The forever reporter in the forever prison from the forever war

New York magazine profiles Carol Rosenberg, the reporter for the Miami Herald who has been on the Gitmo beat for 11, count ‘em, 11 years, with no end in sight:

How long do you think you’ll continue covering Guantanamo?
There are people who call the War on Terror the “forever war”; if this is the forever war, then this is the forever prison. I want to stay here for the 9/11 trial, which I think is years away. I feel like I have an institutional knowledge. Everyone else rotates in and out of here. The soldiers come and go, the lawyers come and go, most of the reporters come and go. I feel a responsibility to stay. I want to see how it ends. I’m a little concerned it’s never going to.

Camp X-ray was built for the specific purpose of getting around the Constitution, full stop. The people who created it committed crimes, full stop. And if the people who continue to defend it today aren’t criminals, they’re moral pygmies at best.

Rosenberg (who, earlier in her career, reported for the Charlotte Observer) can’t do anything about that, but she’s doing the next best thing: surrendering a significant chunk of her life, and a lot of creature comforts most Americans take for granted, to tell people what’s going on down there. Metaphorically, she’s almost as much a prisoner as the inmates. She seldom talks much about herself — her tweets tend to be about the court proceedings she covers — but I have a feeling that even if the trials ended tomorrow, Gitmo would be with her the rest of her life.

She’s not a prisoner, of course. Subject to the military’s irregular flight schedules, she can and does return to Florida from time to time. But I suspect that for the rest of her life, a significant part of her psyche and self will be living in those nasty tents, tweeting from a makeshift courtroom, knowing that every conversation, call or email she gets or receives will be monitored.

At some point, years from now, perhaps after the 9/11 trials are over, she’ll check out. But the Eagles were right, and so I suspect the only a part of her leaves Gitmo is via death or Alzheimer’s.

 

Want to run a newspaper? Here’s how you do it right.

Finally, finally, finally, the owner of a newspaper has told the geeks, waterheads, nematodes, mouth-breathers and knuckle-dragging readers who masturbate to gun ads but can’t STAND the possibility that their local newspaper might publish a story about two happy people doing something that’s none of their damn business to take their whiny, misprioritized complaints and shove them north toward their tonsils.

God, I need a cigarette. And I haven’t smoked in almost 35 years.

Our story begins when Jessica Powell and Crystal Craven — yes, that’d be two people with ladyparts — got married in, believe it, Jones County, Missafreakingsippi, the left ventricle of Bat Country. The Laurel Leader-Call newspaper did a front page story, acknowledging the historic (albeit legally unrecognized) nature of the event, and then basically letting the protagonists speak for themselves and for each other — not an approach recommended for political coverage, but perfectly acceptable for a wedding story. (Bonus pathos: Craven has Stage 4 brain cancer.)

Well, Leader-Call readers freaked out. They called. They wrote. They virtually spat on the paper’s Facebook page.

So how did the paper’s owner, Jim Cegielski, respond?

Did he pretend there was no controversy? Or that if there was, it was OK to ignore it? Did he, God forbid, send an underling out to lie to people about his position or lack thereof instead of manning up and doing his job?

Oddly, no.

He stood up. He took responsibility. He told the people who were wrong that they were wrong. He told them to stop misbehaving toward his employees just because they’d read a story they didn’t like. And he told them that if they didn’t like all of the above, they could get bent. (If the link doesn’t go directly to Cegielski’s column, flip to page A5, where it’s at the top.)

And the horrible financial price the paper paid for this optimally competent exercise of its privileges and duties? Fifteen canceled subscriptions. Even in Laurel, Mississippi, that’s the equivalent of a few households going away for a long weekend.

So here’s a suggestion to people who want to run newspapers that both make money and bond with with their communities in ways that make long-term profitability even possible: Do your jobs. Be right. And when you are right, take no shit from those who are wrong, particularly when it’s aimed at your underlings. Even most of those who disagree with you will respect that; wanting your boss to have your back is a nonpartisan policy goal in and out of newspapers.

