La Mama

Veteran Vatican watchers were befuddled yesterday when out of St. Peter’s dome came neither black smoke nor white smoke . . . but lightning. Traditionally, black smoke has meant the assembled cardinals have not yet agreed on the next pope; white smoke means the church has a new leader.

Lightning, it turns out, means the next pope is Theresa Speyer, a no-nonsense, 12^th-generation Catholic from Olive Branch, Illinois. The new pontiffa (or “La Mama”) traces her ancestry to the Diet of Worms, which, she told reporters, family archives describe as “delicious” and “loaded with protein,” as well as "putting Martin Luther in his place."

At her first press conference, Speyer said she “totally” accepts church doctrine on marriage and the priesthood. “Are you kidding," the twice-divorced leader-elect asked? "I wish I had listened to Him years ago.”

As a woman, Speyer hopes to be more inclusive than some of her predecessors, men like Innocent III whose Inquisition, she noted, rubbed certain people the wrong way. “I plan to sit down with the world’s major religious leaders and see if we can’t be nicer to each other.

“We have the most trouble with Muslims,” she continued, “so first up will be Barack Obama. I’d like to get him with Rick Santorum, who converted Governor Brownback of Kansas when they were in the Senate together.”

Asked about the Dalai Lama, who has made world peace the center of his religious teaching, Speyer demurred. “Let’s start with people who actually believe in God.”

War Crimes

Did U. S. Forces commit war crimes in Vietnam? And 50 years later, does it matter? In his relentless new book, Kill Anything that Moves, Nick Turse argues that the infamous slaughter of 500 unarmed women, children and the elderly at My Lai in March 1968 was not a rogue action that went out of control, but the inevitable result of a policy that came from the top and was intended to “produce a veritable system of suffering.” Turse methodically traces that suffering, and its cover-up, in long-secret files that document atrocities committed in pursuit of the “body count,” a policy that equated military progress with dead bodies. The grossly misleading numbers, which appeared nightly on American television screens in the 1960s, were themselves a result of the “mere gook rule” or MGR, which encouraged killing Vietnamese people with impunity.

What’s missing in Turse’s chilling history is the context in which U.S. troops lived and fought in a landscape filled with constant misery and omnipresent danger against a hardened and largely invisible enemy who didn’t play by the rules of Nuremburg either – a war brought searingly to life by Philip Caputo in A Rumor of War and Michael Herr in Dispatches.

War crimes were committed in Vietnam, as they are in all wars, by people who were trained to dehumanize others and in the process became dehumanized themselves. We cannot justify those crimes; but we must ask why we believe that something as horrific as war can be played by a set of civilized rules.

Stumble of the Week

Historical Truth. As a 16-year-old during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, I remember the collective fear of a nuclear attack, followed by relief that the calm and steely resolve of President Kennedy had made the Soviets blink. In a review of Sheldon Stern’s new book, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, Benjamin Schwartz writes that almost everything we have been taught about the event is not true. The miscalculations and political considerations of the Kennedy administration brought us to the brink of war, and a legendary counter-story was concocted and fed to a gullible press. One of the villains is Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “whose histories ‘repeatedly manipulated and obscured the facts.”’ Schlesinger, who left academia for the halls of power and became the model of the “public intellectual,” was long considered a sycophant by his old academic colleagues. They have been vindicated. His “accounts – ‘profoundly misleading if not out-and-out deceptive,’” writes Schultz, “were written to serve not scholarship but the Kennedys.” Women’s Rights. The fight for the hearts, minds and other organs of the Republican party continues stage right. The Daily Beast reports that the “transvaginal ultrasound” is back on the legislative dockets in Michigan, Tennessee and Alabama. A year ago, the Virginia legislature passed – and then rescinded after a national outcry – a bill mandating the procedure, which the Michigan GOP insists “further protects the interests of the women seeking an abortion by assessing the viability of the fetus and confirming the approximate gestational age of the fetus.” The party of non-intrusive government has embraced women’s rights.

