Category: Blog Post

Katherine Kersten let us know again today about the meaning of honoring our veterans. In case you missed it, it’s building memorials, like the one in Rochester. It was the typical superficiality we’ve come to expect from KK, but I’m sure she tries to do the best she can with what she has to work with.

I do think it is good to have such tangible memorials to our war veterans. I’ve been to the one in my hometown to see the name of my father’s best friend from high school, who died in the English channel when his transport was torpedoed on Christmas Day 1944. I’ve run my fingers over the name of my high school buddy on the black wall in Washington. And I’ve looked through the private memorial constructed by my mother-in-law out of the contents of the foot locker of her brother who went down in a B-24 over Germany in 1943. (Disclosure: I was drafted in 1972, but flunked the physical.)

I have one relative, who as one of the 5th Rangers, stood in an LST bobbing in the waves off Pointe du Hoc on D-Day, watching his unit be slaughtered as they tried to get up that cliff, and knowing he’d be next if they failed. He didn’t have to fight that day, but he did in the hedgerows in France, on the bridges in Holland, and in a Belgian town called Bastogne. He won one Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, three Purple Hearts (which he called the medal for being stupid enough to get shot) and all of 1945 and part of 1946 having his leg pinned back together and learning to walk again with a persistent slight limp.

Two uncles missed that war but got in in time to both freeze in Korea and sweat in Vietnam. They got three Silver Stars and a couple of Purple Hearts between them. Their four sons and sons-in-law missed Vietnam, but did go to Germany for the Cold War, and Iraq in the first Gulf war. One cousin saw men under his command killed in a training accident. One cousin drove a tank into Baghdad three years ago.

And one of those cousins was notified this week that his son is on his way to Iraq after the first of the year. He’s heartbroken, as are we.

I once asked one of these guys why he hadn’t ever joined the VFW or American Legion. He just said anyone who’d ever actually been in combat would never want to glorify it in any way, and left it at that.

Honor yes, glory no.

What we’re doing now for our current armed forces is no honor to the memory of our veterans.

We’ll send my cousin’s son to war short of enough men and equiment to keep him and his comrades relatively safe. We’ll have tax cuts and bridges in Alaska.

Today, we will fire salutes at Arlington, where my uncle is buried, and at Fort Snelling, and at the memorial in Rochester Kersten writes about. We’ll be there even though our president has yet to attend even one funeral of one soldier killed in this Iraq war.

We’ll place flags on soldiers’ graves while the flag draped coffins from Iraq are unloaded and buried out of the public eye, except for the obligatory stories from the local press about the local boy who played high school football and married his childhood sweetheart.

We’ll hear from a president who used the National Guard to duck his own obligation while he uses guys who signed up for the Guard to get money for college to clear roadside bombs and fight house to house in Fallujah.

And we’ll bitch about gas prices half of what the rest of the world pays while some of our regular Army are getting ready for their fourth tour in Iraq.

My uncle once said, "I can’t believe Bush said ‘Bring it on.’ Nobody who has ever been in combat would ever say that. I was always hoping the enemy would hear me saying, ‘Take it somewhere else.’"

Those are the sort of veterans I can honor every day–those who know what it is and went anyway. I can’t honor those who don’t know what it is, and send others to do it.

The New York Times magazine’s style sections, which have lately been spun out as stand-alone quarterlies or something like that, have–to my eye–been kind of a mess. If you look to the table of contents, they are typically divided into broad, allegedly cute rubrics like “The Look,” “The Get,” and so on. But if you actually browse through, my eye like a cabbage moth doesn’t really land on anything in particular, other than what most dominates these issues–the full-bleed, full-truck prestige ads.

That undoubtedly pleases the advertisers. In many ways that’s precisely what a good style magazine should do–become a self-fueled showcase for prestige brands to compete with each other for the most glam, buzz-worthy ad pages.

But as far as “T” being an editorial product, there are just too many elements thrown together without any useful overarching architecture. Normally, I argue the opposite point– many publications, especially the alt-weeklies, suffer from too much off-putting structure designed to lead the reader by the nose-ring. I’m talking about impedimenta like over-defined sections (Music! Film! Books! Readings! Visual Art-Sculpture! Visual Art-Sculpture-Smaller Than Your House!), oversized page numbers, heads, decks, tags, bylines, captions, pullquotes, refers, blah blah blah. Is there a story in there somewhere?

But “T” magazine kind of abandons the images and the stories to the page. Where everything is given equal visual weight, nothing stands out or calls you in. You could make the argument that that’s what catalogs do, and that’s what Times Style editors are trying to recreate–a sort of shopper or browser. It’s irritating to me that such a lazy approach to magazine design–which is itself supposed to showcase world-class design–can succeed so handsomely.

Anyway, my point was going to be that one story in “T” recently jumped out at me, to be the exception that proves the rule. I didn’t notice it myself; my beautiful and brilliant wife did. It was a wonderful, evocative piece about visiting Euro-Disney. It was written by the “mysterious” young San Francisco writer J.T. Leroy, and I thought that was pretty savvy of the Times to pick up LeRoy, who has most recently been writing regularly for the SF magazine 7X7. LeRoy, you may remember, is supposedly a twenty-something young man who was raised on the mean streets of America. According to the story, he was sort of a Gen-Y Jim Carroll–a comparison that stands up, when you read the two well-liked novels LeRoy has published.

Well, today, someone over at Women’s Wear Daily reports that the Times Magazine has suddenly decided to end its nascent relationship with LeRoy. They cancelled an assignment in progress (a piece about Deadwood, the HBO series). The reason given seems to be that the Times cannot verify that LeRoy “is a real person,” and WWD sort of fans the flames of consipracy by talking to “someone claiming to be LeRoy” who confirms the facts of the dust-up.