I’m sure Warren Buffett’s BH Media already has some decent ideas about how to dig the News & Record out of the hole it has dug for itself in the past five or so years (not all of which, I hasten to add, is local talent’s fault). But I’m betting that sending someone to Laurel to buy Jim Cegielski lunch and listen to him talk for an hour would not be a bad strategy at all.

(h/t: Gawker via Athenae)

 

Happy birthday, Ludwig

Beethoven is (probably) 242 years old today.

Oh, and this, kids, is how you do a flash mob.

Now it can be told: Elizabeth McIntosh’s Pearl Harbor story, 71 years late

On Dec. 7, 1941, Elizabeth McIntosh was a reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin when the Japanese bombs began falling at Pearl Harbor. A week later, she wrote a story aimed at Hawaii’s women, to help them understand what had happened and what they could do. It was graphic. Her editor killed it. Today The Washington Post publishes it for the first time.

McIntosh went on to serve in the Office of Strategic Services and its offspring, the CIA. She’s still alive and well at 97.

“I’ve got $3 in my wallet and it feels like a million.”

My friend and fellow blogger Billy Jones has been through a rough few years. He just had an experience most of us who are more comfortable would describe as somewhere between bad and awful. And yet, in a message to me, he calls it a small victory.

I’ll let you decide just how small.

Freedom came from Uranus; or, Eastern D-Day

Berkeley economist and World War II student J. Bradford DeLong:

And so, 70 years ago [today], the million-soldier reserve of the Red Army was transferred to General Nikolai Vatutin’s Southwestern Front, Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky’s Don Front, and Marshal Andrei Yeremenko’s Stalingrad Front. They went on to spring the trap of Operation Uranus, the code name for the planned encirclement and annihilation of the German Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army. They would fight, die, win, and thus destroy the Nazi hope of dominating Eurasia for even one more year – let alone of establishing Hitler’s 1,000-year Reich.

Together, these 1.2 million Red Army soldiers, the workers who armed them, and the peasants who fed them turned the Battle of Stalingrad into the fight that, of any battle in human history, has made the greatest positive difference for humanity.

The Allies probably would have eventually won World War II even had the Nazis conquered Stalingrad, redistributed their spearhead forces as mobile reserves, repelled the Red Army’s subsequent winter 1942 offensive, and seized the Caucasus oil fields, thus depriving the Red Army of 90% of its motor fuel. But any Allied victory would have required the large-scale use of nuclear weapons, and a death toll in Europe that would most likely have been twice the actual World War II death toll of perhaps 40 million.

May there never be another such battle. May we never need another one.

The battle had been engaged a month previously, when 200,000 Red Army soldiers crossed the Volga River at Stalingrad under heavy artillery and aircraft attack (a scene rendered quite faithfully in the movie “Enemy at the Gate”) and met the Wehrmacht head-on. Of those initial 200,000, more than 80 percent died. (In fact, of the roughly 40 million who died in the European theater during World War II, 20 million were Soviet. For comparison, perhaps 450,000 U.S. service members were killed in action in all theaters in the entire war.) The fighting wasn’t just house-to-house, it was room-to-room, with houses and rooms frequently changing hands multiple times. One Soviet regimental commander, finding his unit surrounded by the Germans, fought until his unit ran out of ammunition, then called in artillery fire on his own position.

From the standpoint of today, knowing as we do what transpired in the Soviet Union under 70 years of Communist rule and knowing as we do (thanks in part to my sister-in-law) what transpired on the Eastern Front during World War II, it is easy to say there were no good guys. But much of the good we and millions of other people on every continent of the world enjoy today was made possible by some of the bad guys at Stalingrad. Such are the ironies of history.