Sequestration

Of course they have to do it. Congress needs to pass some package of interim spending cuts and tax “reforms” to head off the drastic reductions (known for some reason as “sequestration”) that will automatically go into effect on March 1^st because . . . well, because once again our representatives have backed themselves into a corner on the elementary issue of what kind of country we want and how to pay for its governance. “At some point, Washington has to deal with its spending problem,’” said John Boehner yesterday. “Now I’ve watched them kick this can down the road for 22 years since I’ve been here. I’ve had enough. It’s time to act.” It’s worth noting that Boehner is not exactly a disinterested observer. He is the Speaker of the House, the person who is supposed to lead his colleagues, not just wring his hands. In fairness, though, a budget would help, and the president needs to submit one. It is wrong, I think, to consider the budgeting process as simply a financial exercise in allocating the money we have (or even the money we don’t have). It is a vision for where we want to take the nation and a blueprint for the journey. Last November, Americans had a clear choice, and a majority of us gave Barack Obama a mandate to govern because we believe in his vision. Now we want to see his blueprint. Why should plotting the nation's journey be any less exciting in 2013 than it was in 1789?

Big Lies

"Beware the big lie!” the 1951 American propaganda film of the same name warns us. “Beware the dove that goes BOOM!" We have seen a lot of big lies lately from people in high places who have looked into the collective face of America and told bald-faced lies so often and so insistently that you think they must be telling the truth.

• Calling himself the most “the most tested athlete on the planet,” Lance Armstrong denied for years that he took performance-enhancing drugs. Last month he answered “yes” to every single question Oprah Winfrey asked him about his drug use.

• For decades Cardinal Roger Mahoney repeatedly denied that priests in his Los Angeles archdiocese abused young people. Last week the court-ordered release of 12,000 pages of church records documented repeated abuse, often by serial violators and always denied by the church.

• Yesterday Essie Mae Washington-Williams died. She was 87 and the daughter of Strom Thurmond, who 65 years ago bolted the Democratic convention and ran for president on the “Dixiecrat” ticket, winning four states. Carrie Butler, Washington-Williams’ mother, died that year at 38. She had been a teenaged Black maid in Thurmond’s house when he impregnated her. “I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen,” Thurmond said in a campaign stump speech, “that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”

Dystopia

Imagine a future with no past. It’s impossible to do so because time doesn’t work that way, and yet this is the great totalitarian dream, manifest most recently in the efforts of fanatical Islamic rebels to destroy the rich manuscripts and artifacts of the Golden Age of Timbuktu. Reminiscent of when the Taliban dynamited the magnificent 6^th-century Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan’s central valley 12 years ago, the rebels sought to eradicate the centuries of history and foundation of an ancient culture that live for their people in the sacred books and statuary. While we naturally and rightly save our most empathic horror for the atrocities committed against living people, there is something almost as appalling about the destruction of a people’s cultural past. It is what makes us who we are. It is why we write books and create art in the first place. And totalitarian regimes – Stalin’s purges, Mao’s cultural revolution, the Khmer Rouge’s Year Zero – strive to eradicate all vestiges of it. In fact, it is the goal of most Utopian visions – even the American melting pot: Henry Ford used to have his company’s workers participate in a pageant in which they would march into a huge black pot, dressed in their impossibly backward ethnic costumes, and march out the other side purged of their Old-World idiosyncrasies and looking exactly alike. In Mali, where they have been risking their lives to save their identities for centuries, people know firsthand that the totalitarian’s dream is the human’s nightmare.

The Game

Although the Super Bowl turned into a very good game, it couldn’t steal the show from Beyoncé, whose electric halftime performance apparently knocked the Superdome lights out. Clearly the best athlete on the field, her 12-minute gig exceeded the 11 minutes the football was in play. And she hardly looked winded. But the most telling game last week was not the Super Bowl but a high-school basketball game in Chicago between Simeon Career Academy and Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, two national powerhouses, each featuring one of the country’s best players. Never mind whether The New York Times should have given 27 column inches to a high-school game. Far more remarkable was that the reporter didn’t even get to the score until the fourth-to-last paragraph. The story focused on the massive police presence and security precautions in the wake of an earlier game, which had ended with an on-court brawl of players and coaches, followed by a fatal shooting outside the arena, one more pointless, violent death in a city that endures almost 10 murders a week. Appearing on national television in warm-up jerseys saying “Shoot Hoops, Not Guns,” the young players embodied the gladiator role that now defines spectator sports even at this level.

