Month: December 2004

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‘When All the Laughter Died …’

My usual chain of random thoughts just led to this recollection: That one Christmas, my mom gave me a copy of a book called “When All the Laughter Died in Sorrow.” It’s the autobiography of Lance Rentzel, a good Dallas Cowboys and University of Oklahoma wide receiver whose career was pretty much killed after he was arrested for exposing himself to some little girls.

Why did I think of that just now? I was contemplating an excellent Washington Post story from the other day talking about one big problem the United States is having in Iraq is simple wear and tear on equipment. Since the war planners made such blithe (or unforgivably superficial) assumptions about how the military action would go, they grossly underestimated how many tanks, Humvees, Bradley fighting vehicles and other workaday army equipment the campaign would need. Since the toughest duty expected in Iraq after the first few weeks was dodging bouquets flung at the liberators, the repair budget was grossly underestimated, too. (Eventually, that leads to things like National Guard troops looking for armor scraps in garbage dumps in Kuwait.)

And thinking of that story made me think of Saddam and his henchmen and their laughable warnings that

Baghdad would become the graveyard for the invaders. I laughed to myself, anyway. And then I thought about how we’ve had 1,300 troops killed in Iraq so far and 10,000 wounded. Yeah, that’s hardly a morning’s work in some wars — check out the Civil War battles of Antietam. Or Fredericksburg. Or Chancellorsville. Or Gettysburg. Among many, many others. But Iraq, of course, is a much different kind of war. And numbers aside, there’s nothing about that old “graveyard” rhetoric that seems funny anymore.

And that made that book come into my head. I always misremember it as something like “When All the Laughter Turned to Tears,” or some variation on that. It’s a tragic story. From what I remember of it, Rentzel talked about how hard he’d driven himself throughout his childhood to excel. The book was part of his therapy, as I recall, part of coming to terms with why he’d done what he’d done. The book was praised, critically, and I imagiine Mom just saw it at Maeyama’s, the dependably good bookstore in Park Forest, and picked it up for me. Judging by the publication date, I must have been 18.

I’ve always wondered whether there was some kind of message in the gift, whether Mom was afraid I was a pervert in the making or something. Probably not. I hope not. It still occurs to me, though.

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The Verdict

Sure, you’ve got the victim’s family and the family of the defendant. You’ve got jurors who handed over six months of their lives to hear testimony and see evidence and make a tough call. You’ve got the prosecutors and defense lawyers. But in the end, the people I really feel for in the Scott Peterson case are the spectators. No more titillation. No more rage on behalf of someone they didn’t know and would never have cared about save for her dreadful fate. No more hatred for a suspect they likewise didn’t know. No more poring over testimony and gossip. No more jockeying for what one news outlet called “the 27 coveted public seats inside the courtroom,” where they could see the monster himself, or the grieving mothers, or the juror with the orange hair. No more booing and cursing the suspect’s family. No more cameras to show off for or reporters to impress.

But it’s not the end of the world. There’s always the execution to look forward to.

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Portraits of Crazyworld

The New York Times has a fine story on an artist, Steve Mumford, who’s gotten himself embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq as a combat artist. He’s been working for Artnet, which has posted a 15-part Baghdad Journal featuring Mumford’s drawings, paintings and dispatches. I’ve only looked at a couple of the more recent installments. I think they’re frank and human in a way you don’t often see in the mainstream press. In the Times story, he says his view of the war has changed. When he first went to Iraq, he thought the whole operation was a “huge blunder.” But he says he’s been won over to the view that the U.S. mission could succeed, partly by talking to Iraqis, partly by seeing firsthand what U.S. troops have been doing to fix things in Baghdad (which one Army officer he quotes calls “crazyworld”).

Despite his expressed optimism, his picture of Iraq — the violence, the apparent distrust of anything American, at this point — looks anything but hopeful. His most recent dispatch ends:

“When I get back to my hotel the following week Baghdad’s streets feel more dangerous than ever. A rocket has hit the nearby Sheraton; reporters are largely confined to their hotel rooms amid a rash of kidnappings. Only five other people are staying at the Al Fanar: an American contractor, his Iraqi wife and a British colleague, a rather mysterious Japanese woman who tells me she runs a massage parlor in the Green Zone, and a reporter, a young French woman who I occasionally spot in a headscarf, in the lobby.