Heroes

It’s Veteran’s Day, and I’m outsourcing my comment for today to Ginmar, who is a veteran and a hero and who has some deep insight into the nature of heroism:

The military is a creature of the most extreme factors one can find. In peacetime, it offers discipline and training. In war, it offers bravery. Always, it offers its service, and it is eternally at the mercy of those with the power to mobilize its forces. There’s bad, good, shining gallantry, and horrible evil in the military, all at once. The best seems impossible to believe; the worst shocks the conscience. In the military, we must confront the simple fact that they are us, that they are who we are at our best and worst, and that great good and great evil often exist in one person. Their evils spring from the seeds our society planted in their souls, and their achievements are a reflection of what we would aspire to do and to become.

People are basically good. Some people are not content without something more, though. Some people wish to serve. They want to cast away the cares of their own daily drama and petty concerns, assume the camouflage not just of uniformity but of duty and discipline, and become an actor in larger, greater things. They hunger for the ability to become greater, not for themselves, but for the good of all.

The military has been used wrongly and savagely, but the very strength it gives its soldiers produces the kind of heroism that does not depend on bullets: Hugh Thompson , Glenn Andreotta, and Lawrence Colburn fought not just against the enemy on the other side, but against the worst foe of all; they opposed their own, and they were outnumbered. Many civilians never attain that courage; wrongs go unchecked daily where only words are involved, and soldiers like Thompson and his crew faced evenly-matched opponents in their actions. The unarmed peasants he and his crew saved represented were no risk to he or his crew. In saving them, he, to my mind, achieved one of the greatest acts of heroism the military of any country has seen. He rejected the unlawful order that had set US soldiers against innocent civilians. There was no fog of war for Thompson, and sadly, there was not nearly enough recognition either. We want our heroes to be pure, shiny, clean, and untouched by reminders of what we ourselves are capable of, both good and bad. We want the enemy to be alien, remote, non-human, but in seeking that comfort we dehumanize not just them but ourselves and make more wars and conflicts inevitable.

People forget that soldiers formed the backbone of the resistance to the Viet Nam war. They were forced to serve and they were forced to obey. Who better to speak of an unjust war than those who fought in it, often unwillingly? There was a wide anti-war movement within the active duty military that many people don’t know anything about. People forget that, perhaps deliberately. The desire to simplify the enemy finds its twin in the same desire to simplify our heroes. Pure gallantry—-such a good word—-as Thompson’s often takes years to be appreciated. It’s also a reminder of just how much good one person—or in this case, three honest, and honorable people—-can do. Evil is weak at the same time it is powerful, but it’s power is negative. Evil is destructive. It builds no hospitals, treats no sick, shelters no homeless. In the aftermath, good is hard work and sweat and unglamourous labor. When people recognize only battlefield heroism, as worthy as it is, they also bury moral heroism. They also make heroism look clean and pure and pretty. If you go in believing that, the reality of it can be horribly shocking.

You can always recognize that kind of heroism by its quietness. It serves, it works, it speaks quietly, it rebuilds, it heals, it soothes, it refuses to stand down. It is attainable not by special training or extraordinary acts, but by every day people. The weakest of children can be a greater hero than the strongest of soldiers. It is based on the premise that when one sees something horrible, one cannot then turn away. One is now responsible to act. Legally, that is not the standard, but morally, it is. To be aware is to be responsible. This is why so many people seek out lies and embrace them.

Most of all, true courage does not result in acclaim and medals and ceremonies. Often, it is punished. People can simultaneously desire to know themselves, and yet at the same time, flinch from it. The military requires that first of all, one must take that long deep look into one’s soul and see if what is there can and is worthy of being changed and molded. Often time, there is no external enemy that poses more of a challenge than one’s own weakness. The military confronts weakness and forges it into strength. People who claim or coyly hint at heroic virtues maintained by deprivation rather than challenge and effort don’t impress me. Only the tempted know what temptation is. For every person who felt the freeze of terror and yet still did the right thing, for every person who felt the burn of physical injury and still got up and kept going, for every person who did a kindness and then walked quietly away without praise or recognition, the only recognition is often the brief sensation of having helped another selflessly.

Want to honor our veterans today? Go be a hero for someone.

Want to honor our veterans every day? Go be a hero for someone.

 

 

You really didn’t build that.