Big-time sports isn’t a game for the players anymore; it’s mass entertainment to keep the people tranquilized, to sell them stuff and to promote betting. And not only here: European football just uncovered a massive match-fixing ring run by organized criminals from Singapore

Oh, Simeon beat Whitney Young, 44-41.

Stumble of the Week

Bullying is not only for young males, as 76-year-old John McCain demonstrated when he went after Chuck Hagel during nomination hearings for Secretary of Defense. Still infuriated over Hagel’s opposition to the Iraq war (not to mention to McCain’s 2008 presidential candidacy), McCain attacked his former friend for opposing the 2007 “surge,” which has become the last straw of Republican honor in Iraq. But Hagel was right. The costs were enormous and the gains short-lived, as the current situation in Iraq makes clear. It’s time for those who insist on resurrecting in Iraq the American honor that was buried in Vietnam to recognize the parallels: two ill-conceived and badly executed wars, marked by “collateral damage” and fought in the end primarily to extricate our own troops. If the purpose of war is to extricate our troops from the mess we created, umm . . . Hearts and Minds. We have read far too much about the tragic brain damage suffered by professional football players. San Francisco 49er cornerback Chris Culliver is only 24, but his pre-Super Bowl comments show that muddled brains can come young. “I don’t do the gay guys, man,” he said in an interview. “Can’t be with that sweet stuff.” His damage control? “The derogatory comments I made yesterday were a reflection of thoughts in my head, but they are not how I feel.”

Liberal Hollywood’s image was jolted by a recent study that reported that two of the 10 highest-grossing film actors, Tom Cruise and John Travolta, are Scientologists, and a third, Clint Eastwood, talks to empty chairs.

Scarfed

Note: If the cartoon doesn't appear in email, you can see it at www.jamesgblaine.com Gerald Scarfe’s cartoon in last Sunday’s Times of London is not especially funny, and its publication on Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day was bad timing. But it is hard-hitting and makes a clear and important point about Israeli activities in Palestine, which is what newspaper opinion pages are supposed to do.

Predictably, the backlash from the Israeli government and its supporters was immediate: they accused Scarfe of anti-Semitism, including “blood libel” (the accusation that Jews use the blood of murdered children in religious rites). Equally predictably, it was effective: Scarfe’s newspaper threw him under the bus within hours of publication.

First up was the publisher: “Gerald Scarfe has never reflected the opinions of the Sunday Times,” tweeted Rupert Murdoch, whose commitment to the principles of journalism is an inch deep. “Nevertheless, we owe major apology for grotesque, offensive cartoon.” The paper followed its leader: After a hastily convened meeting with “representatives of the Jewish community,” the Times “apologises unreservedly for the offence we clearly caused."

 Israeli elections: Will cementing peace continue?

While the reaction was less frightening than the fatwa issued in the wake of the 2005 “Mohammad” cartoons, it was no less insidious. It illustrates the proclivity of the press to bow to the powerful and censor itself.  If Scarfe wasn’t speaking for the Times, why did the paper pull his cartoon (whose publication date is set by the editor, not the cartoonist)? Does it only publish opinions that agree with its own? Has the Times of London finally become the British version of Murdoch’s American flagship, Fox News?

Love Story

“Old age ain’t for sissies,” Bette Davis, famously said. And she had a point. Things just don’t work as well as they used to. The body breaks down. The mind goes with it. And the memory? Don’t ask. “It ain’t what it used to be,” pitcher Dizzy Dean said of his right arm, “but what the hell is?” But if old age isn’t for sissies, neither is adolescence or middle age, early childhood or any other of the ages of man. And growing old has its compensations. We were lucky to get here, however broken down we are. And we have seen enough along the way to know the role luck played in the journey, which is the source of whatever wisdom we have. Knowing our days really are numbered can create a sense of gratitude and excitement for each one of them that perhaps the young don’t yet appreciate.

Last Saturday Ada Bryant and Robert Haire were married. He is 86. She is 97. As beautifully described by Margaux Laskey, their courtship was as filled with romance and fraught with angst as any other. “I didn’t think it was the thing to do because I don’t have that many years ahead of me,” said Ada. “But he said, ‘That’s all the more reason.’ I like him very much. I love him. So we’re going to be married.”