“Drivers and hotel staff, with little work to do, hang out there, watching TV, while a lone macaque monkey in a small cage stares quietly out the lobby window at the street. In an effort to salvage something from this depressing scene I’d tried to arrange for this monkey to be transferred to Baghdad’s zoo, but the hotel owner refused to sell.

“For several days I stay within the confines of the security zone around the hotels, while my friends Esam and Ahmed come to visit. I’m quite sure my movements are being watched, and when I’m finally ready to leave Iraq I tell the hotel staff I’m going to visit a friend for a day before leaving town.

“However, the hotel driver, Farouk, looks not in the least surprised when I ask him to take me directly to the airport. We drive past the blighted landscape of palm tree stumps next to the highway, cut down and bulldozed to lessen the danger of ambushes. After 30 minutes we pass the first military checkpoint at the airport’s outskirts, and I breathe a sigh of relief.”

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Gary Webb

Something I missed over the weekend: Gary Webb, the San Jose Mercury News reporter who wrote a series of articles linking the CIA, Nicaragua’s anti-government contra rebels, cocaine traffickers, and the crack epidemic in Los Angeles, was found dead in suburban Sacramento on Friday, December 10. The cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head, and the sheriff’s and coroner’s offices up there are quoted as saying Webb appears to have committed suicide. (Un-shockingly, some in the parallel conspiracy-driven universe have revealed his death was a “suicide,” in quotation marks, meaning that he was rubbed out as someone who knew too much about the “Bush Crime Family.”)

Right here I’ll say I would need to go back and read what he wrote, how other media responded, and the substance of government investigations to offer an informed opinion about Webb’s stories. What’s clear was that as an investigative reporter, Webb was the real thing, sharing a Pulitzer Prize at one point and getting lots of other recognition for his work before the contra cocaine story.

In saying he had evidence that the CIA was in bed with people who had helped trigger a disaster of epic proportions in the second-biggest U.S. city and beyond, he was suggesting something that most people would reject as fantastic, too evil to be true, to byzantine to really hold together. That was my own reaction. And like most messengers bearing such tidings, he paid a price: others in the journalistic establishment worked to discredit his work, his own paper wound up repudiating the stories, he was transferred to a bureau office 100 miles from where he lived. Sixteen months after the series ran, he quit the Merc. And continued to pursue the story, eventually expanding his investigation into a book, from outside a big-city paper.

Conclusion: I don’t have any. The guy was 49. He believed passionately, and apparently sincerely and without cynicism, in the integrity of his journalism. He had three kids and had been pushed outside the professional realm he loved (his former wife is quoted as saying, “All he ever wanted to do was write”). And he apparently shot himself. It’s a tragedy, that’s all.

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Coincidental Verse

The Writer’s Almanac. I’ve mentioned it before. Praised it. I like it. Appeals to my “finer things in life” side. (Yes, there’s more to the world than “Survivor” (finale tonight!), “CSI,” and “Six Feet Under” (the last viewed on DVD only).

I get The Writer’s Almanac email every day. Often I can’t bring myself to open it because of the possible emotional and time commitment. When I do, though, I’m occasionally surprised by how fitting the poem for the day seems to be. Not the predictable ones, like Thanksgiving-themed verse during Thanksgiving week. But shots in the dark that just fall squarely on some event in my life, something I’m thinking of. For instance, the poem “The Longly-Weds Know,” which the almanac sent out December 2, the day after my wedding anniversary.

And then there’s today’s almanac. The poem is “1100,” by Emily Dickinson. I hardly know from Emily Dickinson, though if pressed I might be able to tell you that she came up with the line “hope is the thing with feathers” and that Julie Harris played her on stage and small-screen. I was puzzled by the title, having been so Dickinson-deprived that I did not know her poems were not titled, but numbered. With Max’s passing on my mind, the poem’s really a bull’s-eye. It starts:

“The last Night that She lived

“The last Night that She lived

It was a Common Night

Except the Dying – this to Us

Made Nature different.

We noticed smallest things –

Things overlooked before

By this great light upon our Minds

Italicized – as ’twere. …”

Go and read the rest.

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Caring for the Wounded

The New England Journal of Medicine is running a photo essay in this week’s edition entitled “Caring for the Wounded in Iraq.” Like the photojournalistic work I mentioned a few days ago, “Purple Hearts: Back from Iraq,” it’s a glimpse at the reality that hides behind statistics like the number of U.S. troops wounded in action (nearly 10,000).

