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December 27, 2005
Question No. 2
A reader from Franklin called to ask: Why did you allow a writer to use the word “rag-head” in a letter to the editor?
To refresh your memory, the letter was headlined “Bent on self-destruction.” Its writer described what he saw as a serious flaw in an
editorial cartoon by Mike Marland. The cartoon depicted a man walking past a sign consisting of the contoured letters of the National Security Agency, NSA. Both the sign and the man cast long shadows. With a worried expression, the man was looking over his shoulder at his.
The letter writer thought the man in the cartoon should have been different – not a white male but “a rag-head, Islamic, Muslim terrorist (or, as the liberal media portray them, an ‘insurgent’).”
“Rag-head,” with or without the hyphen, is an ethnic slur, the caller from Franklin said. Would you allow a letter writer to use the n-word? Just what are the rules?
This is a tough one. In deciding what to publish in letters to the editor, we do our best not to cross the line into censorship. We do edit for taste, and we eliminate gratuitous personal slams. But the public is best served when letter writers are allowed the widest possible latitude to express their views.
When it comes to epithets and stereotypes, context is the key. We might publish the n-word as part of the public debate about the use of the word but in no other context that I can think of.
A better analogy in the case of the “rag-head” letter is the wide berth we have allowed anti-gay rights letter writers in recent months and years. Some have described homosexuality as a perverse choice and gay people as immoral, for example. I happen to find this an ignorant and mistaken view. I think it is a modern-day cousin to the stereotyping of African Americans as mentally inferior or women as too delicate to operate in a man’s world. But I also think that in the current debate, the public’s opinions of gay people and their rights need as open a forum as possible. I even prefer to have negative views out in the open, where people who think otherwise can do as I have just done and express an opposing viewpoint.
In the letter at hand, had the writer said, “All Arabs are dirty rag-heads,” I would have edited it out as a gratuitous ethnic stereotype. Maybe some readers saw it as such a stereotype anyway, but I didn’t. It seemed to me that the writer used “rag-head” both to describe how he thought the man in Marland’s cartoon should have looked and to characterize terrorists. The word also conveyed the strong feeling behind the reader’s opinion.
Given this context, and given the public debate about secrecy in government in which Marland’s cartoon made a pointed comment, the letter writer’s use of “rag-head” fell just within the bounds of public discourse.
Posted by Mike Pride at 12:39 PM | Comments (0)
December 23, 2005
Bappa's eyes
The other night, as my wife and I made the korv, the sausage for our annual Swedish Christmas Eve dinner, someone on the radio asked occasional callers for their Christmas memories. The question brought to mind Evert F. Nordstrom, the grandfather who made the korv with the same recipe many years ago. I called him Bappa.
The memory was not altogether sweet.
It was Christmas 1966, and I was home on leave after Army basic training at Fort Jackson, S.C. As usual, family and friends, including uncles, aunts and cousins from afar, gathered to laugh and talk, to catch up with the family story and to gorge on Bappa and Nana's Swedish meal.
Many years before, I had told Nana a white lie. Not wanting to offend her, I had said how much I liked her pickled herring, called sill, even though, in fact, I could barely get it down without gagging. So, in 1966, as she stood watching, I filled my blue Depression glass plate with chunks of sill. At least it was a small plate.
As far as I could tell, Bappa, called Grandpappy by the cousins from afar, was his gleeful self that night. Although he had retired to Florida, where this particular dinner took place, he was my New Hampshire connection. He was born in Bedford in 1894 in a farmhouse built in 1776. I'm not sure how far he went to school, but he entered the workforce young, possibly because of the early death of his father. His expertise was in refrigeration instruments, including thermometers. He sold them, and he wrote a book about them.
Like many other literate first-generation Americans, Bappa was a student of his country's history and an admirer of Abraham Lincoln. These interests, along with baseball, became our special bond, skipping a generation. He took me to the Polo Grounds in 1954 and Yankee Stadium in 1958, and I still have the brochure, with his handwritten note on it, from his 1942 visit to the Gettysburg battlefield.
Unwittingly, Bappa was also the way I learned the truth - or one truth anyway - about Santa Claus. When I was 7, my mom was in the PTA, and she must have recruited her father as Santa Claus for a visit to my school. I could not mistake his eyes behind the cotton beard. I asked an older boy named Cappy Lingo about this, and he said that of course it had been my grandfather. Cappy grinned and told me there was no Santa Claus.
