Lest We Forget:Capt. Howard Goodman, USMC

By Nicholas Stix When I was a little boy, I used to see Cousin Howard’s face all the time, in a painting over the mantle at Aunt Rose’s. Aunt Rose lived in Long Beach’s West End, one of the last Jews in that Catholic and majority-Irish enclave. Howard was in his officer’s uniform, the painting surely done from a photograph. He was a handsome fellow, if memory serves. I recall a couple of medals; the only one I can name was a Purple Heart. Hundreds of thousands of “Gold Star mothers,” as the mothers of soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen who had died in battle were called, must have had them. Howard fell at some point during the battle of Guadalcanal, “the longest, single military campaign in U.S. history,” which lasted from August 7, 1942 until February 9, 1943. He was one of 1,700 men, most of them Marines, that we lost on that Pacific island. Aunt Rose had been a realtor, and though she never officially retired, she couldn’t have done any business for years. Heck, she could barely walk. She still had the sign out, though, and the little house still doubled as her office. Howard had been her only child, and so she had turned her home into the Howard Goodman Memorial Museum. With her husband long gone, along with five of her six brothers and sisters, the little house didn’t get a lot of traffic. Although Aunt Rose had dozens of nieces and nephews and grand-nieces and nephews, she was pretty much left with her kid sister, Fanny (our Nana), and my sister and myself. Every morning for the last few years of her life, Aunt Rose would either call Nana or receive a call from her, a call which would always end the same way. Aunt Rose would shout into her receiver, “Oh, Fan!,” Nana would shout into hers, “Oh, Rose!,” and they would simultaneously hang up on each other. Oh, those Hungarians! Although Rose and Fanny Frank, their parents, and five siblings were all born in Hungary, had come over in steerage circa 1896 (having left seven siblings in the ground in Hungary), and the children probably learned English as a third language on the Lower East Side, after Hungarian and Yiddish (their aging parents never did learn English), I never heard either sister speak anything but English, or speak with any but an American accent. (I said “circa,” because it was years after arriving, before anyone learned to use a modern calendar, as oppose dot the Hebrew calendar they were used to. And so, everyone had to choose not only a birthday, but a year of birth. Aunt Rose chose the Fourth of July, Nana May 26.) Aunt Rose had an old-fashioned sink, with separate faucets for hot and cold water. Thus, you could wash with scalding or ice-cold water, but warm water was not an option. My mother used to stick my sister and me into a taxi to visit Aunt Rose, who lived at least three miles away. She always served us fish cakes for lunch – the worst, driest, fish cakes in the world. I remember her once having the TV on, playing a rerun of the show, The Millionaire. I was only eight when she died. My mom says that Howard was admitted to the New York bar just before he shipped out, by a special dispensation via Columbia University. But institutions made such special dispensations so often at the beginning and just after the war, that they really can’t be called “special” at all. That’s why you read of so many veterans graduating college in record time, right after The War. It wasn’t that they were geniuses, though they were as bright and as motivated a bunch as ever went to school, but colleges gave them credit for their time in the service. In any event, I’m glad for Aunt Rose’s sake, that Howard got that recognition. Not that she was one for self-pity, though Lord knows, she had cause. It’s one of those paradoxes of life, that the people who have the hardest lives, tend to be the least sentimental or prone to self-pity. I guess they just never had the time. As soon as the Frank kids finished grammar school, it was off to work, to help support their family. I never once saw my Nana or Aunt Rose cry. Nana just couldn’t. Once, when she was about 79 and I was about 14, and she was having a hard time with me, she acted like she was crying. She covered her eyes, and made the correct sounds, but I knew her too well, and shouted, “You’re not crying!” She gave up on that tack. If you’ve never known anyone like that, check out the movie Lost in Yonkers, from a Neil Simon play, set during The War. The immigrant Jewish matriarch in that story, played by the great Irene Worth, couldn’t cry, either. The character was just about Aunt Rose’s age. Howard Goodman was 25, when he was felled by the proverbial “Jap sniper.”

Hoax Sisters: Jennifer and Tawana

By Nicholas Stix I was pleased to see that “runaway bride” Jennifer Wilbanks has been indicted on criminal charges for her kidnapping hoax. With crime, a formula similar to economics in general holds true: If you want less of something, tax it; if you want more of it, subsidize it. Criminal prosecution is the ultimate “tax.” And the refusal by the authorities (police chiefs, prosecutors, etc.) to arrest and prosecute criminals is the ultimate subsidy – it encourages them to commit more crimes, while handcuffing their victims and the police. (Are you listening, Pres. Amnesty?) Just imagine how much grief and how many millions of dollars the American people would have been saved, had law enforcement authorities prosecuted Tawana Brawley, who with Al Sharpton, Alton Maddox, and C. Vernon Mason, engineered the mother of all race hoaxes, in 1988? But would a black woman have been charged the same as Wilbanks? That was a rhetorical question.

A Matter of Loyalty:The Newsweek Koran Caper

By Nicholas Stix On May 2, Newsweek ran a false story in its May 9 issue by Michael Isikoff and John Barry, “SouthCom Showdown,” claiming that an interrogator at our Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detainee camp had flushed a Koran down a toilet, which led to anywhere from 14 to 17 (depending on which reports you read) people being murdered in rioting in Afghanistan, and over 100 being wounded in rioting there and in many other Moslem countries and areas (e.g., the Gaza Strip). On May 16, Newsweek retracted the story.

Among the previously unreported cases, sources tell NEWSWEEK: interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Qur'an down a toilet and led a detainee around with a collar and dog leash. An Army spokesman confirms that 10 Gitmo interrogators have already been disciplined for mistreating prisoners, including one woman who took off her top, rubbed her finger through a detainee's hair and sat on the detainee's lap. (New details of sexual abuse—including an instance in which a female interrogator allegedly wiped her red-stained hand on a detainee's face, telling him it was her menstrual blood—are also in a new book to be published this week by a former Gitmo translator.)

The riots reportedly started in Pakistan, expanded to Afghanistan, and ultimately spread through much of the Moslem world, after an Islamist former cricket star, Imran Khan, read the passage to a crowd in Pakistan on May 6. According to various reports, from 14 to 17 people were killed in the rioting (in Afghanistan), and over 100 wounded. The Pentagon, through spokesman Lawrence DiRita, questioned the veracity of the Newsweek report, and the magazine backed off, with editor Mark Whitaker issuing a retraction on TV and in print on May 16.

Editor's Note: On May 16, Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker issued the following statement: "Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Qur'an abuse at Guantanamo Bay."

Given that the passage in question cites four separate incidents, any of which could have been used by Moslems as a pretext for murdering people, it is easy, in retrospect, to see how Newsweek’s editors could have been shocked (shocked!) that anyone could have singled out the phony flushing-the-Koran-down-the-toilet story. They probably expected the menstrual blood story to be the most explosive one. (Press time update: On May 26, Army Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, the commander at Guantanamo Bay, reported that the prisoner who alleged that the Koran had been flushed provided no credible support for his claim.) Newsweek’s Representative Moslem: Torturing Prisoners Now O.K. The retraction required the journalistic equivalent of cover fire, and so it was accompanied by a rationalization by assistant managing editor Evan Thomas, Newsweek/>“How a Fire Broke Out”.