Not by yourself, anyway, says John Scalzi:

I am financially successful now; I pay a lot of taxes. I don’t mind because I know how taxes helped me to get to the fortunate position I am in today. I hope the taxes I pay will help some military wife give birth, a mother who needs help feed her child, help another child learn and fall in love with the written word, and help still another get through college. Likewise, I am in a socially advantageous position now, where I can help promote the work of others here and in other places. I do it because I can, because I think I should and because I remember those who helped me. It honors them and it sets the example for those I help to help those who follow them.

I know what I have been given and what I have taken. I know to whom I owe. I know that what work I have done and what I have achieved doesn’t exist in a vacuum or outside of a larger context, or without the work and investment of other people, both within the immediate scope of my life and outside of it. I like the idea that I pay it forward, both with the people I can help personally and with those who will never know that some small portion of their own hopefully good fortune is made possible by me.

So much of how their lives will be depends on them, of course, just as so much of how my life is has depended on my own actions. We all have to be the primary actors in our own lives. But so much of their lives will depend on others, too, people near and far. We all have to ask ourselves what role we play in the lives of others — in the lives of loved ones, in the lives of our community, in the life of our nation and in the life of our world. I know my own answer for this. It echoes the answer of those before me, who helped to get me where I am.

Marc Randazza: American hero

I had vaguely heard of the attorney Marc Randazza through his work against the copyright trolls at Righthaven, work that ended almost as satisfyingly as The Shawshank Redemption.

But Popehat points out that Marc Randazza, as a lawyer and as a person, is a Doc Holliday for the 21st century, a loyal friend and a dead shot, First Amendment litigation-wise. This is a litigator who dropped a brief containing a history of penises on the Patent and Trademark office in support of a client’s desire for a phallic-looking trademark, including this sentence, with which even the priggiest bluenose would find it hard to argue: “One may invoke the symbol of strength, the phallus, without it being a literal tallywhacker.”

Ken at Popehat recites other reasons to love Randazza and also links to other people who love him. He also blogs.

Unfortunately, I suspect we’re going to need more Marc Randazzas in coming years. Large corporations, never content to do with their own money what they can spend taxpayer money on, will, I predict, increasingly attempt to use government leverage to silence speech with which they disagree. I hope I’m wrong. But if I’m right, Randazza and those who do the kind and quality of work he does will be in more demand than is good for them or the country.

Ken modestly does not place himself in their number, but on the basis of this post, in which he willfully and intentionally violates a new Arizona law about online behavior and then dares that state’s legislature to have him arrested, I think his modesty might be misplaced:

You’ve been swept up in the moronic and thoughtless anti-bullying craze and consequently passed a bill that is ridiculous on its face, a bill that criminalizes annoying and offending people on the Internet. That’s like criminalizing driving on the road.

Why, yes. Yes, it is.

After annoying and offending the legislature in violation of its shiny new law and giving it some anatomically and geographically improbable suggestions, he concludes:

There. I’m a criminal in Arizona. Send some of your cops to collect me. I know it may be temporarily confusing for them, as I’m not brown, but perhaps they can manage.

Come get me.

Cheers,

Ken

To paraphrase James Goldman, when ridicule is all that’s left, the ridicule matters.

Marion Kirby and the neighborhood giants

Congratulations to former Page High School and Greensboro College head football coach Marion Kirby, who is among five people who will be inducted May 14 into the Catawba County Sports Hall of Fame. [Disclosure: I work for GC.]

That’s not especially surprising, given not only Kirby’s coaching career but also the fact that his game-winning field goal in 1960 gave Catawba County’s Lenoir-Rhyne University its only national championship in football.

But what was most interesting for me was what Kirby had to say about how his upbringing shaped his career:

All of my education except for my year of graduate school at East Carolina was here. I went to Viewmont Elementary, Westmont Elementary, Highland Elementary, Hickory Junior High, Hickory High and Lenoir-Rhyne College and I walked to every one of them.