By Christmas 1966, I was no longer a boy. I was a man, a soldier happy to be done with endless marches in the morning damp and lessons in "the spirit of the bayonet." But I was also happy to be home, in the fold of family. And I woke up the morning after the Swedish feast with a boy's anticipation of Christmas.
But sometime during the night, Bappa had suffered a heart attack and died. He was one day shy of his 72nd birthday. Christmas was also Nana's birthday, magnifying the calamity.
I am the grandfather now. This means that when I think back on that Christmas, I no longer dwell on the shock or the loss or the pall that Bappa's death threw over our holiday. Instead I think of Evert F. Nordstrom alive. I see him as the loving grandfather with the shock of white hair and the broad ruddy face. I consider the kindness with which he touched my life. I think about how he did it and how I might be a good grandfather, imparting something to my grandchildren that their parents cannot.
The other night, as I ground the meat, barley and spices into the pig casings to make the korv, I looked down at my hands and saw Bappa's hands. I smiled as I remembered his laugh, and his singing voice, and his grand appetite for life.
He made a good Santa Claus, too, even though the costume could never disguise those kind eyes of his.
Merry Christmas.
Posted by Mike Pride at 02:32 PM | Comments (2)
December 21, 2005
Go, Johnny, Go
I know you’re dying to know what I think of the Johnny Damon deal. It was the talk of my office all day long. If you’re reading this anywhere between Presque Isle and mid-Jersey, I’ll bet it was the talk of your shop, too.
A fellow who wrote a short piece for the Monitor's editorial page tomorrow spoke for many when he bitterly blamed Damon for leaving the loving embrace of Red Sox Nation for Gotham greed. The other thing I kept hearing was the lament that now two up-the-middle stars were gone, a reference to the hole left earlier by the departure of Edgar Renteria, Boston's shortstop.
As a Yankee fan, my first reaction to the deal – other than to put cotton in my ears – was to think of the position Damon has been hired to fill. Center field at Yankee Stadium is sacred ground. DiMaggio played there, and Mantle. Bernie Williams was a quieter presence, but with his good first step and his galloping gait, he upheld the tradition.
On balance, I think Damon will, too. He’s not in the mold of DiMaggio, Mantle and Williams. He’s a stopgap. If he stays healthy, he’ll roam that vast green pasture for three or four years while Yankee fans await the next young star who was born to the job.
On offense, what’s not to like about Damon? The Yankees haven’t had a classic leadoff hitter in years, although Derek Jeter is certainly no slouch. Like Jeter, Damon gets on base a lot, hectors pitchers when he does, can hit for power and hits in the clutch. I purposely avoided reading today about what the Yankee lineup might look like in ’06, preferring just to dream about it. I mean, Damon, Jeter, A-Rod, Sheffield, Matsui, Giambi, Posada, Bernie (or another DH), Cano. The Yankees should score some runs.
The Yankee pitching staff remains a work in progress, and team chemistry is the essential question mark, but the Red Sox have even farther to go. Less than two months before the pitchers and catchers report, I think we've got the lead.
As for all that talk about the button-down pinstripe culture, Sox fans shouldn’t forget that baseball is a business. I mean, it was a businessman, Theo Epstein, whose cold, brilliant business decisions in the middle of the 2004 season broke the Curse of the Bambino. If the Sox don’t get down to business soon, the memory of that magical year will fade faster than you can say Johnny Damon.
Posted by Mike Pride at 09:43 PM | Comments (1)
December 20, 2005
Principled but practical
To those of us who were around for his father’s tenure as governor, it should not be surprising that U.S. Sen. John E. Sununu is cutting his own political path in Washington.
As New Hampshire’s governor for six years beginning in 1983, John H. Sununu talked a tough fiscal line and bullied the Seabrook nuclear power plant to completion. But he was in no sense an ideologue. He served in flush economic times, and when state revenue swelled, he used the extra cash to build a new state prison and a new state mental hospital. An engineer by training, he paid attention to detail. My favorite photograph of Sununu from this period was of the governor sticking his head in the door of a legislative hearing, like a parent checking to see that the kids were behaving.
