To Come Home Aged but Ageless

A child cries out "'grandpa" and reaches out to touch a seasoned man he has only for the first time met.

Is this some ancient gene of automatic recognition with an automatic hunger for a seasoned face distant in years but close in kinship?

Then sing, sing, sing an ancient lullaby deep from a grandpa's youth. Maybe "All the Pretty Little Horses."

Stroke the child's hair. Watch relaxation cover the sleepy face. A timeless ritual softens the cry and eases him to sleep.

What's It All About?

The feeling that one has made a difference.
That there is something of you that will continue after you're gone.
That the fact that you have lived has in some way changed the world.
To touch a child....especially if that child is part of you.
To calm that child with stroking and a song.

These special moments transcend all hardships, all roadblocks which make rough the highway of life.

Reaffirmed is the world's natural order.

To hold and look upon the youngest is to come home aged but ageless.

In this instant moment of recognition, "The Circle is Unbroken."

Age, it has no meaning -- as the river flows on....

When Journalists Become Monkeys in the Jungle

Ah yes, Judith Miller of The New York Times goes to jail for refusing to divulge her anonymous sources.

Surely that symbolizes the moral cloud under which journalists now operate.

When reporters "defy the law," they may cite high principle. But beneath it all can be narrow self interest, or hunger to preserve professional standing by maintaining the ability to be trusted by future sources who may seek a reporter as a safe mouthpiece. How easy it may seem to hide behind the confidentiality of being a reporter's anonymous source!

As important as confidentiality of sources can be, we now have a situation where anonymous sources are as much a part of the problem as of the solution.

Beware anonymous sources.

Too often a scoop is a trap in disquise laid by an anonymous dagger carrying assassin whose motives have nothing to do with public interest or freedom of the press.

When hungry journalists race through the jungle eager to harvest any piece of fruit devious monkeys toss their way, it is the journalists who can end up as monkeys.

It is not at all clear that today's Judith Millers protect "whistleblowers." Indeed they may be in the service of ruthless "spin doctors" who seek to hide behind journalistic skirts to manipulate politics and public opinion for partisan political purposes.

Far better to focus on the important issues: do not allow oneself to be used!!!!! Keep the big picture in mind --- and do not be seduced by the promise of an "easy" scoop.

The still unproven assertion is that someone close to the Bush Administration was an anonymous source trying to convince reporters such as Judith Miller to unmask Valerie Plame as a undercover CIA operative. Although Judith Miller did not use what an anonymous source may have told her to "out" Plame, conservative commentator Robert Novak did. Ironically no one has at least publicly threatened to put him in jail!

What is at stake? The scuttlebut is that someone wanted to damage Plame's career, to get revenge on her husband, former Ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson, an outspoken critic of Bush plans to invade Iraq.

That Time Magazine parted company with Miller to gave up the court sought documents partly so that its reporter could stay out of jail further darkens the brew. If it seems a bit like professional aggrandizement for Miller to hold back, It seems a bit like corporate expediency for Time to give in.

Oddly Judith Miller, brilliant, accomplished though she is as a preeminent Times expert on terrorism, also is the reporter accused by anti-war critics of helping open the door to invade Iraq.

Her critics say passed on too uncritically the scare mongering anti-Saddam spin on weapons of mass destruction peddled to both press and government by partisans of Iraqi expatriate Ahmed Chalabi. Miller and others passed on the "spin" partly based on tips by anonymous sources.

Chalabi is a controversial figure for many reasons. In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, under his guidance, a major portion of the information on which U.S. Intelligence based its condemnation of Saddam Hussein, including reports of weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to al-Qaeda, filtered its way to the U.S. government and into the U.S. media.

Much of this information has turned out to be false. That is one reason for a recent falling out between Chalabi and the Bush Administration.

So some see Miller not simply as a champion of freedom of the press but as a symbol of just how much a journalist can be corrupted by anonymous sources with hidden agendas.

Miller published nothing about Valerie Plame. Still, she appears to have allowed herself to be excessively manipulated by anonymous sources -- in what appears to be a failure of journalism accuracy and credibility.

So it comes to pass that on occasion a reporter's principles can also be a tool aiding misinformation and corruption -- for an anonymous source can have a license to irresponsibly spin!!!!!!

When Journalism Does its Job

It can be the privilege of a journalist and foreign correspondent to work for years with courageous people who endure much hardship to take on almost impossible odds, to do what must be done, to do what advances understanding and tolerance, to do what expands compassion, to do what rouses to action, to do what helps heal.

When a Hero Becomes an Embarassment

The movie Motorcycle Diaries could be taken many ways. Here is my take on this monumental man who ended his days as revolutionary martyr, an icon to Castro's failed global ambitions, a guerrilla revolutionary hunted unto death.

Guevara, the doctor child of priviledge came from the developed Europeanized side of southern Latin America, the Argentine, ventured north into the Chiliean, both lands of German immigration. the developed lands to the south of South America.

The more Europeanized Argentina from which Che came (as well as more Europeanized Chile) were later to be wracked by the brutal disappearances, Pinochet and all the rest, fascist style generals overturning their countrys' constitutions, cracking down on Marxism, partly in fear of Castro's influence. In both "civiliized" Chile and the Argentine almost "European style" fascist generals led inquisitions into the Left.

But that was twenty years later.

And as Guevara biked North in the early 50's , he biked deep from remnant Europe deep into the Third Word, leaving European "civilization" beyond, into the world of Indian mountain tribalism, dominated by Spanish elites, Peru and neighboring Bolivia, the area where banditry, rebellion, drug growing were to become the symptom of the incomplete subjugation of the highland, non-coastal Indian who once held such dominance in some of the world's greatest civilization. The Leper is a symbol of third world backwardness, treated, isolated in ambivalence by priests, doctors and nuns. While the big employers who sometimes exploited the Indians could often be from American corporate giants -- or American investment, ie Anaconda Copper.

It was in this "biking north into the Third World" which lay the origins of Guevaras's programs for global third world rebellion.

In uneasy alliance with Castro, he led the Cuban expeditionary forces in the far flung adventures both in northern Latin America and fighting the South Africans in Anglola Africa. This was the period when Castro sought to become a global power by providing Cuban soldiers in Soviet supported expeditionary campaigns.

Ultimately the Americans stepped up the pressure on Castro (and the Soviet Union) ---- and told him if you want to survive, distance yourself from Che and Che's activist support of Soviet supported "wars of liberation."

Under some accounts Castro did exactly that. And Che left for one last revolutionary foray into the Bolivian highlands -- to be hunted down by Bolivian commandos aided or led by the CIA.

With Guevara's passing, Castro had a revolutionary martyr to honor, but no longer the living irritant with America. Castro had now diassociated himself from a grand dream to lead a third world insurrection from the Americas to Africa. Oh, yes, he continued to defy America, but he had pulled in his horns a bit.

And so it came to pass that Guevara died, lived on a living legend, brought alive once again by Motorcycle Diaries.

No he was not the revolutionary Trotsky, ice picked by Stalin. But like Trotsky he became an embarassmnent to the real politik of the world. He, too, would be hunted down. His icepick, too, would come.