Dan’s the man: I’ve been waiting for someone to spill the beans on Dan Rather during his long signoff as CBS News anchor, but so far it’s been awfully respectful. Something like: “The news may be balanced but Dan isn’t” — in the British sense of delightfully eccentric, not insane. Stephen King once told David Letterman: “I’ve got a sneaky admiration for Dan Rather because I’m never sure when he’s going to go bonkers on you. He always looks like he’s gonna just stop and say, ‘All right . . . here it comes. We’ve got the bodies in Hangar 18, the government has been lying to you.’ ”

People have been watching Dan for years in the hope of seeing his breakouts. Election nights are good: “Are your fingernails beginning to sweat? . . . The race is as hot and tight as a too-small bathing suit on a too-long car ride back from the beach. . . . California’s the big burrito; Texas is a big taco right now. . . . Florida is a big tamale. It’s not only a hot tamale, it’s the only tamale that counts.”

Also end of shows, especially a time in the mid-1980s when he closed by inexplicably saying, “Courage.” His producer told him to stop but he didn’t, so they had a big meeting to warn him. Next night, he said, “Coraje,” pronounced Cora-heh, as if it were a real Spanish word, which it isn’t. It followed a report from the Mexican border that may have impelled him. Other hosts began saying Valour, Hot Dogs and Mazel Tov, and he finally stopped.

He’s been assaulted often, I mean physically. There was a famed street mugging in 1986 that New York police had a hard time verifying. Dan said the mugger asked, “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” from which REM devised a song. A colleague said he’s “the kind of person” attacks happen to, though he once got his own shot in at Barbara Walters (“As we bent our heads together, my microphone hit her in the mouth.”) He acquired a Marine haircut that seemed to anticipate 9/11. And he seemed personally let down by America when he “covered” the fall of the Berlin Wall and no one watched.

But anchor is a bizarre category. (Anchor what — all those ads the news is sandwiched between, from corporations the shows should be exposing or that own the networks the news is on?) They get huge sums for reading a teleprompter and looking anchorial. A big moment came when they were allowed, like lions from their cages, to come out from behind their desks and stand. Now even gravitas is out.

ABC’s Peter Jennings has been trying to de-gravitas, for the intense “anchor shopping” expected to follow the Rather and Tom Brokaw exits. Dan will be hard to replace. Bets are on Canada’s own, formerly mulleted MuchMusic host John Roberts (who has gravitassed). Once, during his transition, as host of Canada AM, he interrupted an Israeli and Palestinian screaming at each other to say, “Let’s not get bogged down in history.” I wrote about his stunning intervention and said their jaws dropped. He called to say he had viewed the tapes and there were no reaction shots. (Maybe I heard the jaws drop.) The guy has Rather potential.

Same sex: Like many, I am puzzled by the passion and determination of foes of same-sex marriage. But I got a glimmer after yesterday’s Supreme Court decision, in an interview by CTV’s Mike Duffy with Charles McVety of Canada Christian College. Mike asked why it should bother him if someone down the street married a person of the same sex. Are you married? asked the minister. Mike said he was. To a woman? shot back Dr. McVety. Mike seemed startled but said yes — with two kids. You’ll have to redefine all that, said Dr. McVety starkly, seeming to imply this is a zero-sum game, not a case of win-win. What others gain is deducted from what you have, as if sense of self is a scarce, diminishing resource among us.

For years, disadvantaged groups like Jews, blacks or aboriginals chose this route, fiercely affirming a unique self-definition, when much else was lacking. Perhaps in our globalized, downsized, terrorized era, when everyone is expected to cut back, many others are driven to their unique sense of self as a source of solace — and then feel they are being told to share that out too!

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.