John Leonard's Open Salon Blog

My First Post

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 16:08:28 -0400

From way back in 2008, mine own first post:

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Greetings From Sunny Seattle

Well, actually it was sunny today, except for the part where it really rained cats & dogs this morning. Winter (and Spring) in Seattle is like those two weeks of April in New England that make you want to open a vein, except that they stretch on for four months. I don't really mean to bitch about the weather though, it's been done unto death and at least you don't have to shovel rain.

The dog in the avatar is Boris, an 18-month old Pembroke Corgi, who weighs about 40 lbs, 10 lbs over the normal top end for the breed. He's not overweight, he's just a huge dog. Hence the "-saurus" moniker my son gave him.

I wanted to follow up on the NYT article posted this morning re: the Khalil Gibran International Academy, but I though that I might wait until I got home from work and actually finished reading the article. I really found the actions of the "Stop the Madrassa Coalition" horrifying and wondered why they weren't wearing robes and hoods made out of sheets. The actions of the city government, and Mayor Bloomberg in particular, are enraging. Lord knows, I don't expect much in the way of spine from politicians, but I'm really underwhelmed.

The New York Post acted true to its Fox-News-In-Print-Format roots. A deliberate misquote solely to raise controversy and support a pre-determined outcome, the gutter press at its finest. It's obvious that Obama's African-American that's going to hurt him if he gets as far as the general anywhere near as bad as his name will.

Walter Cronkite

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:07:48 -0400

Walter Cronkite is dead at age 92. This started off as a comment over on big Salon, but I saw it was starting to get a bit long and besides, I'm not sure that's the right audience. So I came over here.

I'm like many Americans of a certain age; Walter Cronkite was the man who told me what was going on in the world during my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. I remember from very early on, we had the TV going in the other room while we ate dinner so that my father could listen to his newscast. It was Conkite's voice that told me about space launches, the assasination of JFK, the deposing of Nikita Khruschev, the Viernam war, the first men on the moon, Nixon's resignation. You name it and it was his gravelly voice that told me about it.

Walter Cronkite wasn't always an anchor at a desk. He wasn't afraid to put his butt on the line when reporting. He did more than just "cover" WWII for UPI. He took part in Operation Market Garden and went in with glider-borne infantry. Not a safe thing to do, even when you're not getting shot at.

When his glider crash-landed (that was the only way they ever landed) he lost his helmet and had to scrounge around on the ground to look for it. He found it and put it on his head. After awhile he noticed that a growing group of people was following him. It turns out that the helmet he found wasn't his. It had a big white stripe on the back, which signified that the wearer was a leader, an NCO or an officer, and everybody was looking to him for direction.

Even as an anchor, he got close enough to the shooting in Vietnam to need a helmet and flak jacket. There's quite a few peole still taking those risks, and sometimes loosing the bet, but I'm not sure that I could see one of today's court stenographers doing that, certainly none of the anchors. He never spoke much about the current crop of TV faces - I thinkit was out of kindness.

Walter Cronkite stayed a working reporter. I wish more people in the trade took his eaxample. Maybe then we'd still trust the network news instead of wondering what their angle was, what did their corporate masters have to gain by what they were reporting and how.

I know it's corny, but there's nothing else to say but:

And that's the way it is Friday, July 17th, 2009.

Just a Nice Place

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:06:28 -0400

I haven't posted anything in quite awhile, so I just thought I'd let people know that I was still sucking air.

The photo is of a pool in Stickney Brook in W. Dummerston, Vt., where I caught my first fish ( a brook trout) when I was about 4 years old.

It's still one of my favorite places to go, although I haven't fished it since my own boys were little.

At some point, I expect to be posting a little mongraph on Spike Milligan's war memoirs - one of the funniest tragedies I've ever read in my life, the story of a man who spent most of the years after 1945 looking for 1939.