At NEWSWEEK, veteran investigative reporter Michael Isikoff's interest had been sparked by the release late last year of some internal FBI e-mails that painted a stark picture of prisoner abuse at Guantánamo. Isikoff knew that military investigators at Southern Command (which runs the Guantánamo prison) were looking into the allegations. So he called a longtime reliable source, a senior U.S. government official who was knowledgeable about the matter. The source told Isikoff that the report would include new details that were not in the FBI e-mails, including mention of flushing the Qur'an down a toilet. A SouthCom spokesman contacted by Isikoff declined to comment on an ongoing investigation, but NEWSWEEK National Security Correspondent John Barry, realizing the sensitivity of the story, provided a draft of the NEWSWEEK PERISCOPE item to a senior Defense official, asking, "Is this accurate or not?" The official challenged one aspect of the story: the suggestion that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, sent to Gitmo by the Pentagon in 2001 to oversee prisoner interrogation, might be held accountable for the abuses. Not true, said the official (the PERISCOPE draft was corrected to reflect that). But he was silent about the rest of the item. The official had not meant to mislead, but lacked detailed knowledge of the SouthCom report.

Given all that has been reported about the treatment of detainees—including allegations that a female interrogator pretended to wipe her own menstrual blood on one prisoner—the reports of Qur'an desecration seemed shocking but not incredible. But to Muslims, defacing the Holy Book is especially heinous. "We can understand torturing prisoners, no matter how repulsive," says computer teacher Muhammad Archad, interviewed last week by NEWSWEEK in Peshawar, Pakistan, where one of last week's protests took place. "But insulting the Qur'an is like deliberately torturing all Muslims. This we cannot tolerate."

(According to his MSNBC bio, Thomas is the grandson of Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas. Some Americans still keep up traditions.) Right and leftwing writers responded with knee-jerk talking points that confused and confounded readers, such as GOP writers’ insistence on banning the use of anonymous sources, a “reform” which, if imposed, would effectively end journalism. Only one commentator, to my knowledge, cut through the talking points to the heart of the matter. Appearing on The O’Reilly Report on Fox News last week, Bob Zelnick argued that the Newsweek article should never have been published in the first place, no matter how many reliable sources it was based on. (Zelnick, a veteran ABC News reporter, is now the head of the journalism school at Boston University – but don’t hold it against him! In 1998, he was forced to resign from ABC News, after over 20 years at the network. Zelnick was working on a book on then-Vice President Al Gore. Afraid that the non-socialist Zelnick would be less than celebratory, the network ordered him to cease and desist from writing the book. He refused. Since the network was otherwise going to fire Zelnick for the crime of journalistic honesty, he resigned.) The key passage in Thomas’ PR piece is,

Given all that has been reported about the treatment of detainees—including allegations that a female interrogator pretended to wipe her own menstrual blood on one prisoner—the reports of Qur'an desecration seemed shocking but not incredible.

That’s like a reckless driver arguing with a police officer, “Everyone else was doing it!” Another part of Newsweek’s rationalization, Pakistani teacher Muhammad Archad’s claim, "We can understand torturing prisoners, no matter how repulsive. But insulting the Qur'an is like deliberately torturing all Muslims. This we cannot tolerate," must also be challenged. When the Abu Ghraib stories ran last year, I don’t recall any Moslems, in Newsweek or elsewhere, being quoted as saying that they could “understand torturing prisoners.” Newsweek is just moving the goalposts to help its team. The Newsweek story and Evan Thomas’ rationalization of it both go back to Mary Mapes and Sy Hersh’s Abu Ghraib stories, which were conscious hit jobs designed to discredit the American military, handcuff the American war effort, and win the election for John Kerry. Well, two out of three ain’t bad. The Abu Ghraib story was presented as a story of torture, only it didn’t show any torture. And so, journalists played word games, just like their comrades in academia, and redefined humiliation as “torture.” Considering that tenured university leftists daily redefine perfectly innocent behavior by whites stateside as “racism,” redefining demeaning treatment of terrorist detainees as “torture” in the same prison where Saddam Hussein used to chop people’s limbs off, was a cakewalk. In 1993, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote of the “defining down of deviance,” meaning that behavior that previously was publicly condemned or even illegal, now is presented as acceptable. At the same time a parallel development, the “defining up of deviance,” occurred. Logically speaking, deviance cannot be simultaneously defined up and down. But this wasn’t logic, it was politics. The defining was done by the media, academia, and the law, for different groups. For politically privileged groups – blacks, Hispanics, leftwing journalists -- deviance was defined down, so that virtually any wickedness could be publicly rationalized, and even praised. For groups that were politically disadvantaged, however -- white, heterosexual, able-bodied males, white Christians, political conservatives of all races and ethnicities, white police officers, the military -- deviance was defined up, so that perfectly legal and even virtuous behavior would be not only condemned, but often criminalized. In every war, atrocities are committed by both sides. Historically, however, U.S. forces have committed a tiny fraction of the amount routinely carried out by other forces, in the current context, by our Moslem enemies. In any event, prior to the Vietnam War, it was unthinkable for American journalists to write about atrocities carried out by American forces, so long as hostilities were still under way. Not that Ernie Pyle & Co. didn’t see anything. It didn’t need to be said that we were at war, and one does not do propaganda for the enemy. Were a journalist of a mind to give aid and comfort to the enemy, and hurt our troops’ morale, his editor would have fired him, and he never would have worked again. The operative principle was, in Sen. Arthur Vandenberg’s words, “Politics stops at the water’s edge.” Back to the ‘60s During the Vietnam War, however, a treasonous spirit took root among much of the American press. The earliest example of such treasonous behavior, to my knowledge, was that of Walter Cronkite. In January, 1968, the North Vietnamese communists launched their most aggressive attack of the entire war, the Tet Offensive. Although the communists caught our boys and the South Vietnamese forces unprepared, the Americans and South Vietnamese fought back valiantly, and eventually prevailed. But Walter Cronkite reported instead that we had lost. Cronkite’s false report proved to be the turning point in the war. I was nine years old at the time, but I watched the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite every night with my family. Cronkite, the most popular and respected news anchor ever, was watched by more viewers every night than NBC and ABC combined. Like millions of Americans of all ages, I had no idea that Cronkite was an anti-American, leftwing hack (and not the brightest bulb, either). For thirty years, I took for granted that we had lost Tet. After all, Uncle Walter said we did. (I wonder whether a prosecution of “Hanoi Jane” Fonda for treason, for visiting Hanoi and speaking on behalf of our North Vietnamese enemies, in 1972, might have had a salutary effect on the press. Unfortunately, Pres. Nixon declined to pursue the matter.) If you ever see the epic movie The Deer Hunter, during the haunting section depicting the fall of Saigon, you’ll see a snippet of a report from the end of April or beginning of May 1975 by Hillary Brown for ABC News. But what the clip in the movie leaves out, is Brown’s statement on behalf of the communists, as recounted by her old colleague, Dirck Halstead (who was either unaware of, or undisturbed by the implications of her words), in White Christmas: The Fall of Saigon.

"After 30 years of fighting occupying armies," she closes the standup by saying, "the long war for the Vietnamese people is finally coming to an end.”