I don’t know what all the fuss is about. In the business, it’s called a pseudonym, and the fact that J.T. LeRoy has been writing and publishing under that name for more than a decade ought to be track record enough to establish his (or her) credentials. Probably the Times would like to know what LeRoy’s real name is–and LeRoy isn’t taking the bait. Probably the Times is being careful to avoid any more embarrassments. Probably that is worrying too much about the writer, and not enough about the writing– something the Times has raised to the level of corporate art form.

Funny WWD uses the word “scrapped.” As in, “editors at the Times Magazine recently scrapped a piece by author J.T. LeRoy.” I’ve heard from more than one writer over the years that the Times frequently operates without conscience when it comes to “scrapping” stories that they have assigned. Another convention of the business, even more common than the pseudonym, is that you honor the contracts you make with writers, and you either buy the story and burnish it to your liking, or you kill it. In a pinch, you can accept a story “on spec”–without committment. In all cases, a writer deserves to know what he’s in for before he’s in it, or after it’s over, or somewhere along the way. Times editors, frequently citing that wonderful, all-encompasssing excuse that “it’s a big operation, we’re real busy” are not good about this important but unprestigious nuts-and-bolts facet of the biz. The lives of Times editors do not come to a grinding halt when a story doesn’t work out; but the lives of freelance writers frequently do.

UPDATE: A friend pointed me to the New York magazine piece (referenced in the WWD story) that purports to identify who the real J.T. LeRoy is. It’s an interesting mystery, but seems to me sort of irrelevant to whether the work written by that person is publishable or not. LeRoy has been writing and publishing in almost every magazine other than the Times for many years now. Clearly the New York mag story made Times editors nervous. Or should I say even more nervous.

In another of the many victories for the good guys on Tuesday, all eight members of the Dover, Pennsylvania School Board who had voted to mandate the teaching of “Intelligent Design” in the district’s schools were defeated.

As one voter put it, “Now you have to take our city off the laughing stock list.” And, we can also put them back on the list to get the flu vaccine, should we ever make any.

As some of you many remember, I once suggested that anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution shouldn’t be eligible to get flu vaccine, which after all, is built on the scientific fact of the evolution of viruses.

So here’s to your health, Dover.

I’ve had a few requests to post my commentary which aired at MPR yesterday, but is not archived over there. This isn’t precisely the final cut–sometimes the perfect word on paper just doesn’t work out loud. Actually, that happens a lot. Anyway, here it is:

Coming around the lake the other day, I noticed there were orange barricades piled along the sidewalk, on medians, in the grass. I guess there had been some kind of event. The wind blew pretty cold, there were walkers and joggers, cyclists in their funny stretch pants, roller skiers making their telltale snick and scratch. Winds out of the Southwest at about ten miles per hour, and there were gusts that sent yellow and brown leaves kiting along through the air.

I glanced out across Lake Harriet and I felt depressed. In a tight little herd by the boathouse, all the white metal buoys were nestled together like geese, and next to them the overturned tenders with their oars safely stowed somewhere else. A steady beating of whitecaps came against the Northeast shore, and I thought how fun it would be to head on a reach with my little sailboat, the Lucille Clifton, her mainsail pinched against the gusts. But there were no sailboats, and no canoes.

The park board wants all sailboats off the lake by October 15th. I came off the water four days late. I was reluctant then, as I am reluctant now, to say goodbye–not to the summer, because I welcome fall and winter, each season in its own time. But I grieve the death of the lake. For the next six weeks, it’ll be deserted–no swimmers, no sailors, no buoys, the fishing docks floating like lost space stations. It’ll be a month or more until the ice sets firmly enough to allow the first crackling steps of unleashed dogs, then the sticks and rocks thrown by children, then the children themselves, then finally the parents with the ice skates.

It’s hard to tell which is a busier time on the lake, mid-summer or mid-winter. Long about August first, there are days when sailboats congest the lake as if it were a parking lot full of circling hotrods. At twilight, as the boats tack back to their buoys, the muskie fisherman come out and troll the shallows, casting their monstrous lures fifty yards at a time. At the Harriet guardhouse, more fishermen sit along the shore in lawnchairs and on pickle buckets, listening to the Twins, keeping an eye on their bobbers. I always see their landing net leaning there against an ash tree. It’s big enough to haul in a healthy teenager.

As summer simmered down into fall, I couldn’t justify leaving work early enough to sail before sundown. Still, I played hooky once or twice. I brought along a flashlight, in case the wind died and I had a long paddle back to buoy number twenty-one. I’m pretty good at flaking the sails and stowing the jib and battening things down, but not good enough to do it blind.

The day I came off the water, the wind was flukey. For the last time this year, I cast off the buoy. It was a cool day, a day to remind me that not every windy day is a sailing day. One rogue wind nearly knocked me down, and my jeans were soaked in icy water. But I couldn’t bear to sail her to the landing for the last time. I stayed out, beating upwind, then running downwind, then reaching across, again and again.

The sun set behind Linden Hills and I finally tacked toward the band-shell, catching a glimpse of the tattered banners atop the buildings. It was getting dark–hard to trailer the Lucille Clifton and take down her rigging. Holding the tiller and the mainsheet in one hand, I got out the flashlight with the other, switched it on to test the batteries, and set it on the deck. A searching wind came hard, the boom came across, and I saw the flashlight tip and roll off the cowling and into the lake. I thought I saw its weak beam spiral down ten feet. And then it was gone, into the green night.