The acorn did not fall far from the tree. Earlier this year, John E., a first-term Republican senator, became a sales agent for Social Security reform. His pitch was not ideological. He knows the country must face this issue squarely, and he did his homework on the individual accounts proposed by the president and others. That Social Security reform failed was no fault of Sununu’s. When the issue comes round again, as it must, Sununu will be in it up to his elbows.
What New Hampshire and the nation have in Sununu is something rare. Sure, he votes the party line most of the time, but he is also true to his principles. That is what we see unfolding on the USA Patriot Act.
Sununu studied the act in detail and decided that certain provisions unnecessarily violated the civil rights of Americans. He tried to persuade his party and the administration to amend the act to remove these violations. When he couldn’t, he opposed reauthorization. But he also favored leaving the act in place for three months while Congress and the White House tried to reach a compromise.
Principled but practical: What constituent could ask for more in a senator?
Taking a cue from the president, rightwingers are howling about what they see as Sununu’s apostasy. This is part of the administration’s full-court press to justify increasing power and secrecy in the White House.
As Bush mounts the bully pulpit, he brings a huge advantage to the argument: There have been no terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11. Of course, the nation appreciates the security this attack-free stretch of more than four years represents, and it gives Bush credit for it.
Nevertheless, Americans should take special care in considering the executive branch’s accrual of power and secrecy. The president says consitutional checks and balances are working. This is a dubious claim. As a constitutional check on his powers, the president cites periodic secret reports about extralegal infringements on individual liberties. Is this really enough?
Rather than react instantly in the established shades of blue and red, Americans need to think hard about this question. Our country, at great cost in blood and treasure, is seeking to create the conditions for democracy in a nation recently ruled through ruthless power and secrecy. It would be ironic if, in our own democracy, we did not recognize the threat of overreaching executive power.
As citizens consider the facts and decide what they think, may Sununu’s studied and responsible stance on the USA Patriot Act be an example to them.
Posted by Mike Pride at 09:47 AM | Comments (2)
December 16, 2005
Question No. 1
Questions I imagine readers asking, No. 1
How is it possible that the Iraq election story didn’t make your front page today?
It was a busy news day locally, but when we came out of our news meeting at 4:45 yesterday afternoon, the Iraq election was one of five stories scheduled for the front. The others were the Concord teachers deciding to cut back on what they do for students to protest the lack of a contract, the first personal look at the victim of a fatal fire in Concord, new information about a local man charged with a 20-year-old murder and a feature (a reader, we call it) about a reality television show that visited a New Hampshire household.
Then, shortly after we walked back into the newsroom, we heard that there was a verdict in the Tobin election phone-jamming trial, which we had followed closely for two weeks. This was clearly our lead story.
Our options: Add a sixth story to page one or move a story off. Adding a sixth story would have hurt the impact of the page on a big news day, so we decided to replace a story. Why not replace the reader? A good choice, but it was funny. We decided something funny was a plus on such a newsy day.
So why did the Iraq story move? It didn’t exactly, as I’ll explain, but my reasoning was that it was the one story we had scheduled for page one that most readers would already know about. The time difference between the eastern United States and Iraq means that news about the election had been buzzing on television, radio and the net throughout the day. By the time readers saw it in the next morning’s Monitor, the story would have been around for 24 hours.
Also, there had been two big developments: the election in Iraq and President Bush’s signing of anti-torture legislation put forward by his old rival, Sen. John McCain. We decided that our new design would allow us to give these stories real prominence without putting the stories themselves on page one. We put two bold headlines at the very top of the page – in what we call the skyboxes – giving the news of the election and Bush’s signing of the torture bill. These headlines directed readers to page A2, an open page where the stories got far stronger play than they would have on page one.
Posted by Mike Pride at 10:26 AM | Comments (1)
December 15, 2005
A question of trust
I can trust my newspaper for the ball scores every morning, but can I trust anything else I see or read in the media?
With that question, Dick Hesse of the Franklin Pierce Law Center opened a wide-ranging discussion yesterday at the Monitor. The participants were a media panel and this year’s class of Leadership Concord, a group of businesspeople, nonprofit leaders and public servants who learn about the city’s institutions through a series of visits and classes.
Many of the Leadership Concord class members had come to the Monitor the previous few days to observe our 4 o’clock news meeting. That is where we decide the tentative lineup of stories and photos for the next day's page one. Those decisions in turn determine which world/nation stories will go inside the A-section and which local stories will run in the Local/State section. The meeting is the handoff between the day editors and the night editors and the starting point for the production of the news sections.
