexistent and that therefore all philosophies, religions and lifestyles are equally valid or invalid.