Like other Marxists, Hillary Brown created a fictional reality, in which the South Vietnamese and the communist North Vietnamese were one happy family, and the Americans were an “occupying army.” Hence, in Brown’s parallel universe, the war in Vietnam did not pit the South Vietnamese, Americans, Australians and Canadians against the communist North Vietnamese, but rather “the Vietnamese people” against first the French, and then the Anglo-American alliance. Such a claim is not a case of reporting, but of communist propaganda. During and after the War in Vietnam, Marxist journalists and academics developed the rhetorical dodge of insisting that North Vietnamese dictator Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist, rather than a communist, so that they could portray the conquest of South Vietnam as an act of national liberation, rather than as the tyranny that it was. (In fact, going back to Stalin’s successful rousing of Russians to fight for “Mother Russia” against the German Wehrmacht in World War II, communist dictators have only thrived to the degree that they have demagogically harnessed nationalist passions. It was only according to Marxist ideology, anyway, that nationalism and communism were antipodes.) That act of “national liberation” -- communist imperialism, in plain English -- cost 750,000 South Vietnamese and 1.5 million Cambodians their lives. Make that genocidal communist imperialism. Today, Hillary Brown functions as a mouthpiece, er reporter, for Arab terrorists in Israel, who dream of achieving a second Holocaust. (Since Brown speaks with a British accent, I can’t say for sure what her nationality is, but for over thirty years American media companies have handsomely paid her for aiding and abetting communists and terrorists.) Walter Cronkite was de facto part of a Democrat movement that was disaffected with incumbent Democrat Pres. Lyndon Baines Johnson. The movement, led by senators Eugene McCarthy (MN) and Robert F. Kennedy (NY), succeeded at discouraging Johnson -- despite a landslide victory in 1964 and Democrat control of both houses -- from running for re-election in 1968. Following the assassination of the frontrunner, Kennedy, liberal Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey lost the election to moderate Republican Richard M. Nixon. It is hard for most people today to imagine that Democrats could have destroyed each other, and thus helped a Republican win an election. Following Pres. Nixon’s election, the liberal establishment press (what folks today call the media) repented its sins, and joined in a common front in newsrooms and journalism schools alike against those “evil Republicans” that has, if anything, gotten stronger with time. Nixon was the One During the early 1970s, socialist forces scored a journalistic Triple Crown: The My Lai Massacre story, the Pentagon Papers, and Watergate, the last of which was used to finally drive Pres. Nixon from office. Ever since, young leftists have graduated from “J-school” with hopes of achieving a Triple Crown and thereby deposing yet another GOP president. The official story is that Nixon was a crook, whose destruction saved the Republic. In a moving oration at the time, the late Rep. Barbara Jordan (1936-1996) said, “My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total.” In truth, it was Rep. Jordan’s faith in the prerogatives of the Democrat Party which were whole, complete, and total. Eloquent political speech often serves grubby, partisan aims. Rep. Jordan prefaced her famous statement with remarks on how prior to her role as an “inquisitor,” she had felt left out of the “We the people” from the Preamble to the Constitution. Should we then refer to the congressional Watergate hearings as the Democrat Inquisition, and as a rite of passage, whereby blacks were fully integrated into the Party? Even “respectable” conservatives like Bill Buckley today speak of Pres. Nixon as if the official story were true. Running Nixon out of town had nothing to do with his criminality. Heck, Jack Kennedy committed more crimes before lunch on any given day than Dick Nixon did in his entire life. And yet, for the folks whose life’s work was to “get” Nixon, Kennedy was the Second Coming. Some Christians delude themselves that today’s media hate Pres. Bush more than they ever did Pres. Nixon (or Rudy Giuliani), because Bush is a Christian. But it would be impossible for the SMSM to hate anyone -- even Hitler -- more than they hated Nixon. The campaign to bring down Richard Nixon began in earnest as soon as he had successfully prosecuted the high-level State Department official and Soviet spy Alger Hiss for perjury in 1950. As historian Irwin Gellman showed in his exhaustively researched biography of the early Nixon, The Contender: Richard Nixon, The Congress Years, 1946-1952, entire libraries have been produced of anti-Nixon propaganda with only the most tenuous connection to reality. For but one anti-Nixon myth, Nixon-haters have for over fifty years insisted that a red-baiting Nixon invented the sobriquet “the pink lady” for socialist Cong. Helen Gahagan Douglas, whom Nixon beat in the 1950 California race for U.S. Senate. In fact, that term was coined by Douglas’ Democrat opponent, newspaper publisher Ralph Manchester Boddy … and it was accurate.

Rather than this infamous tag attaching to Nixon, it came from a fellow Democrat, reflecting the deep divisions within Douglas’s own party.”

Note that Boddy later endorsed Douglas! Gellman also chronicles that it was Helen Gahagan Douglas who concocted the smear “tricky Dick” against Nixon, in the last desperate days of her campaign. Somehow, however, leftwing journalists and “historians” have never counted that epithet as a smear.) To understand the “redness” of much of the American media even today (which is why the SMSM has seen to it that the color “red” refers to states that have recently voted Republican), consider that on June 19, 2003, the fiftieth anniversary of the execution of the traitors Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who had handed atomic bomb secrets to our Soviet enemies, the New York Times ran a house editorial speaking of them as “victims” of “hysteria.” JFK-friend Ben Bradlee, the longtime editor of the Washington Post (which, like Newsweek, has long been owned by the Graham family) was so obsessed with his identity as the man who brought Nixon to fall, that like the fictional Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, he sought ever after to relive his great triumph. In 1981, when Bradlee’s reporter, Janet Cooke, was caught faking a story which had won her and the Post a Pulitzer Prize, Bradlee told her, “You’re just like Nixon.” Patriots – in Support of America’s Enemies Leading American journalists have gone from being loyal to America to loyal to her enemies. As James Fallows recounts in his book, Why We Hate the Media, in 1987, ABC News anchor Peter Jennings and CBS’ 60 Minutes star Mike Wallace participated on a PBS panel about ethical conflicts in war. Given a hypothetical situation, in which Jennings was permitted to accompany enemy soldiers and discovered that they were going to ambush American and allied soldiers, Jennings said that he would seek to alert the American/allied forces, even if it might cost him his life.

Immediately Mike Wallace spoke up. "I think some other reporters would have a different reaction," he said, obviously referring to himself. "They would regard it simply as a story they were there to cover." "I am astonished, really," at Jennings's answer, Wallace saida moment later. He turned toward Jennings and began to lecture him: "You're a reporter. Granted you're an American"-at least for purposes of the fictional example …[Jennings was then still a Canadian national] "I'm a little bit at a loss to understand why, because you're an American, you would not have covered that story." Ogletree pushed Wallace. Didn't Jennings have some higher duty, either patriotic or human, to do something other than just roll film as soldiers from his own country were being shot? "No," Wallace said flatly and immediately. "You don't have a higher duty. No. No. You're a reporter!"… [Jennings then expressed regret for his moment of humanity.] [Jennings] "I chickened out." Jennings said that he had gotten so wrapped up in the hypothetical questions that he had lost sight of his journalistic duty to remain detached…. A few minutes later [moderator Charles] Ogletree turned to George M. Connell, a Marine colonel in full uniform, jaw muscles flexing in anger, with stress on each word, Connell looked at the TV stars and said, "I feel utter . . . contempt." Two days after this hypothetical episode, Connell Jennings or Wallace might be back with the American forces--and could be wounded by stray fire, as combat journalists often had been before. The instant that happened he said, they wouldn't be "just journalists" any more. Then they would drag them back, rather than leaving them to bleed to death on the battlefield. "We'll do it!" Connell said. "And that is what makes me so contemptuous of them. Marines will die going to get ... a couple of journalists."