My participation in this program always reminds me what a lousy job newspapers do in explaining themselves. That includes the Monitor. Here was a group of intelligent, involved regular readers of the paper. Their probing questions after the news meetings and during the panel discussion made clear that they had a strong desire to understand the values we bring to deciding what to cover, how to cover it and where to play it. Their questions also made clear that we had done little in the paper or any other venue to explain these values or their practical application.
This is a particularly troubling lapse because our values and our standards define not only us but also the newspaper we publish. They distinguish us from a media culture of shock talk, partisan blather, fake government news and heedless internet posting. The internet is a vast new medium on which I rely daily to check all kinds of facts, but I do so with great care because it is also a vast sea of misinformation. Wikipedia’s recent libel of the journalist John Siegenthaler should give users a clue that even a much-used and supposedly respectable site must be approached with great caution.
Why are newspapers any different? What about Jason Blair, or the columnists who made up stories, or the misjudgments that motivated Judith Miller’s reporting on weapons of mass destruction?
Well, yes, these were terrible lapses. They tainted us all. They are one of two big reasons that Dick Hesse’s lumping all media together – “Can I trust the media?” – was not entirely off-base.
The other reason is that the false division of the country into blue and red states, driven by partisan bigmouths who are not really journalists, has affected the way people read newspapers. Readers are suspicious. They think we are manipulating the news to reflect a partisan point of view. We are transparent in laying our opinions on the table on the editorial page, but can readers trust us not to allow those opinions to affect what we cover on the news pages and how we cover it?
I’m going to make it my mission in this blog and in the paper to do a better job of explaining why we do what we do. I welcome any questions from readers in this vein, but as I learned from the questions posed by the Leadership Concord class, it is easy to identify story and photo play, and even broad policies, that we should be explaining.
In the meantime, let me close on a brighter note and with a statement of belief.
This country is blessed with more sources of information and more access to it than any other country in the world. Citizens can find out what’s going on from dozens of sources at any time. If Americans are uninformed, it is generally not because information is not available to them.
More than ever, the challenge is to use this freedom wisely. “I don’t trust the media” – the premise behind Dick Hesse’s question, and a sentiment widely expressed today – is a copout. What the public should bring to the marketplace of ideas is not distrust but a healthy skepticism.
Posted by Mike Pride at 10:13 AM | Comments (0)
December 13, 2005
Typical Democrats
Leave it to the Democratic Party to want to fix something that works.
Again and again, the New Hampshire presidential primary has been a weathervane for Democrats, pointing in the right direction whether the party chooses to move in that direction or not. It has performed this service not just in selecting presidential nominees but also in guiding political philosophy.
Let’s recap, and I’ll comment only on the Democratic primaries I’ve witnessed during my years at the Concord Monitor.
1980 – A palace revolt, as Teddy Kennedy tries to unseat the incumbent, Jimmy Carter. Kennedy's candidacy proves to be the next-to-last gasp of the New Deal, and it is a weak gasp at that. Carter beats Kennedy without even campaigning. Lesson: The New Deal is dead. The Democrats need to move toward the center. They also need to stick with a winner, as the divisiveness of the nomination fight provides aid and comfort to Ronald Reagan.
1984 – Gary Hart upsets Walter Mondale. Lesson: The New Deal is dead. The Democrats need to move to the center.
1988 – Michael Dukakis wins in a crowded field. Lesson: The Democrats are learning the lesson, as they pass over Bruce Babbitt, who – literally – stands up for taxes, and Richard Gephardt, who appeals to the old FDR coalition, mainly the trade unions.
1992 – Despite a rollicking final stretch in which Bill Clinton takes hits on both womanizing and draft-dodging, New Hampshire sends him forth as the Comeback Kid. He joins a tradition of second-place finishers who, due to circumstances, are perceived as winners. Lesson: Voters – including Independents and Republicans – like a centrist Democrat who charms them, talks (and talks) the issues and hits back on the campaign trail.
1996 – Clinton rocks.
2000 – Wooden Al Gore limps past anesthetic New Deal throwback Bill Bradley. Lesson: Despite eight years of peace and prosperity, the party is in trouble again.
2004 – John Kerry sweeps away a large field. Lesson: Kerry’s flaws are obvious, but he’s the best the party has this time around.