“Those who love deeply never grow old,” wrote Dorothy Canfield Fisher. “They may die of old age, but they die young.”

"Trustworthy, loyal, helpful . . .

. . . friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent." Full disclosure: I have never liked the Boy Scouts. Many years ago I joined the Cub Scouts, mostly to get the blue-and-gold uniform so I could reenact western cavalry campaigns in the back yard. I was an indifferent scout, forever behind in the pursuit of my next badge or arrowhead. Born during World War II, I found the image of smiling blond adolescents and their adult leaders espousing the strenuous life, dressed in uniforms that featured short pants and chest medals, frightening even then. Anyway, my mother was hardly the den mother type, so I always had to go to meetings in other boys’ basements.

Later, when I published a newspaper in rural Pennsylvania, the Boy Scouts were a constant thorn, demanding coverage but refusing to recruit minority members – even after the United Way defunded them for discrimination. The Girl Scouts, by contrast, reached out to everyone, eagerly seeking Spanish-speaking members among the growing population of migrant workers.

Yesterday’s reports that the Boy Scouts are considering lifting their longtime ban against gays seem suspect. Under intense corporate pressure (UPS threatens to stop its funding; the Family Research Council counter-threatens to boycott UPS), the Scouts appear ready to punt on a national policy change and kick the issue to the local level. It’s time for an organization that suppressed thousands of internal files documenting decades of sexual abuse to clean up its act and open its doors.

Hagel

The nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense illustrates again what so many politicians and pundits keep missing – and that is how fundamentally centrist the Obama administration has been. That may change in the next four years, but I would be surprised. My sense is that Obama has generous instincts on human rights and dignity issues, which drive, for example, his health-care initiative. The communitarian philosophy that his right-wing antagonists denounce as socialism, seems more an effort to build an inclusive consensus than to impose a big-government solution. And his foreign policy seems intent on building a similar consensus internationally by returning to the principles Thomas Jefferson set forth in his first inaugural: "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." Nowhere is this rethinking more necessary than with Israel, and the time seems propitious: last week’s elections showed that Israelis themselves are tired of the intransigent politics of their leaders. Chuck Hagel is well qualified to lead the effort to reconsider our defense policies there and elsewhere. His experiences under fire in Vietnam gave him a skepticism about war, whose glories are so often touted by those who avoided its carnage. And it’s worth remembering that the department he will lead changed is name from War to Defense in 1947. But that hasn’t penetrated to the people now mounting an unprecedented public and well-financed attack on Hagel’s nomination. Leftovers from last fall’s SuperPACs, they embody big money's continuing and insidious determination to have its way.

Stumble of the Week

The first reminder of how much the world of air travel has changed came with the $25 fee for my checked bag. “I’ll pay cash,” I told the agent, who replied, “A credit card is faster.” How is that possible? I wondered, before realizing that (1) my entire adult life is contained on the magnetic strip of my Visa card and (2) there is no need to hold greenbacks to the light to see if they are counterfeit. Thus began three hours of non-stop marketing. Upgrade your seat for $29. Purchase extra bonus points so we can do this again. Buy snacks. Swipe your card and watch TV ($5.99 for short flights, $7.99 for longer ones). I foresee the day when your ticket will only get you onto the gangway to participate in an auction for the 23 middle seats that weren’t presold. Once on board, you’ll need your credit card to use the toilet, where toilet paper and soap are extra. Ice in your drink? Two-fifty, and of course you’ll want a cup. Swipe your card.

Already, you don’t get a whole seat. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but each row has only four armrests for  six arms, assuming everyone has two, and the knee jockeying often requires an unannounced lowering of your tray table on your neighbor’s thigh. Although the TV screen threatens to go blank if I don’t swipe my card, it keeps rolling out one ad after another for the entire flight. Finally something's free, and I can’t get rid of it.