You can safely ignore Peter Jennings’ talk of a “journalistic duty to remain detached.” He and Mike Wallace are leftist hacks; they don’t for one minute believe in detachment. However, Wallace’s contempt for the welfare of American fighting men sounded sincere to me. Today, rather than politics stopping at the water’s edge, for many media bosses, it seems to start there. Following 911, communist New York Times publisher Arthur Pinch Sulzberger Jr., whose corrupt policies led to the Jayson Blair scandal, and who during the Vietnam War cheered on the North Vietnamese communists to kill as many American fighting men as possible, tried to sandbag America before we fought al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. When that failed, Sulzberger had his editorial page lie about the Geneva Conventions, in demanding that their protections be extended to terrorist detainees who are not covered under the conventions, so that the American legal system could be crushed under the weight of impossible demands, terrorists could go free to kill more Americans, the Bush Administration could be discredited, and John Kerry could win the 2004 election. Unsurprisingly, the New York Times has sought to compensate for the disproving of the Newsweek story, by producing more al Qaeda propaganda, and demanding, for the 5,352 time, the head of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The Times' routine demands for the head of Donald Rumsfeld remind me of Osama bin Laden, in the comic short films produced by the David Letterman Show. After inquiring after Dave's health and his family, OBL says goodbye, and then remembers to say, as an afterthought, "Oh, and death to America." Only the Times is humorless. And now the Los Angeles Times has also gotten on the bandwagon, demanding that all terrorist detainees be assigned lawyers. The L.A. Times even reached back to that beloved libel of leftwingers from the Vietnam War, that the war is “racist.” “[The riots] were about perceived American contempt for the faith, the culture and ultimately the lives of Muslim Arabs and other dark-skinned people in distant lands.” Somewhere, Richard Nixon must be smiling. I think that my friend and colleague Michael Shaw hit on the reason why the American Left supported the military during World War II, but beginning with Vietnam has increasingly supported America’s enemies. During World War II, we were allied with the Soviet communists; in Vietnam, we fought communists. If we were presently allied with Red China, North Korea, or Cuba against Islamic terror, the Left would joyously sign on, with Pete Seeger singing pro-war ballads. ("Where has all the napalm gone"?) Meanwhile, on ABC News' Nightline last week, Chris Bury resuscitated the “fake but accurate” talking point that was used by the SMSM in defense of Rathergate last fall. Bury insisted repeatedly that the fact that Newsweek had retracted the story, didn’t mean it hadn’t happened! One learns the character of a journalist, a media organ, and of the mainstream media, not only through the stories they cover, but the stories they refuse to cover. Michael Isikoff is allegedly an investigative reporter. If he were really interested in investigative reporting rather than in making the American military look bad, I have an idea or two for him. For the past forty years, white and Asian children and teachers alike have been terrorized and brutalized by racist black children, teachers, staffers and administrators in urban public schools across these United States. Isikoff should investigate some real outrages and report on them. But who am I kidding? If you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.

Bye, Bye, Reggie: It’ll Never be Miller Time Again

By Nicholas Stix The Detroit Pistons sent Indiana Pacers great Reggie Miller into retirement tonight. In spite of the Pacers playing at home, where hopeful fans held up signs saying “Miller Time,” and other tried-and-true exhortations, and with the Pacers playing with frenzied emotion and going shot-for-shot (particularly Jermaine O’Neal) with the Pistons late in the fourth quarter, Detroit beat Indiana, 88-79. That gave Detroit the Eastern Conference semifinal series, four games to two. Detroit will go on to play the Shaquille O’Neal-led Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference finals. In a moment that symbolized a generational changing of the guard, with a chance at tying the game late in the fourth quarter, Miller took a dramatic three-point shot. For years, opponents and fans alike had seen him take and make such postseason three-pointers with a success rate unmatched in NBA history. Only this time, Detroit center Ben Wallace came flying at Miller from 20 feet away, and blocked the shot. With 15.7 seconds left, and the Pistons ahead 87-79, Pacers coach Rick Carlisle removed Miller from the game, so that he could enjoy a well-earned standing ovation from Pacers fans. But Detroit coach Larry Brown, a former coach of Miller’s (and of just about everyone else in the NBA, during the wandering Jew’s long, peripatetic career), outdid Carlisle. Brown called a 20-second timeout, for the sole purpose of letting the crowd and his own players properly salute one of the NBA’s brightest lights. From one shooting guard to another: Young Pistons star Rip Hamilton hugged Miller (as did just about everyone else in the arena, or so it seemed), and thanked him for all he’d done for the game. Miller told him, “You do it for as long as you can.” ABC announcer Al Michaels observed, “Hamilton will remember those words forever.” At game’s end, Miller spoke with courtside reporter Michelle Tafoya. “Unfortunately, the champs rose to the occasion.” Tafoya asked Miller, “What will you say to your teammates?” “Thank you….” “I could have retired three or four years ago, but they let me play with them….” “I’m going to sit back and reflect….” With 25,279 career points, Miller, one of the greatest outside shooters ever, is 12th on the league’s all-time scoring list, and with 2,560 three-pointers, ranks first all-time in that category. And in his last season, he had his greatest percentage ever shooting free throws, .933, and led the league in that category (his career free-throw percentage was .888). Miller had passed on his leadership role with the Pacers to young star Jermaine O’Neal a few years ago, but had to return to that role this past season, when O’Neal and teammates Ron Artest and Stephen Jackson assaulted fans during a November 19 game against the Pistons. Artest was suspended for the rest of the season, and O’Neal and Jackson were suspended for lengthy periods. New York Knick fans will remember Miller for his three-point playoff buzzer-beaters against the Knicks, and for the 1993 playoff game in which he provoked, via trash talk, Knicks shooting guard John Starks into head-butting him, which got Starks ejected. The 18-year veteran will always be known for his combination of cockiness, intelligence, and clutch play. And now, given the class he showed in leaving the stage, he will remembered too for his humility.

Filibuster Battle: The Desperate Hours

By Nicholas Stix Late Sunday night, I sent the following letter to the New York Times. To the Editor: According to Frank Rich (“How Gay is the GOP?” op-ed, May 15), anyone opposing the Democratic Party’s ongoing violation of the President’s prerogative to name federal judges through the filibuster is a homophobe and a closet homosexual. Rich is engaging in a form of backdoor gay-baiting. But beyond that, as a New Yorker, I am deeply saddened and embarrassed. I came to New York 20 years ago, based on its history as an intellectual center. I mourn that city. In today’s New York, veiled threats and pretentious epithets pass for intellectual discourse. In Judge Welch’s words, Have you no decency, Sir? Have you no shame? P.S. I forgot to say “constitutional,” as in President Bush’s constitutional prerogative to name federal judges, but the Times never prints my letters, anyway.