Some of these results were bitter pills, but taken together, they’re impressive. They show the power of an engaged electorate – Democrats as well as Independents – to give the party precisely what it should be seeking in the first presidential primary: an honest critique of the candidates and guidance on direction and message.
Why would the Democratic committee examining the nomination process want to muck that up with a bunch of early big-state caucuses?
Because they're Democrats, I guess.
Posted by Mike Pride at 10:35 AM | Comments (3)
December 12, 2005
Afterglow
Eugene McCarthy, who died Saturday, was the ideal and the reality of my political education.
In the fall of 1968, I was in the Army in Germany. Voting for president for the first time, I wrote in McCarthy's name. My calculation was simple. I didn’t trust Richard Nixon, and Hubert Humphrey, the vice president, had failed to break the shackles of his boss’s Vietnam War policy. McCarthy was the peace candidate; I was a peace voter. That was all that mattered to me, even though I knew McCarthy’s candidacy had foundered after his 41 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire Democratic primary drove President Lyndon B. Johnson out of office.
Looking now at the 1968 general election results, I see that mine was one of just 25,552 votes cast for McCarthy that November. He finished not only behind Nixon (31.8 million), Humphrey (31.3 million) and George Wallace (9.9 million) but also behind Dick Gregory and Eldridge Cleaver. Heck, he even lost in a landslide to two Socialist candidates, Henning Blomen and Fred Halstead.
Twenty years later, McCarthy had become something of a perennial candidate for president. It was hard to tell why – simply to bask in the afterglow of 1968, probably. But by 1988, I was the Monitor’s editor and welcomed the chance to meet the man for whom I had cast my first ballot.
It proved to be a sad awakening. McCarthy had little relevant to say and no charisma. He seemed insular, halting and given to tangents. I had interviewed and scouted an array of presidential candidates during the preceding weeks – Bob Dole, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore, Bruce Babbitt, Jack Kemp, Alexander Haig, Pat Robertson and more. McCarthy was not in their league. I concluded he would have made a feckless president had he been elected in 1968.
But in my journal that night (Feb. 4, 1988), I did not focus on McCarthy's performance. Instead, I wrote about how, just after he left the old Monitor building on North State Street, I impulsively raced down the stairs after him. It had been snowing all day, and when I reached street level, I looked left and right in the misty white streetlit night. McCarthy, a tall form even with age bending him at the shoulders, wore a trenchcoat and a tan broad-brimmed hat. Walking alone, he was just disappearing around the corner.
I caught him a few steps up Pleasant Street. I told him he was the first person I had ever voted for for president. “Good man,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get in this one and give you a chance to write me in again.” I knew by then how electric New Hampshire primary politicking could be, and I could imagine how surprising and energizing it had been to be Eugene McCarthy in the winter of 1968. For me and many others of my generation, he soon became the wilted flower of idealism. But as he and I shook hands in the silent empty street 20 years later, with the snowflakes fluttering between and around us, I felt lucky to have such a fulfilling moment.
Posted by Mike Pride at 09:21 AM | Comments (1)
December 09, 2005
How could we even suspect?
Most of us – I hope – can see the cynical politics at play when the leader of Iran expresses doubt that the Holocaust occurred. But as the last of the Holocaust survivors die off in the next few years, I have a great fear that Holocaust deniers will find too many willing believers among new generations.
This thought was sparked not only by news reports of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s vile propaganda aimed at kicking the Jews out of Israel. It was also reinforced when my colleague Mark Travis pointed out a news item on an old Monitor front page taped to a poster board in his office. Hazen Smith, a longtime employee here, had pointed it out to Mark.
The newspaper is dated July 3, 1940, and contains a wonderful mishmash of news, in the style of old-time journalism. There is a story about the bonfires that will be set in Rolfe and Rollins Park the next day to celebrate the Fourth – the 50-foot flames licking the sky in Penacook and out-climbing the 35-footers in Concord. There is a story about a Laconia steeplejack who has been hired for $1,400 to regild the eagle on the State House Dome. In all, there are 29 stories on page 1!
It was one of the stories at the bottom that caught first Smitty’s eye, then Mark’s, then mine. The headline reads: “Hungary Ban On Jews Is Drastic.” In three inches of type, the story lays out new restrictions introduced by the Hungarian Nazi Party in Parliament on that day.
Among these restrictions, Jews may not:
– Drive automobiles.