“Over the years. I’ve realized how fortunate I was to grow up where I did. My backyard was connected to (the late) Clarence Stasavich’s family’s backyard, (the late) Frank Barger lived in an apartment condo at the end of the street.

“Luke Beam, the great band director at Hickory High, lived two houses up and C.O. Miller, whose name is on the YMCA, I could hit his front porch with a rock.

“So it occurred to me that as a youngster I had a lot of really great male role models in my life, and I’m really humbled to have grown up on the shoulders of giants in my neighborhood.”

And I wonder: How many of our boys today are growing up with those kinds of giants in their neighborhoods, those male role models who lead, mentor and inspire?

Probably not nearly enough of them.

Leap Day cheer

A hearty, happy “20th” birthday to my Uncle Jack!

He’s back

John Robinson — my longtime boss, editor, co-conspirator and friend — left the News & Record recently after 27 years, almost 13 of them as the paper’s top editor. He was among the nation’s first and most prolific blogging newspaper editors, and although the project ultimately fell victim to a resource crunch tied to the Crash of ’08, his leadership on the N&R’s Town Square project got national attention not just in the industry, but also in such general-interest publications as the The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal.

JR believes in sharing credit, and he backs his people to the hilt. Any good reporter from time to time will have to write unflattering things about powerful people with thin egos, thinner tempers and the resources to make life difficult if they choose. Any good newsroom employee, regardless of discipline, also, in this day and age, must spend time looking around corners for what the next important thing in the news business might be. I did a lot of both, and slaying those dragons was much easier knowing that no matter the stakes, as long as I was prudent and ethical, JR had my back. He took a lot of crap over me, and he never once complained to me about it. And during my dad’s final illness, when I spent the better part of a month bedside in an ICU 100 miles away, the only thing he said was, “Do what you need to do. The office will still be here when you get back.” That’s not just the mark of a great boss. That’s also the mark of a great friend.

I mention all this because, now that he’s shed of the News & Record, JR has started a new, personal blog, called “Media, Disrupted.” (I’ve added a link to it in the blogroll on the lower right side of this page, to0.) Go check it out. And keep an eye on him. Even if he wanted to retire, which he doesn’t, I’m pretty sure Susan wouldn’t let him. So I’m betting that shortly after the new year, he’ll be into something new, different and very much worth watching. And he’ll still be tweeting (@johnrobinson).

 

New York legalizes gay marriage

On the one hand, WTF took New York, of all places, so long? OTOH, observes TBogg:

Someday, long after most of us are dead and gone and then reincarnated and then dead again and then maybe reincarnated once more, someone is going to have to explain to future generations why there was such a battle to treat everyone as equals and bestow upon them freedoms that are rightly theirs, and  more importantly, why it took so long.

And  it will have to be explained that some people sought out the opinions of bigots and homophobes and lunatics, a fringe religious cult and an ancient men’s club devoted to velvet robes and pedophilia and gave them a voice in the matter when instead they should have been sent from the room and not be allowed back in until they had  put to rest their own demons.

Democracy is kind of stupid that way.

As Churchill observed, the worst form of government except for all the others. Well done, New York legislature. And memo to President Obama: If you want to know what a leader looks like — and I realize you really don’t — you could do worse than to look at Andrew Cuomo. This country is significantly less unfair and messed up today because of him and the bravery and persistence of the LGBT movement and the straight friends and loved ones (particularly GOP N.Y. Sens. Roy McDonald and Mark Grisanti, who face roughly a 100% chance of a primary opponent next time around) who had their backs.

Almost home

The body of Flight 1549, the US Airways jet that safely landed on the Hudson River in New York back in January 2009, approaches Charlotte on Interstate 77 earlier today. My stepdad mom took this shot from the overpass at Exit 30 in Davidson.

And here’s video my stepdad shot:

Incentives

At times during my intermittent career as a manager, I have found it necessary to modify the performance of my direct reports. Although such modification does not, contrary to what you might have heard, actually involve whips, chairs or cattle prods, it can and usually does involve what we might discretely call incentives and disincentives. Rewards and punishments, in other words.