You Can Call Me Al:Mets Fans and Owners Deserve Each Other

By Nicholas Stix A few weeks ago, Al Leiter came to town for a visit. For seven years the 39-year-old lefty, the owner of one of baseball’s most effective cut fastballs (the other being Mariano Rivera’s), was the ace of the New York Mets’ pitching rotation. In 2003, New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon paid lefty Tom Glavine, a ‘sure-fire future 300-game winner,’ a fortune to come to town, and installed him as the team’s ace. Glavine bombed, going a combined 20-28 over the next two seasons, and the team is still stuck with him, though oddly enough, I’ve never heard anyone speak of the Mets as being “stuck.” While Leiter did not have top seasons, he still whipped Glavine, going a combined 25-17 in 2003 and 2004. And with Glavine now only up to 264 wins at age 39, it looks increasingly unlikely that he will ever make it to the promised land. At 2-4, he’ll have to go on a roll, just to end up with a .500 record this year. Prior to Friday night’s game, Glavine was 1-4, with an ERA way over six. He caught a big break that night. An umpire named Davidson, who had been out of Major League Baseball since 1999, was working the game, and apparently he had a soft spot for Glavine. Six years ago, the ump had thrown in his lot with a megalomaniacal union boss, who made insane demands which resulted in the umpires who followed him getting fired. Davidson started his comeback last year in the A League, the lowest-level minor league affiliated with the major leagues. Hence, Davidson wasn’t umpiring in 2003, when the new strike zone was put in effect, which was devised partly in response to Glavine’s longtime shenanigans, in “expanding” the strike zone. Glavine whined all that season about the calls he was -- or rather, wasn’t -- getting. Conversely, on Friday night, Davidson made several bad calls on Glavine’s behalf. In addition to giving the lefty a generous strike zone, the ump cut the lefty a rare break. On one low pitch, Mets catcher Mike Piazza “caught his balance” after catching a low pitch, by sticking the ball in the dirt. Umpires automatically make the catcher hand over any ball that goes into the dirt, and give him a new ball. The reason is that any foreign substance on a ball or change to its texture or shape can change its aerodynamics, causing it to move in unusual ways. Pitchers love those unusual movements, which fool hitters – and sometimes catchers, too. (In his classic baseball book, Ball Four, former Yankees hurler Jim Bouton told of how when Yankees Hall of Fame lefty Whitey Ford was past his prime, catcher Yogi Berra -- another Hall of Famer -- used to find every possible pretext for putting the ball in the dirt, or scuffing it against his shin guard while rearing back to throw it to Ford, in order to help along the aging pitcher’s stuff. But that was over forty years ago; soon thereafter, umpires started cracking down on such antics.) But Davidson let Piazza throw the dirty ball back to Glavine. On the next pitch, the St. Louis batter hit a come-backer, which Glavine turned into an inning-ending, 1-6-3 double play. With Davidson’s help, Glavine threw seven shutout innings, en route to only his second win of the season. Owner Fred Wilpon likes to present himself more as running a mom-and-pop store than a cut throat business. When Wilpon okayed the signing of Tom Glavine, Glavine was supposed to bring some class to town. And so, one of the first things Glavine did, with Wilpon’s tacit approval, was to publicly trash just deposed Mets manager Bobby Valentine. Why would a “classy” guy like Tommy Glavine trash a man he had never even played for, and who had just been fired from his job? And why would a “classy,” mom-and-pop kind of guy like Fred Wilpon enjoy seeing Glavine kick a guy while he’s down? Bobby Valentine was merely the man who had rescued a lost franchise, and who with Gil Hodges and Davey Johnson, was one of the three most successful managers in Mets history. Valentine’s intelligence, intensity, work ethic and demanding nature turned around the franchise, and in seven years (1996-2002), got the Mets to the playoffs twice, including their first World Series appearance (2000) in 14 years. During the heart of those years, the Mets had the best infield in all of baseball. Valentine is a notoriously difficult man. Although from Connecticut, he is a “type A,” New York kind of guy. If he was extremely intelligent helming the Mets, he also was at times too clever for his own good. There was the time that he got thrown out of a game and snuck back onto the bench, wearing a Groucho disguise. He didn’t fool the umpires. Another time, he decided to try and motivate the team by badmouthing his best, most selfless player, catcher Todd Hundley, suggesting that Hundley was out partying too late before day games. Apparently, Valentine was making it up. On the other hand, after 911, Valentine frequently visited Ground Zero to cheer on and cheer up the recovery workers. The bottom line is, with a .534 winning percentage, “Bobby V” did a great job as manager. For years before and for two years after his tenure, in spite of Fred Wilpon signing big-name players to overpriced contracts, the Mets were laughingstocks; they were never laughingstocks on Valentine’s watch. After firing Valentine, Wilpon hired a nice man named Art Howe as manager, who in two seasons never won more than 67 games. * * * Al Leiter wasn’t just a great guy on the mound, who last year still broke 90 mph with his fastball; he was great in the locker room, and the gregarious New Jersey native was the team’s unofficial ambassador to the world. When he wasn’t playing, Leiter, a paunchy bundle of nervous energy, ran around doing good deeds in the New York metropolitan area. And before the 2004 season, he even went on a diet and lost his paunch. He was too good to be true. Last year was the last on Leiter’s contract. He wanted so much to finish his career with the Mets, that he was willing to compromise with management. If the tam had offered him a contract low on base pay and heavy with incentives, he still would likely have signed. Instead, the Wilpons – father Fred and son Jeff – in effect told Leiter, ‘Don’t let the door hit you … on the way out.’ So Leiter signed with the Florida Marlins, with whom he had won a World Series ring in 1997. (He won his first ring with the Blue Jays in 1993.) At present, he’s not pitching any better than Tom Glavine. When Leiter took the mound against the Mets, I expected the fans at Shea to give him a standing ovation; I know I would have. Instead, I heard a smattering of boos against a backdrop of silence. That’s the kind of mercenary attitude you expect from Yankee fans. Flushing is not The Bronx! I’m sorry, Al. You deserved better.

See How They Run, See How They Run!

“Senators proved that they could indeed move quickly, if given proper motivation.” Fox News reporter Brian Wilson tonight on the clearing of the Senate, when a small plane was detected breaching the Capitol’s air space.

WNBC News: Bavaria Has Moved West!

On tonight's 11 p.m. news on NBC's New York affiliate, WNBC, co-anchor Sue Simmons read a story about the Pope's "favorite Bavarian beer." Unfortunately for Simmons and WNBC, the beer was from Stuttgart, as its very name made clear. Stuttgart is in the province of Baden-Wurttemberg, which is to the west of the province of Bavaria. Bavaria may make better beer than any other province in Germany, but someone needs to tell the news writers at WNBC that there are hundreds of beers in Germany, the majority of which are not brewed in Bavaria. Better yet, why don't the news editors hire someone who is familiar with Germany?