Why It's Wrong

Mon, 25 May 2009 12:05:01 -0400

In today's NY Times, there is an article by Richard Oppel about Capt. Kirk Black, a National Guard officer, U.S. Captain Hears Pleas for Afghan Detainee. Captain Black, a National Guard officer who is a member of Baltimore's SWAT team in civilian life, is in Afghanistan to help rain the local police force . Capt. Black appears to be heading for rather serious trouble. His offence? He doubted the oficial story that one of the prisoners at Bagram Air Base is who the US Government says he is.

The US Government maintains that a man by the name of Gul Khan is in fact someone named Qari Idris, a Taliban leader. Mr Khan's relatives feel differently. They contacted Capt. Black and asked him to look into Mr. Khan's situation. Capt. Black agreed to do so, correctly feeling that by helping to clear up a mistake that caused an innocent man to be held, he would be helping to as the old phrase goes, "win hearts and minds".

To make a long story short, Capt. Black did look into things and as it states in the article:

“Upon speaking to multiple village elders, family members, the police chief and the subgovernor, I am convinced that the individual in question is not the person that the government claims,” he wrote in January to Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights lawyer he had met three years earlier during a posting to Guantánamo. “I am a police officer in the United States, and there is a mass of evidence that this individual does not need to be held.”

Mr. Smith has taken Mr.Khan's case and is filing for a writ of habeus corpus in fderal court - a right that Mr. Obama thinks that Mr. Khan ought not to have.

Now, every cop that I've ever met starts off with a simple premise - that the suspect is guilty and deserves what he gets. They're not exactly a bunch of hand-wringing Lefty civil libertarians. That Capt. Black, a real-life cop, has actually been convinced that Mr. Khan is indeed a victim of mistaken identity is something I find very convincing. Capt. Black is no Johnny-come-lately to the GWoT, he's done a previous tour at Guantánamo Bayand in his own words:

“When I got there, I’ll admit I basically believed everyone there was a terrorist and we had every right to be holding them,” he said. “But as I learned more about the system, I learned that quite a few of them were just swept up in the initial invasion.”

Now it seems that the US Government (surpise!) doesn't like it's judgement questioned by a junior officer. Capt. Black was told to "toe the party line" and not discuss Mr. Khan's guilt or innocence. Additionally, Capt. Black has been placed under investigation and the investigators attempted to get a sworn statement from Mr. Oppel, the author of the Times' article, who declined to give one.

It seems that the US Goverment has decided that Mr. Khan, like all Bagram prisoners is, in the words of a goverment spokesman, classified as “an imminent danger to the lives of U.S. service members.” And once so classified, he has no rights. Not even the right to prove who he is.

This is what "indefinite detention" means. Not only are locked up and the key thrown away, but nobody hs the right to question the premise of your inprisonment. You are scooted off and stored away, not because of what you've done, but because of whatt he goverment fears that you might do. A government that doesn't like to be questioned.

This is wrong. When we were children, this is what we were told happened to those poor, oppressed people "behind the Iron Curtain" and was something that we would never do.

I guess we're nothing special after all.

Can You See The Real Me? Can You? Can You?

Sun, 17 May 2009 23:05:09 -0400

"Well" you ask, and well you might, "just why does that John Leonard fellow hide behind photos of innocent dogs? An unfortunate incident with a flame thrower when he was younger? A biological experiment gone hideously wrong? Or even less likely, is the boy so handsome that even Cary Grant would die of envy (if he weren't already)?".

Well, now it can be told, or shown rather. Sorry, I'm afraid I don't have my guyliner on, and as an ad for Ford pick-ups described - I'm "just not the kind of man who shaves on a Saturday ", or a Friday or a Sunday either for that matter. I think it should be obvious that I achieve that devil-may-care look by simply not caring.

But I am waiting for a Java program I wrote to finish (a large amount of processing to be done) and have nothing better to do, so I thought I'd scare the children.

Here I am in all my glory. If Rob can show his ponytail, I can show my face.