This is tricky business. My philosophy as a newspaper editor, given the relative rigidity of our deadline schedule and the high stakes involved with issues of factual accuracy, was to err on the side of harshness. My own adaptation of the credo approved by corporate HR went something like this: Bad behavior will continue until the pain of continuing the bad behavior outweighs the pain of altering it.

Monochromatic? Lacking in nuance? Guilty as charged. But it worked. The kid from the University of Georgia  whose performance problems were driving me up a tree shaped up right quick once he realized he was facing the very real possibility of having to work every single Georgia home football weekend. Oh, yes, I did.

When you get to the level of government work, opportunities for bad behavior abound, and just about the worst behavior is torture. Unfortunately, Americans apparently have decided for political reasons that holding the torturers (including those who ordered torture) accountable for their behavior would be Bad Form, or whatever the current explanation is, blah-blah-blah-kharmacakes.

But there is, of course, a flip side to that approach, and that’s rewarding the behavior you want to see, in hopes of seeing more of it. We could, at the least, honor those who understood the law, remembered their training, opted to remember the law rather than soiling their drawers:

Throughout the military, and throughout the government, brave men and women reported abuse, challenged interrogation directives that permitted abuse, and refused to participate in an interrogation and detention program that they believed to be unwise, unlawful and immoral. The Bush administration’s most senior officials expressly approved the torture of prisoners, but there was dissent in every agency, and at every level.

There are many things the Obama administration could do to repair some of the damage done by the last administration, but among the simplest and most urgent is this: It could recognize and honor the public servants who rejected torture.

In the thousands of pages that have been made public about the detention and interrogation program, we hear the voices of the prisoners who were tortured and the voices of those who inflicted their suffering. But we also hear the voices of the many Americans who said no.

Some of these voices belong to people whose names have been redacted from the public record. In Afghanistan, soldiers and contractors recoiled at interrogation techniques they witnessed. After seeing a prisoner beaten by a mysterious special forces team, one interpreter filed an official complaint. “I was very upset that such a thing could happen,” she wrote. “I take my responsibilities as an interrogator and as a human being very seriously.”

I’m not naive. I understand that this probably won’t happen during my lifetime. Hugh Thompson Jr., the Army helicopter pilot who threatened, at the risk of his own life, to machine-gun U.S. soldiers involved in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam if they did not stop killing civilians, didn’t get official Army recognition for 30 years.

But if we can’t investigate, indict, prosecute and punish those responsible for torturing and, in some cases, killing prisoners in our custody — prisoners who in many instances had done nothing wrong — perhaps we can at least salvage something for those who tried to do the right thing, and for ourselves as a nation whose fraying reputation for morality, freedom and justice rests, if it rests at all, on their efforts. I don’t know if a Presidential Medal of Freedom means anything anymore — giving one to George Tenet, who signed off on torture, debases the brand — but there ought to be something we can do.

RIP: Dick Wharton

Dick Wharton had been serving his community, his country, his church and his profession for decades before I ever met him. We met in the mid-1990s while serving together on a patient-care team for the Guilford Regional AIDS Interfaith Network. He was smart, wise (and understood the distinction), funny, compassionate, ethical and a model of Christ’s love in the world. Like me, he loved good writing of all kinds, and he was himself a pointed, pithy writer. His death is a huge loss for Greensboro, but that loss is leavened by his record of service and accomplishment and the fond memories with which he leaves us.

My sympathies to Peggy, Emily, Scott and their relatives. Thanks to all of you for sharing Dick with us.

A team of her own

It’s the bottom of the ninth, you’ve got a one-run lead and the bad guys have runners on. Whom ya gonna call?

OK, two questions: As long as whoever it is can strike out 14 batters in 22 innings, do you care whether the person you call has two X chromosomes? (Full disclosure: I’m the father of such a pitcher, but she’s 12 and I have only the vaguest idea what her stats are.)