This is Your Brain on the New York Times

By Nicholas Stix Yesterday’s New York Times contained an op-ed by Katherine Ellison, “This Is [sic] Your Brain on Motherhood.” Ellison argues that being a mother makes you smarter. But so, she adds, does being a father. (So, why the title? Why not, “This is Your Brain on Parenthood”? Ellison is a feminist. To demand that she be logical would be an act of sexual harassment and verbal assault.) “ANYONE shopping for a Mother's Day card today might reasonably linger in the Sympathy section. We can't seem to stop mourning the state of modern motherhood. ‘Madness’ is our new metaphor. ‘Desperate Housewives’ are our new cultural icons. And a mother's brain, as commonly envisioned, is impaired by a supposed full-scale assault on sanity and smarts. “So strong is this last stereotype that when a satirical Web site posted a ‘study’ saying that parents lose an average of 20 I.Q. points on the birth of their first child, MSNBC broadcast it as if it were true. The danger of this perception is clearest for working mothers, who besides bearing children spend more time with them, or doing things for them, than fathers, according to a recent Department of Labor survey…. [Idiotic paragraph ridiculing people who think it peculiar that a visibly pregnant would seek to land an executive position in city government.] “But what if just the opposite is true? What if parenting really isn't a zero-sum, children-take-all game? What if raising children is actually mentally enriching for mothers - and fathers? “This is, in fact, what some leading brain scientists, like Michael Merzenich at the University of California, San Francisco, now believe. Becoming a parent, they say, can power up the mind with uniquely motivated learning. Having a baby is ‘a revolution for the brain,’ Dr. Merzenich says. “Commonly envisioned”? By whom? I don’t know any people like that. But I used to. Feminists have long seen children as an awful obstacle, indeed, the chief hindrance to women realizing their destiny as corporate lawyers. Children keep women down, and as one feminist wrote a few years ago, talking to her baby was the least interesting part of her day. (I can’t recall her exact words, but her interest in interacting with her child was on a par with watching paint dry.) How was it that a leading academic abortion advocate always referred to the unborn child in an expectant mother’s womb? Ah, yes. “Trespasser.” And so, Ellison is having it both ways. She is playing feminist enlightener, arguing against pervasive stereotypes, but dealing alternately in stereotypes that feminism has spread, and others (“the torrent of negativity about motherhood”) that she has invented, in order to “refute” them. (If the “torrent of negativity” refers to “desperate housewives,” then that is merely yet another feminist-invented stereotype.) As for the perception that having children makes mothers, excuse me, parents, dumb, that sounds like something limited to the feminists at places like MSNBC. I would not assume, however, that the average American is as benighted as the average TV news editor. As for Ellison’s lament about working mothers, if parenting makes you smarter, she should be celebrating. As for the specifics of her “scientific” meditations on working mothers, the reasons mothers tend to spend more time with their kids than their children’s fathers do are simple: 1. In intact families, the husband on average works many more hours out of the home than the wife; 2. Half of all marriages end in divorce, 75 percent of which are initiated by the wife. In the vast majority of those cases, the wife gets sole custody of the children; and 3. The U.S. illegitimacy rate is currently 33 percent. If women want their children’s fathers to spend more time with their kids, all they have to do is marry the former, and stay married to them. But such talk is heresy in today’s matriarchy. Why, you may ask, in an essay glorifying the cognitive value of motherhood, is Ellison complaining about mothers spending more time with their children than fathers do? The reason is that the complaint is part of the feminist package of talking points, and Ellison has to trot it out to establish her political bona fides, even if it has nothing to do with her topic. Getting back to intelligence, Ellison maintains that neuroscientists found that mother lab rats became smarter at time management, in the course of performing tasks and getting back to their baby rats, and sees the rats as proving that working mothers get smarter at time management. Huh? What Ellison did was assume that working mothers became smarter through being mothers, and then gave the example of the lab rats as “proof” of her assumption’s correctness. It’s circular thinking with a pseudo-scientific gloss. But since Ellison has qualified her statement by saying that what is true of women is also true of men, she should have found (or made up) a case of neuroscientists who took baby rats away from their mother, and experimented on them with their father, and then said that that was proof of how working fathers get smarter in time management. After all, she did say that cognitively, what is true of mothers is true of fathers. Ellison then changes tack yet again. “With our economy newly weighted with people-to-people jobs, and with many professions, including the sciences, becoming more multidisciplinary and collaborative, the people skills we've come to think of as ‘emotional intelligence’ are increasingly prized by many wise employers. An ability to tailor your message to your audience, for instance - a skill that engaged parents practice constantly - can mean the difference between failure and success, at home and at work, as Harvard's president, Lawrence Summers, may now realize.” The foregoing has nothing at all to do with intelligence. “People-to-people jobs” is a euphemism for “low-paying service jobs.” The sciences haven’t become “more collaborative”; they were always collaborative. And “emotional intelligence” isn’t intelligence at all, but a political invention created in order to claim that people who aren’t all that bright really are bright. And “tailoring your message to your audience” is a euphemism for, at best, political opportunism, and at worst, demagoguery. Lawrence Summers got into trouble for honestly using his powerful intellect. Ellison is implying that Summers should have lied. So, motherhood/parenthood makes you smarter, but then you have to employ your new-found smarts by being a lying demagogue. Translation: 'Women are not only smarter than men, but superior in matters of the emotions and compassion … and Larry Summers sucks!' Again, as part of current feminist talking points, every feminist must make every effort to insult Lawrence Summers, in order to prove her political bona fides. And the reference to “collaborative” work is feminist code for “more feminine,” since as every feminist knows, females are “more relational.” Then Ellison argues that the government should provide more money for childcare for women: “to be sure, our society needs to do much more - starting with more affordable, high-quality child care and paid parental leaves - to catch up with other industrialized nations and support mothers and fathers in using their newly acquired smarts to best advantage.” But if being a mother makes you smarter, logically, government should cut all money for childcare, so women can spend more time with their kids, and thereby get smarter and smarter. If Ellison’s thesis is correct, then getting more and better child care will leave mothers at the dumber level they were at, without the intelligence they would have gained from taking care of their children. Are you dizzy from all of Katherine Ellison’s contradictions? I know I am. Here’s what is really going on with Ellison. 1. Ellison wrote a book, The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter, and the Times is helping her sell it. (“Us?” Who is “us,” Kimosabe?) If Ellison’s essay is any indication, her book is like Malcolm Gladwell’s current bestseller, Blink, which according to Steve Sailer, sets up an attractively simple thesis (our snap judgments are generally right) only to contradict the thesis in other parts of the book (our snap judgments regarding race, if we are white, are usually wrong), without ever bringing the two positions together, and selling to an audience that wouldn’t dare point out the implications of Gladwell’s contradiction. 2. Feminism’s contradictions. Back in the 1970s, feminism used to condemn motherhood. But in recent years, yuppy feminists discovered that children can be status symbols, just like expensive cars. Having or adopting a child shows the world that you can have it all, even if you rarely see the tyke. After all, what do you think illegal aliens are for? And so, Ellison is writing on the joys of motherhood for women who do not raise children, but who in the case of those who have children, wish to get credit for their illegal nannies’ labors. (My wife used to be just such an illegal nanny, as had been dozens upon dozens of the (formerly illegal) immigrant women we both knew. Back in 1997 or ‘98, when I pitched a story to New York’s Daily News on the abuse such illegal nannies endured from their female bosses, lefty op-ed editor Bob Laird told me, “I don’t think that’s true.” Hearing that, my wife immediately started shouting, surely loud enough for Laird to hear, “He has one!”) Even feminists who could never imagine having or adopting a child have come around to publicly supporting working motherhood for professional colleagues (even though it isn’t fair to those who worked so single-mindedly to get where they are, dammit!). That means that women who work less will get the same perks as those who devote themselves solely to their work. If it makes the workplace a feminist space, where all women can gain more perks and power, it indirectly gives the childless women more power. But while feminists are now contradicting their earlier anti-family animus, they avoid examining the contradictions. Feminists never examine their own contradictions, they just heap them ever higher. And should anyone point out the contradictions, they’ll teach ‘em! Just ask Larry Summers! 3. With apologies to Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne, “It’s the New York Times, Jake.” The Times has undertaken a campaign of late, showcasing writers who argue that institutions considered by many of their readers to be mentally degrading are actually sources of hidden mental stimulation. Recently, the paper showcased writer Steven Johnson, who was flogging his new pop philosophy book, arguing that TV makes you smarter. In accordance with the Times’ anti-intellectualism, one must get one’s mental stimulation via inferior means. Heaven forbid, one should get smarter through reading Plato or doing math problems. Next thing you know, someone will write a book claiming that reading the New York Times makes you smarter!