Shoeless Joe

In the other election, Roger Clemens received 214 votes for baseball’s Hall of Fame; fellow first-ballot candidate Barry Bonds got 206. Both fell far short of the 427 votes needed for induction. Clemens ranks ninth in victories and third in strikeouts in the history of Major League pitching, while Bonds holds the season and career records for home runs. Until confronted with allegations of steroid use, which they vehemently deny but cannot shake, they were shoo-ins for the Hall. But their performances seemed to defy human limitations and, particularly in the case of Bonds, their bodies – at least those parts visible to the public eye – seemed weirdly changed. But they looked into the eyes of the press, the public, prosecutors and the United States Congress and flatly denied they had juiced – as Lance Armstrong had done, and as Pete Rose had denied he bet on baseball. Bonds, Clemens and Rose have joined Shoeless Joe Jackson as the greatest stars kept out of the Hall. Jackson is by far the most sympathetic figure. Born to sharecroppers, working by age six as a "lint head " in a textile mill, and illiterate, Jackson became one of the best players in history. He allegedly admitted – but subsequently denied – being part of the effort to throw the 1919 World Series. Acquitted by a jury, he was banned for life from the game he loved and swore he never betrayed. It was Jackson to whom a tearful young boy supposedly said, “Say it ain’t so, Joe?” What boy would say that now?

The Second Inaugural

I cannot wait to be part of the next four years. President Obama’s speech, so masterfully crafted and so mercifully short, called on all of us to embrace the ideals of our past as we work to transform the future of our world. “With common effort and common purpose, . . . let us answer the call of history and carry into an uncertain future the precious light of freedom.” That is the essence of America at its best, and it is fitting that, 150 years after Gettysburg, a man who is half-black and half-white should stand up and tell us so. Obama built his speech on the bedrock of American exceptionalism, which has of late become a touchstone of conservative politicians. But he hardly expropriated their ground, for the belief that America was founded on ideals that make it a beacon for the world is ingrained in the three defining documents of our history – the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Each specifically harks back to those that came before, and Obama repeatedly references every one of them. Each summons the nation to live up to its stated ideals and to honor its past, not by worshipping at its altar, but by building a new future on its foundation. Each expands the definition of community – “Seneca, Selma, Stonewall;” “the poor, the sick, the marginalized” – and all make clear that “our journey is not complete.” And thank God our government has finally acknowledged global warming.

Courage

I missed the president’s inaugural speech yesterday because I was part of a panel commemorating Martin Luther King’s visit to a small boys’ school in 1963. As I listened to the tape of King’s speech, I thought of the impact his presence had on me then, and I also thought that, despite all the changes of the intervening years, including the events in Washington, King could have given much the same speech today. As I listened to my co-panelists – Bill Forsyth, who spent 1964-5 in Mississippi with the Congress of Racial Equality, and Roger Daly, who registered black voters in Alabama with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee – I was reminded of the courage of so many people of all races in those years. Bill was arrested three times. Roger, who was arrested four times, was finally driven from the South after one man held a gun to his head and three others beat him to a pulp. He had been our football captain, and a want of aggression had not marked his character, but nonviolent resistance was the hallmark of the civil rights movement, and for Roger, who had always hated bullying, nonviolence was the cornerstone of his commitment. We should not forget that all the violence of those bloody days was perpetrated by one side, and Roger spoke of living in constant fear, of being a double outsider – hated by whites and mistrusted by fearful blacks – and of being ashamed of leaving. I write to honor both his courage and his honesty.

Fifty Years Ago

Later today I will participate in a panel discussion honoring the 50^th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s visit to a small school in rural Massachusetts where I was a high-school senior. I wrote about his visit a year ago, and today’s ceremony takes me back to the 1960s, which was the formative decade of my life. It is a time now often disparaged because, it is said, it ended up glorifying violence and led to the narcissistic backlash of the “me generation.” Popular culture instead reveres what Tom Brokaw branded “the greatest generation,” a phrase that has always stuck in my craw. For that was that generation against whom my own was in rebellion, not because we saw our elders as an undifferentiated collection of other-directed organization men in gray flannel suits (as some books of those days described them), but because we saw a country, entering into unprecedented economic prosperity after a devastating depression and a global war, which was reacting violently to the demands of a people who were, in Dr. King’s words, “still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination,” a country that ignored an environment that featured a dying Lake Erie and a burning Cuyahoga River sending flames five stories in the air, a country that was itself engaged in a devastating conflict in southeast Asia. And while we were sometimes attracted to false prophets, we were struggling to change things we believed needed to be changed. They still do.

