Columnist.
The old boy walked the bike out the door of his house in Little Rock and into Heaven, aka fall in Arkansas. In all its burning-tree glory. It was hard to tell which golden view high above the winding Arkansas River he preferred. One after another, the great oaks were turning into splendor. He knew others would burst forth any day. His favorite tree, he decided, would be the next to turn. As with all good things, anticipation may be the sweetest part.
Moammar Gadhafi is dead. Abdelbaset al-Megrahi isn't. Despite his being convicted of planting the bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 on the night of December 21, 1988, killing all 259 people aboard and 11 others on the ground when it crashed in the vicinity of Lockerbie, Scotland, scattering debris and bodies in its wake. Mr. Megrahi was duly tried and convicted of murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment.
It's no secret that the country is in a foul mood -- somewhere between sour and utterly disgusted. A general feeling of dissatisfaction pervades the national discourse. A dissatisfaction with the president and his administration, certainly, but with his critics in Congress, too. Poll after poll reflects unhappiness with what's called the direction of the country, though a better term for it might be drift.
"When the wicked spring up as the grass, and all the workers of iniquity do flourish, it is that they shall be destroyed forever." -- Psalms, 92:7 So may it be with all tyrants and enemies of the United States. Or do I repeat myself? Let's hope so. For the American cause should always be freedom's. However wayward the means or distasteful some of our allies in coalitions or convenience, let there never be any doubt that America will always be a friend to freedom. Around the world, America and freedom have been associated, even synonymous in our finest hours.
After five years in lonely captivity, denied visits by the Red Cross let alone his countrymen and kin, there was Gilad Shalit back on native soil. In his fresh uniform, web belt around his shrunken waist, regulation headgear tucked under a shoulder strap, and looking shrunken in his outsized uniform, Sgt. Shalit was saluting the high-ranking (and well-fed) politicians who are attracted to such occasions -- like moths to even a flickering flame.
Another day, another jobs bill/economic stimulus. And another presidential tour to promote it. This time our president and partisan-in-chief chose North Carolina for the setting, and who can blame him? Who wouldn't want to drive through its mountains and vistas these beautiful fall days -- instead of actually working out a compromise with those tiresome types in Congress? The kind who are always raising irritating questions, like whether the president's programs will actually work. Unlike those that have succeeded mainly in raising the country's unemployment rate to 9 percent or more.
Gravity has its laws courtesy of Sir Isaac Newton, and protest has its authoritative field notes by Eric Hoffer. A longshoreman and philosopher in pretty much that order, Eric Hoffer described the protesters of his time, the Hippies and Yippies of the Sixties, with such enduring insight that he might have been talking about Occupy Wall Street today. The specific focus of protests, if any, may change with the times. But the general spirit remains remarkably the same. It's a kind of free-floating dissatisfaction with the world. Or maybe the dissatisfaction is just with the protesters' place in it.
I have no idea what kind of job Andrea McKenna does as a teacher at her middle school in Springdale, Ark. I do know she's just been picked as the only teacher in the state of Arkansas to receive a prized Milken Educator Award this year. The award includes a cash stipend ($25,000) and is a big deal in American education, which needs all the attention it can get.
God's in his heaven, the Boston Red Sox aren't in the World Series, and all's right with the world once again. The natural order of the universe, broken after the Bosox won not one but two World Series in the last decade, has been restored. It kind of revives one's faith. In tragedy. No, it wasn't easy to set things right. It took some of the highest-paid talent in the major leagues for the Red Sox to bumble their way out of the American League playoffs this year, but somehow, against all odds, they managed it.
The line between fact and fiction in politics can be blurry. I'm reminded of that every time I see still another strange quote of Sarah Palin's ("I can see Russia from my house!") that was actually spoken by her talented mimic, Tina Fey. It's another proof that, as the neurologists tell us, the centers of memory and imagination are closely related in the human brain. Psychologists call it the Misinformation Effect, and there's a lot of it going around. There always is as an election year approaches.
We live in strange times. Aren't they all? But much like Tolstoy's unhappy families, each strange time is strange in its own peculiar way. And most peculiar, at least this week, may be the little legal brouhaha that some of our fellow Americans -- learned citizens all, maybe too learned -- are trying to raise in the midst of the general acclaim for the latest accomplishment of the armed forces of the United States. In another victory-by-drone, the armed forces of the United States took out al-Qaida's chief of operations in Yemen and points north on the Arabian peninsula. This achievement was a twofer, for it also eliminated one of his trusted lieutenants. Both were technically Americans. By birth if not by loyalty.
This era has lost its Edison. Maybe its Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller combined. As an inventor, Steve Jobs kept coming up with Next Big Things that changed the world before rendering them obsolete by inventing their successors. He began with the personal computer and went on to churn out the iPad, iPhone, iTunes, and all the apps that changed and still change the world -- not just technologically and economically but politically and culturally -- for good, bad and in-between.
Dear Sir, It was wholly a pleasure to get your email about the recent changes in the core curriculum at the University of Arkansas' campus at Fayetteville -- and expressing honest puzzlement about why a newspaper editor should care about such academic matters. What's the big deal, you want to know, about requiring, say, 35 credit hours in the arts and sciences for an undergraduate degree instead of 65 as in the past? Why all the fuss?
Now the most embarrassing piece of evidence yet has made its appearance at that super-sophisticated physics lab over in Switzerland where they put atomic particles through their very fast paces. This time CERN's researchers have found that nearly half of the global warming observed of late isn't traceable to man's activities after all but to sunspots, specifically the fluctuations in solar cosmic rays that promote cloud formation. (I don't understand it, either, but I'll take the textbooks' word for it.)
The succession of American secretaries of the Treasury from Alexander Hamilton to Timothy Geithner is alone enough to raise questions about the Theory of Evolution. For when it comes to secretaries of the Treasury, devolution might be the better term. Tim Geithner began his tenure at Treasury with the revelation that he hadn't been paying his taxes, at least not on time. By now he's gone on to overlooking even bigger things. Like the danger of the federal government's spending still more, and therefore driving the country even deeper into debt. But that hasn't stopped him from hectoring other countries about their spendthrift ways.
Dear Irate, Blame me. I'm the editor here at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette who put that article that so offended you -- and a number of other valued readers -- on the cover of our Sunday opinion September 11th. It was wholly a pleasure to hear from you all because it gives me an opportunity to explain why I would do such a thing.
Talk about the wish being father to the thought. Harry Reid, leader of the now diminished Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate, once said the Tea Party was a reaction to hard times and would disappear when the economy improves. Really? In just how many ways is that diagnosis of the Tea Party faulty?
Why shouldn't the United Nations recognize an Arab state of Palestine alongside the Jewish one called Israel? It wouldn't be the first time. On November 29, 1947, the UN's General Assembly voted 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions, to partition the disputed territory then called Palestine into two states whose people were going to live happily ever afterward. Fat lot of good it did. Riots erupted throughout the over-Promised Land as soon as the vote was recorded. The Arab Higher Committee for Palestine declared it would "fight for every inch" of old Palestine. The learned sages of Al-Azhar University in Cairo declared jihad against the infidels. (The term would become familiar to Americans after September 11, 2001).
Dear Dominique Strauss-Kahn, familiarly known as just DSK in haute-financial and political circles: I owe you an apology. I could scarcely keep myself from smirking when you were accused of sexually assaulting a chambermaid in one of those upscale hotels in Manhattan that no working stiff could ever afford. My chronic case of Francophobia went into overdrive.