American Anthems: The Music of Aaron Copland

By Nicholas Stix Assigned for the first time to teach philosophy, I faced a daunting task: Making Hegel's irrational yet hugely influential metaphysics of the synthesis of opposites understandable to undergraduates of, um, modest gifts. Aaron Copland to the rescue! I played a tape of Copland's 1942 Lincoln Portrait, in which a variation on "Camptown Races" representing the South (point), and a brass-and-percussion evocation of a cavalry charge representing the North (counterpoint), fuse into the "new birth of freedom" and national rapprochement of Lincoln's sublime Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural, respectively. Alas, music can do what neither politics nor logic can. University of Houston music professor Howard Pollock's ambitious, uneven book, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man, while occasionally indulging in academic nonsense, is redeemed by the author's encyclopedic knowledge, informed affection for Copland's (1900-1990) person and music, and Pollock's ability, more often than not, to write technically sophisticated musical analyses without obscuring the music. Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, educated in Paris, and lived in the American grain. We still live enveloped in his sounds: His 1942 ballet, Rodeo, hawks beef; the then obscure Shaker song, "Simple Gifts" (ca. 1848), that he worked into his most famous ballet, Appalachian Spring (1944), accompanies airline ads; and his short, 1942 work, Fanfare for the Common Man, has ennobled spots for New York's Museum of Natural History, and the Trinidad and Tobago TV show, Panorama, alike. More important is the spell Copland's music has cast over other artists. For but one example, in Hugo Friedhofer’s Oscar-winning score to William Wyler's 1946 masterpiece, The Best Years of Our Lives, Friedhofer took an uptempo theme from Copland's 1938 ballet, Billy the Kid, evoking western town (as opposed to much slower farm) life, and made it slow and wistful, to express three returning veterans' problems readjusting to small-town life in Michigan. Much later, John Rubenstein adapted the same theme for the epic ABC drama, China Beach (1988-1991), to contrast wandering, lost Vietnam veterans' similar struggles with civilian routine with their intense, purposeful years "in country." The best thing about Howard Pollock's book is its repudiation of the highbrow assumptions that popular music is somehow "derivative," orchestral music "original," and each at odds with the other. Pollock's painstaking, chronological analyses show how Copland's "serious" works often derived from his more popular ones, and that some of his most ambitious pieces, e.g., the score to the 1949 film, The Red Pony, were composed for popular venues. In his Oscar-winning score for William Wyler's 1949 film, The Heiress, based on Henry James' story, "Washington Square," Copland had to portray a sensibility very unlike the robust attitudes he had been associated with. He came to depict feminine emotions with a delicacy new to Hollywood. That same, new delicacy suffused Copland's critically acclaimed Dickinson Songs, based on twelve Emily Dickinson poems, the following year. Pollock's worst flaw is his occasional embrace of academic "queer theory." He calls "intriguing" idiotic notions advanced by K. Robert Schwartz, Susan McClary, and Mark Levine, who claimed that the postwar music that Americans emotionally responded to was somehow "gay music," adding, "More generally, the dialectical complexities of Copland's work arguably incorporate not only a Marxist perspective but the kinds of 'binarisms' characteristic of modernist homosexual-identified literature as explored by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick." Huh?! In alternately affirming, demolishing, and reaffirming such lunacy, Pollock seems either spineless or cynical: "However intriguing such notions may be, they failed to illuminate the wide variety of styles and aesthetics among gay and straight composers alike." Pollock discusses responses to Copland's "Jewishness" by early critics who projected their anti-Semitism onto his music, but fails to see the same phenomenon afoot in contemporary theorists' similarly tone-deaf insistence on "queering" Copland's music, based merely on the fact that he was a homosexual. (But aren’t we all?) Aaron Copland strove always to create a quintessentially "American music." As Pollock points out, in Copland's most popular works, such as Appalachian Spring, the composer's "Americanism" might involve quoting from American folk music, i.e., "Simple Gifts," making allusions to other works, and finally, creating the illusion of derivativeness, by seeming to quote tunes, when he is in fact creating his own. Pollock sees a second meaning to Americanism of "vastness" -- of solitary prairies and lonely cities -- but this sounds too vague and metaphysical to me. Finally, following the author's hero, composer and Copland-friend Walter Piston (1894-1976), Pollock suggests that Copland's own ambiguity about the phrase "American music" gave it an even vaguer, third meaning: American music is anything that an American composes (to which I would add: which is not simply derivative of a foreign composer's music). But that would trivialize musical character as being no more than the matter of a composer having an American passport. Ultimately, I think, Copland used the myth of an existing, distinctively American idiom, in order to create such an idiom. In seeming contravention of logic, Aaron Copland can seem, musically, at any given moment to be any given thing to any given listener, but not all things to all listeners at all times. But then, amid his sophistication, he had gained true simplicity:

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free, 'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be, And when we find ourselves in the place just right, 'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gained, To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd, To turn, turn, will be our delight, 'Till by turning, turning we come ... round ... right. (Simple Gifts)

Postscript: This essay was commissioned by a major, conservative magazine in 1999. In preparing it for publication, however, an assistant editor cut it from 900 to 600 words, making it unpublishable. The book editor was a gentleman, however, and while most publications pay "kill fees" of one-third to one-half the publication fee, he paid the full publication fee of $200. I posted the essay to my first, bcity.com, web site in early 2000. Unfortunately, Bcity’s owner, CNET, shut it down in May, 2001. Today, while looking for a different published article, I stumbled on to this one, in a file I had carried over from my old, corrupted pc.