You can find the photo essay here (or go here for a PDF version). The photographs are mostly unsparing clinical images of soldiers who have suffered severe trauma. “High-energy gunshot wound passing through knee” is one of the typically dispassionate captions. To me, the pictures testify to two things: the extraordinary destructive power of modern weapons, even the improvised ones wielded by the Iraqi guerrillas; and the near-miraculous capacities of medical technology. The doctors and nurses you see in the pictures are using every means at their disposal to save bodies torn apart by explosives and shrapnel. In many cases, they’re succeeding. (As “Purple Hearts” testifies, though, it’s not as easy to put the people back together.)

Once again, I’m reminded of one of Walt Whitman’s Civil War poems, “The Wound-Dresser.” The hospital scene and means of treatment he depicts are primitive by our standards. But the sense of heartbreaking destruction of lives is the same:

“The crush’d head I dress (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away),

The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through I examine,

Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life struggles hard

(Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death!

In mercy come quickly).

“From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand,

I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood,

Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv’d neck and side-falling head,

His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the bloody stump,

And has not yet look’d on it.

“I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep,

But a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and sinking,

And the yellow-blue countenance see.

I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound,

Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensive,

While the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray and pail.

“I am faithful, I do not give out,

The fractur’d thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen,

These and more I dress with impassive hand (yet deep in my breast a fire, a burning flame).”

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The Tribune on Max

The Chicago Tribune is running a nearly heroic-scale obit on Max. Here’s the lead:

“Australian-born Maxwell McCrohon was a journalistic visionary whose innovations in design, story-packaging and feature writing changed the face of the Chicago journalism and had a wide impact throughout the U.S. newspaper industry.”

And a fun detail recounting his early days at the Chicago American:

“He also was a fill-in movie reviewer. A sample lead from one of his reviews: ‘The Frenchmen who produced the film version of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” have spread the rather bitter bread of his play with a heavily spiced syrup of sex.’ ”

12/10/04: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is carrying Hearst’s more workaday version of the obit. The WLS site in Chicago is running the AP’s version at length. And the Washington Times has UPI’s take.

12/11/04: The New York Times has an obit, too, this morning.

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Max

One of our family’s oldest and greatest friends, Max McCrohon, died yesterday. He’d been sick a long time with emphysema (I remember him as an unregenerate smoker of unfiltered Camels) and, for the past three or four years, with lung cancer. There’s a lot I could say — that everyone in my family could say — about Max (and about all the McCrohons). For now, just this: He was the one who inspired me to become a journalist and who gave me my first opportunity to work in a newsroom. And he and his wife Nancy somehow were always welcoming to the Brekke kids; their home was always, always open to us. I honestly can’t imagine what my life would have been like without him, and them.

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Will Work for Cookie

News from the world of online help-wanted ads (in the midst of all this blogging and freelancing and handwringing about life and the world in general, a job search is theoretically happening here at Infospigot World Headquarters; but that’s another long, sad story, for later; much later). Just now on Craigslist, I spot this posting: **MANAGING EDITOR FELLOWSHIP.**

Interesting! “Managing Editor Fellowship.” It’s for VegNews, “America’s premier vegetarian lifestyle magazine.” It looks like a real magazine, and it sounds like they want a real managing editor. The ad says, “The candidate will work alongside the editor-in-chief and with dozens of experienced writers to build a top-notch editorial department. Person will manage magazine’s editorial lineup, work with writers on revisions, read and pitch stories, field inquiries, plan future editorial, research story ideas, and have an opportunity to write for the magazine.”

And in return for the 50+ hours a week the ad, with admirable frankness, says this job will require, the managing editor fellow will get 100 bucks a week (it’s a stipend, not a salary). Plus a furnished cottage somewhere in San Francisco, and other perks, including ” all-you-can-eat vegan cookies.”

Hey, give them points for trying something creative. It’s not always true that you only get what you pay for. I’ve seen plenty of mediocre people pulling down big bucks and talented ones who were seriously underpaid. On the other hand, I always wonder about organizations that say they want the kind of talent that can “build a top-notch editorial department” while offering what amounts to spare change and (in this case) baked goods as part of the compensation package.