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A profile in courage
Gregory Good, Sr., my wife’s grandfather, 92 years old, recalls nearly getting shot down by Nazi fighters in this moving profile. Grandpa Goodie still suffers from post-traumatic stress and is attending therapy sessions with Iraq and Afghanistan vets.
Sprucing up
New president, new blog layout. Like all blogs, a work in progress. Thanks for reading Lerterland during the Bush years and, now, the Obama years.
Hail To The Chief
We have prevailed in our task. God Bless America Land that I love Stand beside her And guide her Through the night With a light from above From the mountains To the prairies To the oceans White with foam God Bless America My home sweet home God Bless America My home sweet home — Israel Isidore Beilin (Irving Berlin), 1917
Scapegoating the black and poor
Daniel Gross explodes the right’s endlessly repeated notion that making loans more accessible to minorities, through liberal initiatives such as the Community Reinvestment Act, is the root cause of the current meltdown: I await the Krauthammer column in which he points out the specific provision of the Community Reinvestment Act that forced Bear Stearns to run with an absurd leverage
David Foster Wallace, R.I.P.
I never read Infinite Jest, but I did read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments and got a lot out of it. However, the DFW work that left the biggest mark on me by far was this Harper’s essay [$] about grammar and usage. To take a subject as crushingly boring as this and turn it
Support our troops
By which I mean: Support them when one is apparently raped and murdered and the U.S. Army rules it a suicide. Darcy has more details on the fate of Private LaVena Johnson. There’s a petition calling on Henry Waxman to launch a full inquiry. Please sign on.
Mandela at 90
One of the high points of my adult life was watching Nelson Mandela, Mario Cuomo and David Dinkins ride past in a motorcade in New York on June 20, 1990. The legacy of Mandela, or “Madiba” as South Africans affectionately call him, is a complex one. His reaching out to Castro, Gadhafi and other autocrats during those days is still
Verse for the day
The passageof a life should show;it should abrade.And when life stops,a certain space —however small —should be left scarredby the grand anddamaging parade. — Kay Ryan, U.S. poet laureate From “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard”