by Glynn Wilson

GATOR LAKE, GULF STATE PARK, Ala., Oct. 15 - It is not always easy to find the right first word to begin any composition. When you are hammering out words like nails as a daily newspaper reporter, it sometimes hardly matters. You can start with “The…” and go from there.

The mayor was convicted of taking bribes to allow a developer to flip land and build over some wetlands, you might say, and then go on to give out his name and party affiliation, maybe take the trouble to list his campaign contributions. There’s one in Orange Beach worth checking right now, even since the mayor and the city attorney there went down. Too bad it wouldn’t matter that much to the faithful in the Bible Belt, or the one’s sporting W’s on the rear window of their SUVs along the Redneck Riviera.

That’s actually pretty easy to do, starting with “the” and just going with it - when you can find a publisher willing to print it who is not in on the deal himself.

Sitting here on the other side of Gator Lake by the public picnic area across from the state-owned hotel and convention center due soon to be torn down - two years after Ivan crashed through most of it, making it uninhabitable - perhaps the first word should take the name of a house on a suspect sliver of terrain known as West Beach in Gulf Shores. To wit: “Wits End.”

Photo by Glynn Wilson

My old house at 1109 Lagoon Avenue is now painted pink and is called “Dog Heaven.” Many wonderful trips had there, in the hammock listening to the waves crash relentlessly on the sand…

Revisiting the beach I used to call home 15 years ago, the precariousness of the place is so obvious it is still a mystery to me why every time I’ve ever ridden down this seven-mile long spit of land there is at least one pair of snow birds stopping in the bike lane to write down the phone number of another beach house for sale or rent. That is, the few houses with the guts still in them and the decks and stairs obviously rebuilt just recently.

They come with names like “Wits End” or “Satisfaction,” “Labor of Love” or “Sand Trap” or “Come Lucky.” But the beach sand pumped artificially on the beach side travels steadily, surely north across the road like snow blowing over a mountain trail. You can build all the dune fences and save all the beach mice from extinction, maybe, but the sand will still travel north, like the never ending march of time itself, even faster in between houses close together and faster still in between condo high rises stacked side by side.

The planet is warming and the sea levels are rising and all the millions wasted on “beach replenishment” will only stem the tide for a little while, long enough for the developers to cash in until the next big hurricane hits dead on. Then they will go in and build it again, and again, and someone will get rich every time, especially the friends of the governor and the titans of big oil and construction and automobile sales.

That is the American way, after all, since Manifest Destiney drove these crazy escapees from Europe across the plains and the mountains to California and Oregon. They will plow any forest and build anywhere the pathetically weak governments will let them . . .

Excuse me for a minute. I need to shift gears. A great blue heron just flew across the lake in front of me. Not close enough for a photograph. As I was driving over here a few minutes ago, I stopped the van on the side of the road myself. Not to look at a beach house.

Two hawks, followed by two great egrets, flew right in front of me. I got a few shots as they flew away.

Anyway, back to what I was saying. Even the Bible says only a fool builds his house on shifting sand. Find rock, like the houses of Roebuck east of Birmingham where they build their houses not only on rock, but out of rocks.

No, counting on a house staying in the family for generations on this beach is not sensible gambling, unless you just love to lose.

Photo by Glynn Wilson

No, that’s not a garage under an apartment. There were rooms on the bottom floor, beach level at the Gulf State Park Hotel and Convention Center. First Ivan’s wind swept them clean, then the water surge finished them off…

Hang on. Time for a shot of inspiration . . . I’m going to walk over here among the live oaks and see if I can find some birds to shoot. Back in a few . . .

Now, no, not now. Not with this wind whipping in here like it starts to do this time of year, when the skies go grey and the bars get lonely and the only thing there is to do is read, write or drink.

Today is the turning of the tide from the immaculate fall to the not too dreaded winter, where you don’t have to worry about the Gulf freezing over - except maybe every 100 years or so. I saw ice in the Gulf in 1990, when that 100-year storm came down from Canada into Dallas and then turned left and froze the Gulf Coast all the way to Panama City for seven solid days.

Three years later, back in Birmingham hanging out on the Southside, I went through the 100-year snow in those hills. Those were the last of the cool years, my friends. They are gone now, unless the Yellow Stone volcano comes to life and spews a dark cloud around the planet and cools things down a bit.

The mercury is rising, they used to say. Now they mean it when they say it, even on the rocking chairs in front of the Cracker Barrel.

It is about time to head north again, since the skies are turning grey and the money’s running low. Time to get ready for another winter in Birmingham. There will still be a few late migrant birds coming through there. Maybe the dry summer didn’t kill all the fall color and it will be something of a show in Blount and St. Clair counties.

Hang on. It’s that great blue again, coming back to the edge of the point. . .

Got a few shots of him flying off, nothing worth printing.

Wits end. That’s what I was saying. Homo sapiens are capable of finding that outer limit, that “Island Escape” house or the one called “SOS.”

It is a cry for help. A cry for someone to cancel the insurance and raise the interest rates and make it unaffordable, like gasoline will be soon. Then Bush and Riley’s economy will be revealed as the frauds they are, fudged numbers as cooked as Health South’s books under the now Reverand Scrushy.

But no sir, I am not at wit’s end. Not altogether at satisfaction either, if you know what I mean. You know what Mick said about that. You get what you need.

Some people just don’t believe that. They like to step over the rest of us and get more than their fair share. Not sure why they think they deserve it, but like the commissioner said in All The King’s Men, they get in the courthouse and “gets biggity.”

Anyone who thinks they can live on this land forever is “getting’ biggity” on the planet. What they may not realize is, the planet will get them, sooner or later, and there ain’t no angel from heaven going to come down to earth to save them.

We are all doomed anyway, ultimately, no doubt about it. Dust to dust and all that. So why not live a little? Get out in nature and do something, anything, while there is some nature to get out into. The planet is not at wits end just yet…

End Note: There is high speed wireless on West Beach, at the Gulf Shores Surf and Racket Club. But the yankee bitch there said it was for registered guests only. The old codgers I saw sitting in the lobby would not know how to turn on a computer, and would benefit from the conversation like the Morgan City crowd did in All The King’s Men. But no! I missed the closing time at the Dizzy Bean by 11 minutes, so I’m filing from the Gulf Shores McDonald’s. Talk about rednecks. The manager did manage to get the connection working, after moving it out from under the food wrappers on his desk : )

Photo by Glynn Wilson

We are not sure if this is an egret and a heron or what fishing along the road in Gulf State Park between the main office and the picnic area on the beachside of the lake. All we know is they were both very large and white and hanging out with what appeared to be two Cooper’s hawks. I couldn’t get close enough for a picture. Could it be great white herons? Bob Sargent thinks it might be a cattle egret and a great blue heron, but you can’t really tell from the photograph.

Maybe Condi Can Explain It To Him

by Glynn Wilson

Do you ever wake up in the morning with a start from a dream and find yourself calling the president a dumbass?

Oh, I suppose not. That’s my curse.

I only wish I could get into the press room with George W. Bush and try to question some sense into him. I wish his handlers would get him to read this column, because it contains a lesson in the difference between myth and reality and how Americans should treat the people of other countries.

As I wound down Sunday night, flipping around the cable TV channels to find something worth stopping on as I often do, I ran across a movie loosely based on a true story called “Hidalgo.”

It is a 2004 film based on the life and tales of the famous American horseman Frank Hopkins and his amazing Spanish-American mustang Hidalgo.

While working for Wild Bill Cody’s traveling show in 1890 in the last days of American cowboys and Indians, a wealthy Arab sheikh invites Hopkins and his horse to enter the “Ocean of Fire” horse race, a 3,000 mile survival ordeal across the Arabian desert.

Up until that year, the race was restricted to the finest Arabian horses ever bred, the purest and noblest lines owned by the greatest royal families. But the sheikh was a fan of tales from the American West, and Hopkins was billed as the greatest rider the West had ever known and his horse the greatest horse that ever lived to run.

So the Sheikh wants to puts his claim to the test, pitting the American cowboy and his mustang against the world’s greatest Arabian horses and Bedouin riders, some of whom are determined to prevent a foreigner - and especially an “impure” horse and rider - from finishing the race. Hopkins is presented as half Caucasian and half Native American, born of a marriage between a European father and a Native American mother. His Indian name is “Blue Child” or “Far Rider.”

In spite of the seemingly overwhelming obstacles, Hollywood predictably has Hopkins win the race by a nose in the end. But the sheikh’s nephew the prince, who Hopkins saves from quicksand during the race, lives to come in second on the top Arabian horse. The horse of a British woman, who the Arabs in the film call “the Christian woman,” comes in third, in spite of all her plots to have Hidalgo killed. Some Christian.

I would like to imagine George W. Bush watching this movie in the White House screening room along with Secretary of State Condi Rice, who explains its meaning to him.

“Don’t you see, Mr. President, how this cowboy showed class and humility after he won the race?”

Hopkins befriends the sheikh and his daughter throughout the race and makes a gift of his Colt pistol after it’s over. A hundred years of peace ensues between the two countries as a result, even though the myth of the pure bred horse and rider are blown.

The victory by Hopkins and Hidalgo shows that free will matters more than breeding.

To show he’s truly a class act, the directors have Hopkins travel home to America after the race and use the $100,000 in prize money to buy hundreds of mustangs the U.S. Government planned to shoot. He releases them into the wild and sets Hidalgo free along with them.

Now isn’t there a lesson in this movie about how America should deal with the rest of the world and nature? Isn’t that why they used to love us?

For more information about the film, consult the Wikipedia online encyclopedia. And watch for it on a cable channel near you.

by Glynn Wilson

With most of the media attention of late focused on the stupid exchange of rockets between Hezbollah and the Israeli military, another story closer to home has been relegated to a slanted, pro-American capitalist news footnote.

Even the Cuban government got into the act of condemning Israel’s bombing of the Lebanese village of Qana this week, calling it “cowardly, vile and criminal” and urging the world to force an immediate cease-fire.

While the rockets continue to land on both sides, the socialist leadership assured Cubans on Friday that Raul Castro was in firm control as acting president, and the health minister said Fidel Castro was “recovering satisfactorily” from intestinal surgery, according to the Associated Press.

While cable news networks took a brief break from the war in the Middle East to give a mini report on the situation in Cuba, they focused mainly on anti-Castro Cubans dancing in the streets of Miami - with no condemnation of people who would celebrate at the prospect that Fidel Castro might be dying.

What are they thinking?

If Castro were to croak now, with Bush and his oil cabal in power here, and if Castro’s brother Raul were to appeal to the American government to lift economic sanctions, chances are the oil companies and real estate developers would move in and ruin Cuba forever.

After spending a couple of weeks in Cuba during the Christmas holidays in 2002, I came away with the impression that about the only thing the Cuban people really need from the United States is more food - and maybe some investment capital to rebuild Havana.

An honest, educated and realistic comparison of Havana with any American city would reveal a wild dichotomy that few American reporters seem willing or able to understand or report.

Thanks to the policies of a true socialist-democracy under Castro, virtually everyone in Cuba has a college education - even the chicas, or prostitutes.

There are no illiterate dumbasses roaming the streets of Havana with guns like there are in every, single American city. Crime is almost non-existent in Cuba.

For all the talk from the Bush administration and the conservative movement about being pro-education and anti-crime, they could learn a thing or two from Castro – if they were willing to listen, learn and conduct an honest assessment.

Photo by Spider Martin

A little old lady smiles for the camera in downtown Havana, Cuba, December 2002

There are also no toothless, homeless people in Cuba, like there are in every American city. Every single human being in Cuba is entitled to free health care, including dental care.

But the supposedly richest and most powerful country in the world cannot provide that for its citizens right here in the good old U.S. of A.

Does anyone else see the irony?

And here’s an interesting fact. While studies show more obesity and related health problems in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world, there is no such thing as obesity in Cuba. I walked from one end of Havana to the other, talking to people and taking photos with Spider Martin, and we never saw a single fat person. Not one.

The irony here is that the food in the homes and restaurants was sparse, simple and frankly scarce. But they are not starving either. They just live on fish and rice and do not over eat.

Imagine the boon it would be for Alabama chicken, soybean and corn farmers if only they were allowed to sell to Cuba?

According to research for a story I wrote about that trip, estimates show that lifting the sanctions on trade with Cuba could result in U.S. exports valued at $658 million to potentially $1 billion a year, or 17 percent to 27 percent of Cuba’s total imports.

But no, the South Florida anti-Castro Cuban lobbying money, which funds the campaigns of Republicans such as Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and his brother in the White House, prevents a reasonable policy toward Cuba. That money even trumps the pro-business and conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which for years has urged Republican and Democratic Party presidents to lift the sanctions against Cuba.

So we hope the press releases out of Cuba are accurate, and Castro will be back on his feet and well soon. We hope he is able to survive until a more reasonable Democratic president and Congress regain power in the U.S. and finally decide to change our policies toward Cuba.

It is a beautiful place in the universe.

With a good bit of honest forethought, re-engaging with Cuba could be a win-win situation for America, Cuba and Alabama.

But it would best be done with some planning for sustainable redevelopment, not American-style suburbanization. The oil companies should not be able to rape Cuba’s environment and spoil the beaches. And real estate developers should not be allowed to put a McDonald’s on every block and a highrise condo on every dune.

While Soviet-style Communism proved it cannot work indefinitely, due to its propensity to lead to totalitarianism, that does not mean a bit of socialism mixed with democracy can’t create a better world for everyone – not just the privileged few, the born rich.

Photo by Spider Martin

For the fun of it, here’s the photo Spider shot of me with the guy who drew the caricature used for these columns. He did it unbeknownst to me and then offered it to me for something Americans are banned from spending in Cuba - one American dollar. How could I refuse?

“Only sound methodology can ensure success.”
- Bobby Jones

by Glynn Wilson

It is somewhat surprising no one has suggested this before. If body builder Arnold Schwarzenegger can be governor of California, and commentators can suggest a run for governor of Alabama by basketball player Charles Barkley, why not Tiger Woods for president?

Then again, why would anyone want to run for political office in these strange times when you can play golf for big bucks all day long every day?

Judging by their television ads during the British Open, even the corrupt Southern Company, parent company of Alabama Power, realizes that Bobby Jones was onto something when he talked about a sound methodology leading to success.

What I’m wondering is: What if George W. Bush had actually trained all his life for the presidency like Tiger Woods trained to be a great golfer, instead of fucking off most of his life?

Maybe now we would not be mired in ill-conceived wars in the Middle East if our dicktater-in-chief knew more about foreign policy than he does about eating peanuts, drinking Jim Beam whiskey, cutting brush and riding mountain bikes.

In flipping back and forth this morning between the British Open on ABC and “Meet The Press” on NBC, the juxtaposition of success and failure was striking.

Tiger Woods clearly prepared well for the British Open and had a successful game plan for approaching the links course at Royal Liverpool. The Bush administration quite obviously had an incomplete and bad game plan for fighting the war in Iraq and now can’t seem to figure out what to do about the growing war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

This neo-con crowd also doesn’t seem to know what to do about the nuclear ambitions of Iran or North Korea.

The plans and executions of the Bush administration have been so bad that Washington Post columnist Thomas Ricks has written a new book called Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.

In improvising a response to the insurgency in Iraq, U.S. forces frequently were led poorly by commanders unprepared for their mission by an institution that took away from the Vietnam War only the lesson that it shouldn’t get involved in messy counterinsurgencies. The advice of those who had studied the American experience there was ignored, Ricks says in his column in the nation’s capitol newspaper today.

The other lessons from Vietnam, which have been taught at colleges and universities for years now, including West Point, are that you can’t win a war in a far off country where the people do not support you. And you cannot continue to fight a war with mounting casualties and obvious failures when public opinion does not support you at home.

For all of Bush’s claims that he doesn’t care about public opinion polls, what that means is he doesn’t care what the American people think. He is the president and “the decider” after all. Translation: We are all just peons in his empire.

If someone died and put me in charge, I would tell Tiger Woods to take his 2-iron, which has been so successful off the tee this week, and bash Bush over the head with it.

I would rather be playing 18 holes myself. Instead, I am watching in dismay as the world comes unraveled because of the fiasco that is our country’s foreign policy.

So what about it folks? Tiger Woods for president?

Letting The Press Off The Hook

by Glynn Wilson

BIRMINGHAM, Ala., July 4, 2006 - It would almost be an understatement to say that the American press has been on the bad end of a few bad mouths of late, especially as it concerns recent coverage of the Bush administration’s supposedly secret surveillance programs.

If I were a CIA “agency” man, I might celebrate the CIA’s losses in war today. If I were a solider, I would celebrate other men and women in uniform, alive and dead, on this Independence Day.

But I am a writer and a journalist. And since everyone here knows there would be no independence without some world class writing, as well as spying and soldiering, I believe the press deserves something of a break today.

So I will tell you a story about one of the greatest newsmen to ever be conceived on Alabama soil, at least by today’s standards of how we judge people in this United States of America.

LF

The One That Got Away, Indeed

In his new memoir, The One That Got Away, Howell Raines writes of great and small fish and fishers, giants and dwarfs of the written word - and then there’s politicians. He writes of interesting people he knows and has met - and what makes for an honorable life.

By the end of it, he is released in his mind not only by the great blue marlin he fought for seven and a half hours and then lost off Christmas Island in the Pacific. You get the feeling that he writes the last short sentence of the book as if he is “released” from his grief at his great fall - and perhaps now that the story is written and on its way to the publisher.

I want to believe it is true, all of it, like I want to believe that his Minolta underwater camera failed when he tried to take a picture of that blue marlin as it ran alongside the boat and was almost within his guide Tuna’s reach.

But fish tales, like memoirs, are often fraught with hype and yes hubris. Hubris is a word Raines uses a lot, perhaps because his public image as an arrogant SOB will live with him for the rest of his life no matter what he does in the future or what he writes.

And the truth is, I’m not big on fish tales or fishing anyway, perhaps because it was my long-dead father’s favorite pastime, not mine. There was no such thing as catch-and-release in Eschol Wilson’s day, 1926-1973. Then, the idea was to catch the most and the biggest bass you were skilled or lucky enough to get hooks into - then clean, fry and eat the buggers for supper.

Mr. Raines must certainly know that the fish releasing him is the perfect metaphor for his life and how he was run off from the New York Times and left with the time to fish. He’s the first Alabamian to ever hold the three best jobs at that lofty newspaper: Washington Bureau Chief, Editorial Page Editor, and Executive Editor.

We’ve never had a president from Alabama, although we did have one serious candidate for awhile during Howell’s lifetime, which is likely one of the reasons he bagged his first shot at the New York Times job in those days of segregation and the fight for Civil Rights.

But he played the journalism political game well and made it all the way to the top. Then just when everything seemed just about perfect - from a record seven Pulitzer Prizes to his new Polish bride and country house in the Poconos - it all came crashing down like it did for Icarus, who you will remember flew too close to the sun.

The image Raines would leave you with is another metaphor, one from Hemingway, one of his literary and journalism heroes. Although curiously, Raines fails to mention the fisherman Santiago’s words of life’s justification when he lost his marlin, but not his life to the sharks, in Old Man And The Sea. This is an oddity, since Raines makes a big deal out of remembering his nanny read it to him in bad old Birmingham, and then finding a copy of the Life magazine it was first published in after he “made it” to New York.

I guess it would be admitting too much to come out and say, as Santiago did, “man is not made for defeat….A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

If you are into fly fishing and literary journalism of the personal kind, you must like this book. Raines learns from and quotes all the great fishing writers, and has the resources to fish in some incredible places.

He does cast into the waters a few other metaphors, from baseball and of course football. It you know anything at all about Howell Raines, you probably know that he sometimes likes to quote the great but flawed University of Alabama football coach, Paul “Bear” Bryant. You may or may not know how that very thing was one of the annoyances that made the “mandarins” in New York, as he calls them, come to hate him.

And he just can’t resist an allusion to the Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg. In fact, the central test of character from the book comes from none other than the great general of the Confederate Army, Robert E. Lee, who Raines claims not to idolize, being from one of those rare strongholds in North Alabama where his family members hid in the woods to escape the fighting and sold goods to the Yankees.

If I were to construct a similar narrative, I might use a canoe trip down a river or the sometimes maddening or sublime game of golf. But it’s his story, and he tells it well - if inevitably incompletely.

There is one key person in this drama, another Alabama writer, who is never mentioned in the book - perhaps at his request. Since he does not want me to write about it either, I will not tell the story here. But one of these days, that story will be told.

For now, let’s change Cherokee directions - something I learned about from reading Raines’ book and should have known - and imagine another fish tale.

Historians sometimes have to do this, when people are too afraid or dead to talk.

I like to imagine a world in which Ralph Nader and the Green Party, along with the U.S. Supreme Court and some hanging chads in Florida, did not hand George W. Bush the election of 2000 like every gift he ever got in his life of high crimes and misdemeanors.

But that might be too much of a “stretcher” to pull off here today, so let’s move forward a bit and bring this fishing trip back to the press.

What if someone had been willing to stand up to the writer’s guild and just say no to promoting Jayson Blair? You will remember Blair as the short, black kid who made stuff up at the New York Times and filed plagiarized stories high on cocaine from the suburbs of New York rather than get on the plane to Virginia and Texas. He was given a golden opportunity over a thousand other fine reporters who spent years vying for the chance, and he not only blew his own career up his own nose. He damaged the great ship that was the New York Times like the sharks ate holes in Santiago’s boat.

