I've said that before. It is that way for me. Perhaps there are people who can hie themselves to an attic and rip out a Red Badge of Courage in a couple of weeks without breaking a sweat. Perhaps. The rest of us mortals sweat to achieve a credible effort. But in the days following the blow up in Ferguson, MO, I discovered a new level of hard. And that is discovering how hard it was to put words on my screen, about Ferguson, which I'd dredged from a cool, dispassionate, objective nook in my soul. There was such a place in my soul, but it was cloaked in industrial strength duck dynasty camouflage.
I've always admired David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter. It always brings to mind Joe Friday handing his murder book to a female DA. "What's this?" she asks. You know what he says. Anyway I dug out the book and man, that is good writing. Credible, dispassionate delivery, and loaded with fact and opinion riding on solid sources. I reviewed the dog-eared and book marked pages—pardon me while I digress a moment, but the book was published in 2007, and besides being an excellent history of the Korean War, he draws lessons from Korea and applies them to Vietnam and Iraq. Just a majorly excellent book. Go to a library and try a couple of pages of the Epilogue, and page 223, and pages 390 and 391. These are in the hard cover version. I mention it because anyone who wants a better understanding of some of the major developments in our country in the last hundred years, you might want to own the book. Sorry about the digression—and it inspired me and got me digging deeper for the elusive cool-headed dispassion.
I can't promise that I achieved cool index-hunt-and-peck-index-typing fingers, but I damped the blast furnace down some. I intend to publish here, a piece I've worked on for a while. It's called Hate Crime. It will come out in installments. Number 1 will appear tomorrow.
A domani.
I've always admired David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter. It always brings to mind Joe Friday handing his murder book to a female DA. "What's this?" she asks. You know what he says. Anyway I dug out the book and man, that is good writing. Credible, dispassionate delivery, and loaded with fact and opinion riding on solid sources. I reviewed the dog-eared and book marked pages—pardon me while I digress a moment, but the book was published in 2007, and besides being an excellent history of the Korean War, he draws lessons from Korea and applies them to Vietnam and Iraq. Just a majorly excellent book. Go to a library and try a couple of pages of the Epilogue, and page 223, and pages 390 and 391. These are in the hard cover version. I mention it because anyone who wants a better understanding of some of the major developments in our country in the last hundred years, you might want to own the book. Sorry about the digression—and it inspired me and got me digging deeper for the elusive cool-headed dispassion.
I can't promise that I achieved cool index-hunt-and-peck-index-typing fingers, but I damped the blast furnace down some. I intend to publish here, a piece I've worked on for a while. It's called Hate Crime. It will come out in installments. Number 1 will appear tomorrow.
A domani.