Waterloo Sunset

I love music, all kinds of music.I guess that is to be expected. I was raised with the sounds of music filling the house. My mother loved folk music. My father loved Middle Eastern music. They both loved classical music and bluegrass.In that environment, as I say, I developed a fondness for all kinds of music. I liked the music my parents liked — still do — but I also liked the music that was popular with others of my generation.Hey, I'll listen...

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Custer's Last Stand

It was on this day 135 years ago that the Battle of the Little Bighorn — better known as Custer's Last Stand — began.In my studies of American history, I have really only read one book on this subject — "Son of the Morning Star," Evan S. Connell's 1984 book, which I was inspired to read in 1991 after seeing the TV dramatization of it starring Gary Cole and Rosanna Arquette.The TV adaptation received some Emmy Awards, and I felt that both the book...

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The High Ground

One of my favorite movies of the last 20 years is 1993's "Gettysburg."It was a long movie — more than four hours — but I guess it had to be that long if it was going to do justice to what may well be the most important and most decisive event in American history. Many historians believe — and I am inclined to agree — that victory at Gettysburg paved the way for the Union's eventual triumph over the Confederacy.I have not done a comprehensive study...

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Worth a Thousand Words

Yesterday, the Food and Drug Administration unveiled the warning labels that will now adorn cigarette packages.Well, they're supposed to be in place by September of next year so they won't start showing up at your neighborhood convenience store for awhile.But, when they do, the difference will be — as the commissioner of food and drugs for the FDA said — "dramatic."The overall appearances of cigarette packages will be changed. Warning labels have...

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Weiner Roast

Up to this point, I have avoided making any comments on the Anthony Weiner scandal.But I was speculating via e–mail with a friend of mine — for a few years, we worked in the same newsroom as copy editors — about how much fun it would be to work on a copy desk when the headline on Weiner's resignation announcement was being written.How many off–color headlines and double entendres will wind up in print, I asked him. And he agreed that it would, indeed,...

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Obama's Uphill Climb

Not so long ago, Barack Obama said he would rather be a one–term president who did the right things than a president who won a second term by doing the popular (but not necessarily prudent) things.That was a noble sentiment.In fact, it kinda reminded me of a slogan from a series of cigarette commercials from my childhood. As a demonstration of their loyalty to the product, the people in these advertisements were shown with a dark circle around one eye and the slogan (spoken in broadcasts, printed in newspapers and magazines), "I'd rather fight...

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The Guy Next Door

The other day would have been the 70th birthday of a man who lived next door to my family when I was a child.I grew up outside the city limits, on a lakefront lot in what was then a sparsely developed area in central Arkansas. Many of the people who lived out there at that time had no one living directly next door — their closest neighbors might be half a mile away — but my family actually did have a neighbor.Well, there was a house next door that we could see from our house. The identities of the neighbors changed from time to time.For a few years,...

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Barack Hoover Obama?

"Many of the administration's pet stimulus programs have joined Jerry Ford's 'Whip Inflation Now' buttons on the junkpile of history: green jobs, cash for clunkers, debt relief for homeowners, and now, by the President's own admission, 'shovel–ready' infrastructure projects."Walter Russell MeadThe American InterestNo matter what you think of Barack Obama or the Republicans who are vying to replace him, you should read Walter Russell Mead's piece...

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No Republican Frontrunner

I didn't watch Monday night's Republican debate from New Hampshire, but I've been reading a lot about it.And I have come to the same conclusion as Michael Barone in the Washington Examiner — there is no frontrunner yet.How could there be? I mean, this is June. The party conventions won't be held for more than a year. Primary voters won't start going to the polls for another six or seven months.The debate, as Barone observed, "was a New Hampshire...

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Photographs and Anxieties

I seldom hear much about Gabrielle Giffords these days.That is how it should be, I guess.After all, she was news on the day she was shot — and in the days that followed, when her dramatic fight for life was played out on the nation's TV screens in the form of medical briefings.But, for most of the last five months, she has been just another patient and the details of her treatment have remained out of public view. She did survive a wound that was...

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What About Bob?

When I was growing up in Arkansas, the Arkansas Gazette — which was, at the time, the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi — would run editorials endorsing candidates in various races during the campaign and then would publish a list recapping those endorsements in the days just before the primary or election.I knew people who would cut out that list and take it with them to the polls so they would know who not to vote for.Now, I grew up appreciating...

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It's the Jobless, Stupid

"Given the history of recessions driven by financial meltdowns, it was inevitable we'd have a lingering unemployment problem. All the more reason to gear every possible policy toward augmenting job growth. Once he passed his ramshackle social–spending bill called the 'stimulus,' though, Obama devoted most of his attention to re–engineering key sectors of the American economy — health care, finance, energy — regardless of the economic consequences."Rich...

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The Horror of War

There is no time in my memory of my childhood when the war in Vietnam was not an ever–present fact of life.When you thumbed through a newspaper or a magazine, you were bound to see articles about it. If you switched on your TV or your radio, you were almost sure to see or hear something about the war. All the prominent people of the time were talking about it.It was everywhere.As young as I was, I got the sense that most people still thought of war...

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Fueling the Fires of Skepticism

"The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts. He ascribes all his failure to get on in the world, all of his congenital incapacity and damfoolishness, to the machinations of werewolves assembled in Wall Street, or some other such den of infamy."H.L. MenckenBaltimore Evening SunJune 15, 1936It's been nearly 75 years since Mencken wrote those words, and I often wonder whether Americans have learned much in all that time.It is from that perspective, therefore, that...

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