The tribunal is still out on whether this little confabulating missile will sink that ship.

But from my observation point - and I was one of those vying for the chance and got it, for a little while - Howell Raines could have been just the editor America needs right now, to go up against Bush and Cheney and Karl Rove.

Yes, he also listened to Judith Miller, who listened to Chalabi and beat the drums for war. But she was the star of the Washington bureau on the subject of weapons of mass destruction, having written a book about it. And after 9/11 - and I know this from multiple sources - virtually everyone at the Times believed deep down in the ultimate thematic truth that a nuclear attack on New York was likely and that it would be the end of civilization as they knew it.

Faced with what we know now - about no WMD, massive and illegal domestic surveillance, all manner of corruption from Iraq to New Orleans - the so-called “hard charging” Howell Raines who “ate gunpowder for breakfast” - would have unleashed the troops and “flooded the zone” on these assholes in charge in Washington today.

And no matter how mean he was as a boss (he was actually more aloof to me the times I met him), I would like to know what it would be like to live in a world with Howell Raines at the helm of the New York Times today - sans the torpedo in its broadside.

I may just be dreaming, and of course I am because that is not the world we live in today. But by damn, I would like to live in that world.

Everybody else running news organizations today seem like pantywaists to me, and I’m sure to Howell. The PR doctors and the spinmeisters have totally taken over the country now.

I won’t spoil the entire book for you by going into all the details he likes to drop in here and there about how bad the news business is and how to fix it. Best I can tell, he is right as rain on most of that advice.

I do, however, have a couple of quibbles.

For one thing, Raines likes to talk in terms of sociology almost as much as he likes to quote Bear Bryant. But I think Mr. Raines’ sociological bibliography is as limited as his grasp of the literature on communications research generally. He was an English major, after all. He would be better off talking in terms of political science or journalism history, both of which are flawed disciplines to be sure.

But he would be on sounder footing in his stream of thought that way, like when he says the reason a large audience turns to Fox News is for fake, made up news. That’s not it, at all. Really it’s not. It’s not even that Fox is the Republican network. Roger Ailes’ genius there, and of course I disagree with it as much as Raines, is that Fox News is the pro-American patriotic network, what I like to call “America’s Al Jazeera.”

As for what he says about blogs and bloggers, well, I’ll let him off the hook for that. I doubt he reads this one, although another writer and a friend of his does, down in Florida.

And I suspect Mr. Raines is too old and too ink-stained to get this - although he was there when the Times embraced the Web.

Maybe there is hope. A Howell Raines blog. Hell, I would write for it - in the flash of a rise of a fine silver fish . . .

-30-

For the blog diary record, here’s the text of the letter I wrote to Howell Raines eight days after September 11, 2001. One particular friend told me to cut the military references and send it. I didn’t listen. It went out just like this.

September 19, 2001

Howell Raines, Executive Editor
The New York Times
229 W. 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036

Dear Mr. Raines,

A number of witnesses to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center said words could not describe it. Yet somehow The New York Times put together a package of words like nothing I have seen in my 22-year association with the news business. Like millions of Americans who would now die to serve their country, I would die to serve The New York Times.

So take me, sir, and do with me what you will. I am single and willing to track down Osama bin Laden in the caves of Afghanistan if necessary. I am versatile in a way very few new hires could be. I can do breaking news on deadline with wire service precision. I know politics, and have sources the Times could use at this time. My specialty in more recent years has been science and the environment. I know the American South, and could be useful in this region. As a pioneering Web developer, I could be useful to the Times online. I know literary non-fiction and can do features as well.

After working for weekly and daily newspapers, magazines and wire services since 1979, and reading the Times regularly since in the early 1980s, I decided in the mid-1990s that the newspaper business was dead for me in a way. It just did not seem so vital anymore. The news seemed stale. I thought there were no more courageous newspaper editors in the world, that no big stories existed. So I escaped to the halls of academe and began a love affair with teaching the craft of journalism.

After reading your coverage of this gut-wrenching story, however, my only thought was, “I want to be part of it.” All I ever wanted in life was to be a reporter, to work for a great newspaper, a great newspaper editor. Judging by your performance in the face of this tragedy, you are one of the last of the great newspaper editors. So as a loyal soldier might report to his commander in chief, I salute you and stand ready to serve.

With deep sincerity,
Glynn R. Wilson, A.B.D., Ph.D., UT
University of Loyola New Orleans