– Buy books unless they are written in Hebrew or Yiddish.
– Marry, unless they are their families’ eldest sons or daughters.
– Retain Hungarian names; they must instead take “Hebrew” names.
– Hoist the Hungarian flag.
– Employ Gentile women under 40 years of age.
– Ride in regular railway cars.
– Buy anything from a peasant.
– Sign any legal document.
The lead story on the same page, a roundup of events in the war in Europe, contains this paragraph:
“Bloody anti-Semitic rioting spread throughout Rumania after disorders last night in which scores were injured and many believed killed. Many wealthy Jews fled to the country and others remained inside their homes as police and troops failed to bring the disturbances under control.”
This paper hit Concord doorsteps as people prepared to celebrate Independence Day in 1940.
1940!
Maybe you read in your history books that America’s leaders didn’t know about the Holocaust, or that reports of it were too fantastic to be taken seriously. But here, in plain words, Americans could read of Hungarian Nazis passing laws restricting the procreation of Jews and Rumanian authorities standing aside while Jews were killed and routed. How great a leap is it from these acts to the attempted extermination of the Jews?
Whether America could – or should – have done more to help the Jews of Europe is a complex issue. That’s not my point here.
What concerns me is how easy it was, when news of the Holocaust became widely known after the war, for people to say they had no idea anything like that was even possible, much less going on. And how easy it will be, once the Elie Wiesels of this world are gone from our midst, to persuade emerging generations that perhaps the Holocaust didn’t happen after all.
Posted by Mike Pride at 05:26 PM | Comments (0)
December 08, 2005
Where's our senator?
Those war protesters arrested this week at U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg’s Concord office have a point. Gregg is a hard man to get a hold of. The protesters have been trying in vain for months to hear from him on the Iraq war. They’re not alone. Gregg has been stiffing the Monitor’s editorial board for years, and he seldom makes himself available to the public to answer questions and explain himself.
Obviously he doesn’t have to talk to his constituents. He won the last two elections by a landslide over token opposition from the Democratic Party. He’s busy, too, as the point man in the Senate for the Bush budget. And he’s a senator, not a congressman, meaning he answers not to a particular district but – theoretically at least – to the whole state.
So why isn’t Gregg more responsive to the public? Guessing at motives is a bad idea, but I do think his hiding out hurts his reputation. I interviewed him several times earlier in his political life. While I see him as somewhat remote from human concerns, he does have a solid, consistent philosophy of government, and he has remained true to it for at least three decades. He can defend it vigorously, too. And he can articulate his views with both clarity and the nuance that comes only with long experience.
He’d help himself by holding a string of town meetings, by meeting with the Monitor’s editors and – yes – by sitting down with those war critics and telling them why he thinks they’re wrong.
In fact, he owes it to us.
Posted by Mike Pride at 01:05 PM | Comments (1)
December 07, 2005
On Pearl Harbor Day
On this Pearl Harbor Day, I can’t help but think about the passing generation for whom Dec. 7, 1941, changed the world. Or about the day nearly 60 years later, Sept. 11, 2001, that was so often compared to it in the aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers.
9/11 changed the world, too, but maybe not as drastically as it seemed at the time. Almost involuntarily, I paused my remote on Fox the other night long enough to hear Bill O’Reilly declaring that America is now fighting World War III and everyone should recognize that. He seemed to want to pin down his guests on this point, hoping they would disagree with him so he could question their patriotism, not to mention their intelligence.
But let’s leave that argument for another day. The story in today’s Monitor about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor discusses how popular culture – video games in this case, but the argument also applies to Hollywood – distorts what happened that day. The story quotes a veteran who says that as long as veterans of Pearl Harbor are around, they’ll give the public “the straight poop.” But how long will that be? And how many people care to read in any detail what historians dig up about this disaster?
This question is especially pertinent to me because I have been helping a man named Steve Raymond prepare his memoir for publication. Steve will turn 90 next June, but he wrote the memoir decades ago from diaries and notes he kept during three and a half years as a prisoner of war. He was not at Pearl Harbor but in the Philippines, which the Japanese also attacked.
His account of that day recalls the meager response of the unprepared American force and the utter shock and confusion of the troops. When General Edward King surrendered the American troops on the Bataan Peninsula four months later, Steve started on the Bataan Death March. Our working title for his memoir is Bataan and Beyond: My Three and a Half Years as a Slave. We’re nearing the finish line in preparing the manuscript, and I’m hoping the book will be published next fall.