The baseball coach at tiny Montreat College has offered a small scholarship to an 18-year-old girl from California. The girl, a right-handed pitcher named Marty Sementelli, has, at this writing, neither signed a letter of intent nor declined. Although the amount of the offer was not disclosed, apparently it’s not much for a school that costs about $33,000 a year. Moreover, she would have to play JV ball and earn a varsity roster spot; she’s not guaranteed one. And yet some Montreat College alumni are all butthurt about this.

The coach, to his credit, says the criticism he has gotten will not effect the offer. “She struck out 14 in 22 innings,” he said. “That’s good stats; I don’t really care where you’re at.”

Steeee-rike.

Don’t make me come back there; or, Golf Skillz: Let Greensboro show you them

Hmph. Go away for a long weekend and my employer gets in all KINDS of trouble.

Congratulations to Coach Dirk Fennie and the 2011 Greensboro College men’s golf team: NCAA Division III national champions. They played with skill, they comported themselves with class and they represented the college in and with style.

Crosstown rivals Guilford College did themselves proud, too, finishing ninth overall.

(Photo: Dan O’Shea/Fairway Outdoor via Greensboro Sports Commission)

“It was the greatest honor I had ever received. … But with honor comes responsibility.”

Ellen Schrecker, honored for her research on academic freedom of expression, responds when the academic freedom of expression of colleagues is threatened: Take your honors and shove them.

Because more than 70 percent of all the instruction in American institutions of higher education is now in the hands of men and women with part-time or temporary positions, academic freedom is particularly at risk. … Freedom of expression on our nation’s campuses is too fragile – and too important – for us to allow it to become hostage to external political forces with repressive agendas and an academic community too spineless to stand up against them.

“Tenured radicals,” the concept made popular, and used as a book title, by radical-leftist-turned-radical-rightist David Horowitz, are almost a myth. There are few true radicals teaching in American colleges and universities today, and fewer still with tenure. Barely more than one in four American college instructors anywhere on the political spectrum holds a tenured or tenure-track position. Most of the rest can be fired about as swiftly as a landscaper or bartender.

Moreover, we live in an era in which some of the most important ideas are under fire from powerful, monied interests who are threatened by those ideas, in areas as diverse as climate change, economics, worker safety and gender issues.  Just to add a soupçon of irony, these interests often are even more adept at playing the victim than the real victims are, and when our national media aren’t too brain-dead to know the difference, they’re too hung up on “telling both sides of the story” to remember that that isn’t their job, that their job is to tell the truth.

So I thank Ellen Schrecker for standing up for freedom of expression. It probably won’t make a difference in Tony Kushner’s life one way or the other — the guy who wrote Angels in America probably doesn’t have to lift a finger again the rest of his life if he doesn’t want to. But it might make a huge difference for a lot of talented instructors you’ve never heard of and never will, some of whom might one day teach you or your children.

UPDATE, 5/10/11: The executive committee of the CUNY Board of Trustees has overturned the overturning. Kushner gets the degree. Sadly, the board member who prompted the vote of a week ago to try to rescind the award gets to keep his seat. Jackass.

The best day I can remember

My Uncle Frank, my mother’s oldest brother, is retired in the Charleston area. He has a sharp mind, in part because he consciously works to keep it engaged. He has settled notions on a few things (most prominently, in our correspondence, the need for electoral term limits), but by and large, his willingness to re-examine things skeptically is a model for anyone half his age and blows the current crop of 2012 presidential candidates — of both parties — out of the water. He belongs to a vanishing breed: people who regularly write letters to the editor of the local newspaper.

He also belongs to a writing group, which recently assigned its members the exercise of writing about “The Best Day I Can Remember.” Because he and his wife, Frances, recently moved to assisted living, I reckon he has had a number of occasions recently to think about that subject, or related ones. What he wrote was short and sweet, and with his gracious permission I republish it here:

Most of the days of my life have been good days.  I could never say that any one day was the best.  The best day that I am aware of is today.  As long as I can think, and move, and communicate as I please, I will be having a “best day.”  I love to read, dialogue, touch, eat, drink, listen to music, and especially to be with Frances.