Racism and the Brian Nichols Case

By Nicholas Stix The Brian Nichols case is one of those instances of contemporary journalism, in which thousands of man-hours are devoted to talking and writing about a case, in order to try and keep the public in the dark about it. To recap, among other, lesser charges, Nichols is charged with having murdered Fulton County Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes, court reporter Julie Ann Brandau, Sheriff’s Deputy Sergeant Hoyt Teasley and ICE Agent David Wilhelm in Atlanta on March 11. Since I have already meditated on racism in relation to the Nichols case, you may wonder why I am going back to the well. The relationship between black racism and black crime is inexhaustible! It would be difficult to do justice to the topic in one book, let alone one article. (During the late 1990s, I shopped a book proposal on black supremacist thought. No one – surprise, surprise! – was interested, even though such a book had a large potential audience.) Due Diligence, Diversity-Style? Brian Nichols had a responsible job at UPS at the time of the killings. If a white job applicant at UPS had had Nichols’ past (including several arrests and bouncing from job to job), red flags would immediately have shot up, and he would never have gotten an interview. Did Nichols use a phony social security number? Or was his hiring, as Mickey Kaus quipped of the hiring of journalistic fraud Jayson Blair at the New York Times, “More evidence of due diligence, diversity-style"? Why was Nichols almost acquitted at his first rape trial, where the jury was hung 8-4, in favor of acquittal? This was not “he said, she said.” He was caught with assault weapons and ten pounds of marijuana. Ah, but he wasn’t on trial for assault weapons and felony possession with the intent to distribute drugs, in addition to rape, sodomy, and kidnapping. And so, the jury in Nichols’ first case had no idea whom they were dealing with. And the prosecutors in the first trial were too lazy to provide the jury with the necessary corroborating evidence to make a case, even though there was no lack of such evidence. In a telephone interview, former Fulton County assistant district attorney Denise A. Sorino told me that in 1996, Fulton County DA Paul Howard inherited an office of some 80 ADAs, most of them experienced and white. He fired most of the white ADAs, and replaced them with black ADAs who were inexperienced and often incompetent. Apparently, DA Howard also believes in "due diligence, diversity-style." Thousands of Fulton County felony cases were simply “lost.” Years after arrests had been made, with witnesses that could no longer be located, and arresting officers that could no longer recall the details of the case, the cases were simply dropped. In many other cases, involving groups such as athletes and pastors, Sorino said that Howard gave them preferential treatment, so that they were never punished for their crimes. "I'm a Warrior" Consider who Nichols killed. Although according to police, he murdered four people, if we view Sgt. Teasley as “collateral damage,” whom Nichols had not wanted to kill, that leaves three victims whom Nichols went out of his way to kill, all of them white: Judge Rowland Barnes, court recorder Julie Ann Brandau, and ICE Agent David Wilhelm. Ashley Smith, Nichols’ white hostage at the end of his flight, said he told her, “I’m a soldier.” He sees himself as a race warrior. DC sniper John Muhammad, who was (and may still be) a member of the Nation of Islam (NOI), also clearly saw himself as a soldier, though I don’t know of him saying that. As I have written in the past, black supremacists, including but not limited to the NOI, see themselves as soldiers in a war of racial annihilation. A few years ago, in Far Rockaway, Queens, one of the nation’s most racist black slums, a black ex-con tried to get other black bus riders to help him lynch me, after I had defended his first intended victim, an East Indian driver. When a 6’4” black man the ex-con was counting on disappointed him (the con said, “You got me, brother?” to the giant behind me, who responded “That’s not the way, Brother,” and quoted Scripture), the convict was outraged. Although it was pouring outside, he said, “I don’t like what I’m hearing, so I’m going to walk, because” (slamming himself across the chest with his forearm) “I’m a warrior!” And with that, he marched off the bus and into the downpour, without an umbrella. (By the way, Freedom Allah, who claims to be a member of the Five Percenters, wrote me during March, to complain of my depiction of his group: “Greetings. I just wanted to let you know, in case you did not know, the 5% Nation is not pro black and we are not anti white. We have black five percenters and we have white five percenters. Please do not spread lies about our group in the future. Thank you. Peace” Mr. Allah notwithstanding, I am sticking to my story, whereby the Five Percenters are a violent, black supremacist organization. But I’m an open-minded fellow. We’ll talk. Who knows, maybe Mr. Allah can change my mind.) Violence as an End-in-Itself But what about the black deaths, you ask? Black supremacists have no problem with killing blacks. When Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was building the largest black supremacist movement this nation has ever seen, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, I am unaware of any whites dying at his hands. But if Garvey treated his black enemies badly, he treated his friends worse! Wherever he went, he left a trail of dead black supporters in his wake. The paranoid Garvey projected his own treacherousness onto loyal supporters, who then had to be liquidated. And while the Nation of Islam has murdered anywhere from dozens to hundreds of whites, it has also murdered a great many blacks. (No, I did not qualify my statement, by saying that “members” of the NOI committed murders. Too many members at every level of the NOI have conspired to commit murders or helped NOI murderers evade justice, to speak of the group as anything but a criminal organization. Indeed, genocide is the sine qua non of the NOI.) When I was 14, I ran with a black gang for a few months. The leader, Alan "Poncho" Hankins, once ordered me to beat up a white boy named Brian. Brian was one of the nicest kids in town, but Poncho said, "Beat him, Stix! Beat him, or I'll beat you!" Poncho was scrawny, but crazy. I feared him a lot more than I feared Brian, so I gave Brian a hellacious beating. (A few years later, I ran into Brian and he was nice to me. He may be a saint.) Another time, when I was alone with Poncho in his sister Sarah's apartment, he again ordered me to inflict violence -- on him! He made me twist his feet outwardly as far as I could go, while he lay on the floor, screaming for me to keep going. If I'd been stronger, I might have broken his legs. Subsidizing Racial Revolution At least, the NOI is a private organization. To my knowledge, it is not subsidized by the taxpayer. Yet. But black supremacy has long lived off the white taxpayers whom it seeks to kill. When I was a token white in the federally funded, black supremacist Youth Justice Program (1974-76) for juvenile delinquents, during the summer 1975 program, our middle-class and upper-middle-class youth counselors gave us Sam Greenlee’s novel, The Spook Who Sat By the Door, to read. In Spook, a James-Bond-in-blackface story, “Freeman,”> the first black CIA agent, travels around the country, organizing black street gangs into a guerilla army, which takes over the country in a bloody, racial revolution. When a black police detective friend of Freeman refuses to support the revolution, Freeman kills him without regret. The counselors insisted that not only is Spook great literature (it’s horrible), but that it presents a realistic plan for action. Black supremacists typically rationalize the murder of a black by arguing, ‘He was working for the white man.’ Unfortunately for the black supremacist counselors, Spook had virtually no effect upon my comrades, perhaps because virtually none of them bothered to read it. More PC Political correctness appears in yet three other guises in the Nichols case. 1. Lack of restraint: Incredulous, fortysomething, black Atlantan Tony McCreer told CNN, “Why would you take someone who had already been caught trying to bring in a weapon, without any restraints?” The reason is that criminal justice authorities around the country long ago yielded to pressure from the civil rights lobby to show an exaggerated concern with the dignity of ultraviolent black felony suspects. 2. Too much restraint: In recent years, urban police officers have been trained to engage in such extreme restraint in the use of deadly (or any) force, that many have been killed in the line of duty, as a result. The training is clearly race-based, due to the fear of expensive civil rights lawsuits on behalf of ultraviolent, black felons, anti-police media campaigns, black race riots, and agitations within departments by black counter-police organizations. (Black counter-police organizations are racially segregated groups composed of black supremacists, most of whom were improperly hired in the first place. They were typically hired solely due to being black, in spite of their police test scores and psychological testing and interviews. Black counter-police avoid, if at all possible, arresting black suspects, and sometimes aid and abet black suspects, they racially harass law-abiding white citizens, demand policies that handcuff police and give ultraviolent black suspects license to kill, speak out publicly against their white fellow officers, teach black youngsters that white officers are more of a danger to them than black criminals, and demand and get promotions to supervisory positions for black officers who were unfit to be hired, in the first place. The most notorious black counter-police organizations are the Sentinels in Cincinnati, and the clandestine 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, formerly named 100 Black Men in Law Enforcement Who Care, in New York.) Whites are not rioting or initiating multi-million-dollar lawsuits out of respect for white criminals, and no one in law enforcement fears being accused of racism for abusing the rights of white suspects. Indeed, I submit that the rise in the proportion of violent, black male criminals not only among the black poor but the black middle class, is due not to white racism, but the opposite phenomenon: Black males’ accurate perception of the fear and solicitude that so many white authority figures (including police officers) show them. Had the Nichols incident occurred under the training of say, 1960, Sgt. Teasley might very well be alive today, and Brian Nichols would likely be dead. Sgt. Teasley would simply have shot Nichols dead, and gotten a commendation for doing so. But then, in 1960, no one was “progressive” (read: stupid) enough to give a woman the responsibility of guarding a male defendant charged with violent felonies, and so Sgt. Teasley would likely not even have had to confront Nichols. And while Sgt. Teasley was black, he still went through training in extreme restraint in the use of deadly force. 3. Blood: Another possible factor in Sgt. Teasley’s death, is black racial solidarity. I don’t know how black Atlanta/Fulton County police officers think, but I’ve seen enough and heard enough of black cops in New York to know that many think of black felons as their brothers, and law-abiding whites as their enemies. In 1995, I witnessed a black federal (postal) police officer aid and abet a violent black criminal in escaping prosecution. Black officers tend to show even more restraint in the use of deadly force than their white colleagues. What black New York officers fail to appreciate, however, is that black criminals do not return their love. (Conversely, black officers in Washington, DC, and Prince George’s County, MD have a history of shooting black suspects with a frequency many times higher than officers in New York, suggesting that they do not feel restrained either by pc training or feelings of racial solidarity.) Did He Snap!? Various relatives of Nichols spoke to CNN, including his aunt Regina Dow and cousin Reginald Small. They seemed like decent people, and expressed their condolences for the victims and their families. The relatives (as well as childhood friends) said they didn’t recognize the suspect as the Brian Nichols they knew, and hoped for some psychiatric evaluation to determine how and why he “snapped,” and to protect him from the death penalty. But the evidence suggests that Brian Nichols didn’t “snap” at all. Rather, he behaved himself as long as he lived with his family in Baltimore. But as soon as he left home in 1989 at the age of 18, to attend Pennsylvania’s Kutztown State University, he chose a very different life than the one he had previously led. Since that new life unfurled away from Baltimore, it is understandable that his friends and family would not recognize the man Nichols chose to become. The Brian Nichols of March 11 was not a man who lost his mind, but rather a man who exercised a control over his faculties such as most men will never know. The question remains, as to why Nichols surrendered in Duluth, GA, rather than committing “suicide by cop,” while seeking to take a few more policemen with him. After all, it’s considered a slam dunk, that he’ll get the death penalty. Perhaps Nichols plans on arguing that he is a prisoner of war, and expects black jurors to engage in jury nullification on his behalf. But Brian Nichols is not a soldier; he is a racial terrorist. He may have a good soldier’s discipline and ruthlessness, but not, ultimately, a soldier’s courage. One Fox News personality said that Nichols now cannot kill any more. But that’s not true. Unless and until he is executed, he can still kill people – guards and other inmates -- in a prison or a mental hospital, where he will surely be a hero to black supremacist inmates or patients. This story’s awful epilogue, is that Brian Nichols will be held up variously (and already has been, in some precincts) as a hero and a victim by the black supremacists who have taken over the education and care of poor black children.