Long passages of the memoir are relentlessly gruesome. Fake gore sells in video games and movies, but I wonder if the public has the stomach for the reality Steve and his fellow captives endured.
My main reason for working on the project is a belief in the importance of history. One man’s memoir is but a drop of history, but we should squeeze out every drop we can, especially while the people who lived it still walk among us. Whatever doubts we might have about the place of history in our culture, future generations who seek to know the past will find it only if we leave it for them.
Posted by Mike Pride at 09:32 AM | Comments (0)
December 05, 2005
One step back
On Friday, I started to write a blog entry about the report released the previous day by New Hampshire’s same-sex marriage commission. I was so angry I had to say something. Yet I knew from experience that I had to get past the anger to say what I wanted to say.
Then, halfway through the blog entry, I decided I wasn’t really writing a blog at all. I was writing the editorial for the Sunday Monitor. I went back and edited out all the “I thinks,” which were really scaffolding anyway, and assumed the mantle of the editorial “we.” (I don’t like the first person in an editorial, so I generally avoid the “we” whenever I can.)
So what’s the difference between a blog entry and an editorial?
I’m still an amateur blogger – who isn’t, with the exception of my friend Chad Finn, the Boston sports blogger? – but I have a few answers.
For me, blogging is fast writing. Although I don’t always make it, my goal when I write a blog entry is to stay under 400 words. A blog entry can be more personal than an editorial. I polish editorials, and at least one other editor reads them before they go in the paper. For better or worse, the blog is just me thinking out loud.
That doesn’t mean I don’t also think about how I say things in the blog. Words are my life. I try to treat them right, even though they don’t always treat me right.
Finally, in the case of the same-sex marriage commission, I knew in my bones after 20-plus years of editorial writing that this stance was important for the Monitor to take.
A few years ago, I read and admired the work of David Moats of the Rutland Herald, who won the Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials that helped Vermont find a path to gay civil unions. Out of fairness and in justice, New Hampshire needs to find a similar path.
Here’s the editorial, which ran under the headline, “New Hampshire is far better than this bigotry”:
It would be easy to go bonkers over the embarrassing report issued Thursday by New Hampshire’s same-sex marriage commission. In some ways, though, it is a relief to have this commission end. Here’s what should happen now: The governor should openly denounce this report, and the Legislature should repudiate it.
The report is prejudice codified. It is hard to believe that in the 21st century, such flaunting of bigotry is tolerated in the public halls. It is hard to believe that citizens who know better would not rise up in protest against their representatives inviting and expressing such loathsome claptrap.
Can you imagine a commission on women or on African-Americans producing a report like this? Its members would be tarred and feathered. At least they would be shut up. But gay men and lesbians are a small and only partly visible minority. Somehow, this makes it all right to allow bigots to rail away at them in public testimony and an official commission to take these bigoted assertions seriously.
The truth is, New Hampshire is a tolerant state. Yes, polls show that the public opposes gay marriage. But in part that is because public debate on this issue has not advanced beyond blind prejudice. It is painful to acknowledge that, but the commission’s work makes it crystal clear.
How many times have you heard it asserted – with no evidence whatsoever – that the real agenda of gay men and lesbians is to destroy the institution of marriage? The commission even says so in its report!
What gay men and lesbians want is the same thing straight couples already have: the right to commit officially and publicly to lasting, loving personal relationships, and the benefits that go with state-sanctioned marriage. It is not much to ask.
What they got instead from this commission was a self-fulfilling prophecy from people who began their inquiry with neither open minds nor humanistic intentions. The report asserts that “same-sex relationships are not based on the same concepts of stability and fidelity as marriage.” And this: “Gays tend to be measurably more promiscuous than their straight counterparts.”
These statements rise from bias. Coming from an official commission, they perpetuate bias.
New Hampshire is far better than what the representatives of the people have produced in this offensive report. New Hampshire is a place where most people take “Live Free or Die” to mean “Live and Let Live.”
If the gay-marriage report’s recommendations come to a vote, individual conscience will play a far greater role in the result than political log-rolling or partisan ideology. Even with an average age just south of Methuselah, the Legislature will reject the ideas put forth in this report.
The report is an aberration, part of the inevitable hangover from the one-term governorship of Craig Benson. That is why Gov. John Lynch should go out of his way to denounce it.