Some day, in the not too distant future, I will be ready for my days to end–for the chemicals of which my body is made to rejoin the chemicals of the earth.  Regardless of when that time comes, I am happy for the life I have experienced.

May peace be with you all.

 

Happy birthday to some great Americans ..

… in this case, my nephew Kevin Ange and everyone else, here and gone on ahead to walk cosmic point, in the U.S. Marine Corps, 235 years strong today.

I hear some people are voting on some stuff somewhere …

… which matters not as much as the fact that it’s once again time to wish a happy birthday to a great American, a frequent Blog on the Run: Reloaded commenter and my friend and neighbor, Fred Gregory!

“What do you feel when you kill someone?”

Recoil:

It would be just one shot.

Watching the Iraqi insurgent walking along the canal, Sgt. Brandon McGuire and his four-man sniper team knew that.

They had lain hidden for two days and two nights. On the third morning, when they observed the man uncovering a mortar, they knew, yes, he was the one, the insurgent who was very good with his weapon, having killed and wounded Americans and Iraqi civilians with it.

The shuddering kites flown by kids nearby showed the wind was stiffening. Sometimes nearly obscured by dust, the Iraqi kept walking — just a little under a mile away.

McGuire was very good, too. The barrel of his Barrett .50 caliber Weapon Sniper System shifted imperceptibly, the Iraqi’s robes swirled in his scope, his finger squeezed …

If you’ve got to fight a war, if you’ve got to kill for your country, this is the way to do it: quick, as clean as killing can be, no unintended innocent victims.

Sgt. McGuire, by killing a man responsible for setting off many IEDs, undoubtedly saved not only the lives of U.S. service members but also Iraqi civilians. I thank him for his service.

Next time you hear someone say government is the problem and not the solution …

… remember Frances Oldham Kelsey.

Eastern Inferno now available for Amazon.com pre-order

My sister-in-law’s grandfather’s journal of his service in the German infantry on the Eastern Front during World War II, which she and her brother edited, is now available for pre-order from Amazon. (Short excerpts here.) In addition to being a rifleman, he also was his unit’s cartographer, so the book is going to include some of his hand-drawn maps.

I am really proud of Christine and Mason. They recognized early the value of what they had, and they have worked hard and spent a lot of their time and money to bring to light this lengthy piece  of primary source material from an episode in history in which a high percentage of participants did not survive. I hope it will be of help to historians. I know it will be of interest to anyone, professional or amateur, who studies World War II.

And it’s just my opinion, but even having seen probably every WWII movie ever made, I think it would make a helluva movie.

Your attention, please

Please join me in wishing a happy birthday to a great American, my brother Hugh!

Glenn Beck pwned by social-justice Christian

I know and love many ministers, but just for today, my favorite is Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary in New York. I am drinking so much WIN out of her piece on Glenn Beck, Christianity and social justice that I do not own a beer stein capable of holding it all. At my age, I’m running out of things I haven’t seen yet, but until today I had never seen someone turn the other cheek and still leave a mark — and Glenn, buddy, all the pancake in the world ain’t gonna cover that bruise.

Clearing the fence

My friend Andy Duncan lost the Shirley Jackson Award (novelette division) earlier this week — to Stephen King. I told him that’s like coming in second in the home-run derby to Henry Aaron: He can hold his head high, and no one will ever think either one of them used steroids.

Salute

Thanks to all veterans of the Korean War, which began 60 years ago today, including my late father, Hooper Alexander III, an infantry platoon commander and recipient of the Bronze Star.

(Photo from the archives of my brother Frank.)

How to save a life (two, actually)

I have read many amazing things on the Internet in the past 15-plus years, but this may be the amazingest: Follow along as members of MetaFilter across the U.S. work in real time, over the course of 24 hours, to stop two women from being shanghaied into forced prostitution by the Russian Mob.

Wow. Just … wow.

Unless all of Hollywood just fell into the ocean, this is going to be one amazing movie.