Stumble of the Week

A Friday feature (revived) Journalism. Today is the day management has threatened to close The Philadelphia Inquirer and/or sell its assets if the unions don’t deliver $8 million in givebacks. Whatever happens today, it has been quite a tumble for America’s third-oldest daily newspaper and long one of its best – in 15 years under editor Eugene Roberts The Inquirer won 17 Pulitzer Prizes. But how the mighty have fallen: In 1993, The New York Times paid $1.1 billion for the Boston Globe, a paper very similar to the Inquirer, whose current owners bought it for $55 million a year ago.

Lennay Kekua is not dead! It should be good news that Manti Te’o’s 22-year-old girlfriend did not die, as reported, from leukemia last September, following her hospitalization from a serious car accident. In perhaps the most inspirational story of 2012, Notre Dame’s all-American linebacker and Heisman Trophy runner-up played a monster game after learning that both his long-time girlfriend and his grandmother had died earlier the same day. In the weirdest story of 2013, Lennay turned out to be a hoax. Overall, it was a bad week for big sports: Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds didn’t come close to election to Baseball’s Hall of Fame; Lance Armstrong demonstrated on “Oprah” that he is a pathological liar; and Lennay never existed.

Pornography. The dirty movie industry has launched a stiff protest against Measure B, which requires actors to wear condoms, claiming that Los Angeles County’s new regulation violates filmmakers First-Amendment right to make movies they way the want.

Life of Orion

Before offering even the most minor restriction on guns in America, advocates must genuflect to “the hunter.” Alone in nature, with only his rifle for food, survival and protecting the vulnerable, the hunter has become an icon of America’s mythic past and a guardian of its present values. I have no quarrel with hunters, although I don’t see why the attitudes of those who shoot animals – that are often beautiful and that do not shoot back – should be the sacred touchstone of gun policy. In one of my favorite old New Yorker cartoons, two young bucks look over a woods teeming with men with guns, and one says to the other, “Why don’t they thin their own damned herds?” And so Congress has cast a cold eye on the regulations the president proposed yesterday, addressing an issue that no candidate dared even to touch in the last election. Obama’s “sweeping” package seems a modest list, which includes renewing the 1994 assault-weapons ban; prohibiting the sale of magazines with over 10 rounds; banning the possession of armor-piercing bullets; toughening gun-trafficking laws; and requiring background checks for all gun sales. The NRA responded with a repellant video that called Obama an “elitist hypocrite” because his daughters have secret-service protection in their school.

The proposals do not seem to gut the Second Amendment. Whether they will help thwart future killing sprees, I don’t know; but restricting some people’s access to some weapons seems a more hopeful step than arming everybody in sight.

A Noble Profession

The day Gene Patterson died, Greek anarchists set off bombs in the homes of five journalists. There was no direct connection between the legendary editor’s death in Florida and the explosions in Athens. But it focused my attention on the state of modern journalism and the vulnerability of those who practice it. Patterson was a giant: as editor of the Atlanta Constitution in the 1960s, he became the conscience of the South, demanding justice for Blacks while explaining the complexities of his region to the rest of the country. Later, at The Washington Post, he oversaw the publishing of the Pentagon Papers. He was a man of enormous courage. In Greece, journalists are being attacked from all sides, part of a worldwide assault on the press. Three issues are combining to create the lethal situation. The first, and by far the most serious, are attacks on the press and its practitioners, fomented by sitting governments and marauding thugs. The attacks are political, psychic, physical – and effective: 70 journalists were killed last year and six already in 2013. The second is the profession’s own self-destruction, as bad reporting, crass partisanship and corporate greed have shattered public respect for the institution. People wanted to kill Eugene Patterson, but they never questioned his integrity. Finally, the old economics of journalism no longer work. As the only business specifically protected by the Constitution, journalism is a unique combination of private enterprise and public trust. If we neglect the second part of that equation in pursuit of the first, the dead reporters will have died – and Gene Patterson will have labored – in vain.