Lynch is politically cautious and has come out against gay marriage. But he owes it to New Hampshire’s citizenry to counter the public embarrassment that this report represents.
It isn’t the governor alone who should let his voice be heard. Other legislators and citizens, especially those who are not gay, must speak out as well.
New Hampshire needs to move forward on gay marriage or gay civil unions. But before it can do that, the same-sex marriage commission must be publicly scorned for taking a giant leap backward.
Posted by Mike Pride at 01:36 PM | Comments (3)
December 02, 2005
Audubon sighting
A reader of this blog wrote the following:
The people who pay the bills, NH Audubon members and donors, finally have a forum for their opinions.
Here's the link.
Posted by Mike Pride at 06:04 PM | Comments (2)
December 01, 2005
Peace
Ben Hartford, a local man serving in Afghanistan, happened upon my entry about Veterans Day ("Missed opportunity"). His response is worth more readership than it would get as a comment tagged onto that entry, so here it is:
Mike,
I'm a paratooper with the 82nd Airborne currently on my second deployment to Afghanistan. My younger brother is currently on his second deployment to Iraq. We come from a long line of veterans (at least one ancestor of ours has served in every war since the founding of our great nation).
I just about jumped up and "hoorayed" when I read your almost month-old blog. It makes me sad to see kids, and America in general, forget our veterans and troops. I assure you, we (currently deployed soldiers) do not forget you (the American public). There are times when we can do nothing but think of you.
When raising my children, I will be sure to always remind them of those people that sacraficed years of their lives (sometimes all of their years) to give them the freedoms they enjoy.
One last thing. I don't like being in the Army. I'm too close to being a pacifist. But I love my country. And I love my countrymen. I can be a good soldier. I can do what needs to be done to complete the mission and get my buddies back to the hootch alive. If my being here, doing things that I don't always agree with, means that another 26-year-old got to go to college and start his life, then I've done my duty before God and country.
Peace Out,
Benny
Posted by Mike Pride at 05:04 PM | Comments (1)
The impresario
When you look at the Capitol Center for the Arts today, it is hard to believe that 20 years ago it was a rat-trap, literally falling apart. It smelled, it was unsafe, and the seats were beat up and uncomfortable. Backstage was, well, the pits.
Handicap accessibility was nil. When the great violinist Itzhak Perlman played there one winter, they had to put him and his wheelchair on a forklift to get him into the theater. The night he played, the heat didn’t work. Perlman wore an overcoat onstage.
A string of owners had done their best to keep the theater going, but none had the wherewithal to restore it. It was only a matter of time before it closed down. And then, in 1989, at the age of 62, it did.
At the first stirrings of community action to bring the theater back to life, I was skeptical. The dollar figures were enormous, the plans grandiose.
Cindy Flanagan, an early champion of the theater project, took the Monitor brass on a tour of the place to try to win the paper’s support. We stood in a dungeon with garbage all around us and wires hanging from the ceiling while Flanagan explained what a fabulous reception area this would make. She took us onstage and backstage and tried to make us see enormous potential in the dust and grime. Frankly, I was glad to get out of the place alive.
Community leaders pressed on. Paul Hodes, Marty Gross and others came to the paper with charts on how the financing could be made to work and architectural renderings that made the place look spectacular.
Although the Monitor cheered the project on, behind our editorials I’m sure the community could see that only one hand was clapping.
But Flanagan, Hodes, Gross and a large cast of others did it. They got the money, they captured the imagination of the arts community, the business community, the whole community, and they resurrected the old Capitol Theater. It was a miracle, one of Concord’s finest hours.
Yet no amount of community enthusiasm could make this risky venture go. Who would woo new patrons, book the shows, engage the community for the long haul, line up sponsors and keep them involved, make the Cap Center not just a venue for big names but a community resource, put the fannies in the seats? The last piece of the puzzle was an impresario.
The community found one in M.T. Mennino. For 11 years, she did all of the above and also helped lead yet another major renovation and addition that made this jewel of the community shine even brighter.
Mennino’s death at age 56 yesterday was a shock and a loss to Concord.
Now, in tribute to all that she accomplished, and with her model to guide them, the center’s board must find her worthy successor. There will never be another M.T., but if she were still with us, the first words on her lips would surely be: The show must go on.
Posted by Mike Pride at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)