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Show A8 The Emery County Review, Tuesday, July 22, 2008 VIEWPOINT Opinion and Letters to the Editor Death Leaves You Searching for Words Susan Estrich Established January 2, 2007 James L. Davis, Publisher & Editor w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w Colleen A. Davis, Co-Publisher, Office & Advertising Manager Josie Luke, Assistant Editor Lyndsay Reid, Advertising Design Charlotte Williams, Advertising Sales Kathy P. Ockey, Staff Journalist Casey Wood, Webmaster Our Vision To be a valued member of the communities we serve and to be trusted as an honest, truthful and reliable source of news. w w w Our Mission To inform, entertain and provide a public forum for the discussion of events impacting the people of the Emery County area and to inform with news and features relevant to those who call the Castle Valley area home w w w Our Principles We will be ethical in all of our efforts to provide information to the public. We will be unbiased in our reporting and will report the facts as we see them and do our best to focus on the good news of the county, its people, history and way of life. We will be strong and active members of the community and assist in any way that we are able. We will strive to provide the best quality product possible to our readers and advertisers...always. We will verify the details of news we are reporting and if a mistake is made on our part we will correct it immediately. We will always listen to suggestions on how to do our job better. Editorial Submission Guidelines The Emery County Review welcomes and invites letters to the editor and guest opinion articles on public policy or current events. We welcome letters of thanks to individuals who have helped make our community a better place to live, work and play. The editorial staff reserves the right to edit all submissions for space constraints, clarity and errors in fact. Submissions must include author’s name and contact information. Contact information will not be published. Letter’s and opinion articles can be sent to jldavis@theemerycountyreview.com, mailed to The Emery County Review, P.O. Box 487, Orangeville, UT. 84537 or faxed to 435-748-2543. When my father died, so many years ago, my heart was broken. And then it got broken again. In the hours and days after his death, I was comforted by family and friends. But I couldn’t help but notice who was missing, people I cared about, people I thought cared about me, who didn’t call, didn’t come, weren’t there. Later, much later, I asked a few of those people why: Where had they been? Why didn’t they come? And the answer was always the same. They didn’t know what to say. They didn’t know what to do. So they didn’t say anything. They didn’t come. Here is the truth. It isn’t hard. It isn’t scary. Death is not contagious. The answer is: Go. Say you are sorry. Tell a funny story. As my friend Jack used to say, 90 percent of life is just showing up. In hard times, it’s probably closer to 99 percent. It’s easier, of course, when the person who died was very old, when they lived a good life, had the chance to follow their dreams and see their children and even their grandchildren grow up. Then you can say, it is God’s will, the way of the world, a life welllived. Then you can smile and say, look what they left behind, all the children who live on. Let’s drink to him. Then you can say, if you’re younger still, this is not about me. My father died at 54. There were children, not grandchildren. My best friend died at 53. Her mother was still alive. Her oldest grandchild was a baby. God’s will? I don’t know. I am sitting on a plane flying to my friend Tony Snow’s wake. He was 53. He had a wife he loved, three children he adored. In a business that is full of snakes and sleazebags, of cheaters and charlatans, he was a sweetheart, a decent and honorable man who loved his family, his country and his work. Why him? Because his mother died of the same disease when she was 37? Bad genes is just not a good answer. Here is what I know. You never stop missing the people you love. It never gets “all better,” the way the scrapes and bruises of childhood do, the way career disappointments and broken romances do. It never goes away. It just becomes part of your history. It was my friend Patrick who told me that, after my father died. At a time when others were pulling away, he would sit with me. His brother had died when he was a kid. His family was ripped apart. And then time passed. Life went on. And his brother, and his brother’s death, became part of his history, a scar and not a gaping wound. After my father died, I was sad all the time. I worked and I cried. I looked at the world through tear-stained eyes. I took pills to sleep. I tried not to dream. I put one foot in front of another and tried my best not to fall. I would see people laughing, partying and having fun, and think, that will never be me. I will never be happy again. And then one day, I realized I had gone a whole hour without reliving my father’s final days, without feeling angry with every middle-aged man I saw. An hour became two. I started being able to remember my father as he had been when he was well, when he was truly alive and not lying in a hospital bed with tubes everywhere. When I quit smoking for the last time, I thought about cigarettes all the time -- when I had my first cup of coffee or my second, when I talked on the phone, when I got in the car or ordered a drink or finished dinner. And then I started getting used to doing all those things without my trusty Marlboro. I went an hour without thinking about smoking, and then two hours and then a whole day, and then I was an exsmoker, someone who used to smoke and not someone who does. Death is harder. I never stopped missing my dad. It never went away. The list of those I miss just keeps growing. But life goes on. I became who I am. Tony will live on in Jill and their children, and in all of us he touched with his kindness and decency. There should be more to say, but for now, that will do. I will be there. It is not so hard. (Copyright 2008 Creators Syndicate Inc.) Cartoon Uproar Suggests Obama is an Untouchable Patrick J. Buchanan To watch the contortions over that New Yorker cover cartoon of the Obamas is to understand whom it is impermissible to offend in the America of 2008. The cartoon is a caricature of Michelle as an urban terrorist in an Angela Davis afro with an AK-47 slung over her back and a bandoleer of ammo in the Oval Office doing a fist-bump with a Barack decked out in turban and Muslim garb. On the wall hangs a portrait of Osama bin Laden. Blazing away in the fireplace is the American flag. “President Obama and First Lady -- as Seen From the Right-Wing Point of View” might have been the caption. Phil Klein of American Spectator nailed it: “This cartoon is intended to make fun of conservatives as ignorant racists and essentially marginalize any criticism of Obama as moronic.” Unfortunately for the New Yorker, the cartoon misfired. Blow-ups are likely to be as pandemic in right-wing dorms this fall as were posters of “Che” Guevara in left-wing dorms in the 1970s. Indeed, to a goodly slice of the media, this cartoon is no joking matter. Michelle and Barack had been dissed! For 48 hours, editors Rick Hertzberg and David Remnick fended off attacks, assuring media interrogators the cartoon’s purpose was not to satirize the Obamas but to satirize the caricature of Michelle and Barack in the mind of the paranoid right. Remnick insisted to The Huffington Post, “It’s not a satire about Obama -- it’s a satire about the distortions and misconceptions and prejudices about Obama.” Why did progressives recoil? Because the more savvy among them sense that, like much humor, this cartoon was an exaggeration that contained no small kernel of recognizable truth. After all, Barack did dump the flag pin. Michelle did say she had never been proud of her country before now. Barack did don that Ali Baba outfit in Somalia. His father and stepfather were Muslims. He does have a benefactor, Bill Ayers, who said after 9-11 he regrets not planting more bombs in the 1960s. He did have a pastor who lionizes Black Muslim Minister Louis Farrakhan. Put glasses on him, and Barack could play Malcolm X in the movies. And assume the point of the cartoon had been to satirize the Obamas. Why would that have been so outrageous? Journalists, after all, still celebrate Herblock, the cartoonist who portrayed Richard Nixon with the body of a rat climbing out of a sewer. Bill Clinton is still denounced as a racist for saying Barack’s claim to have been consistent on Iraq was a “fairy tale” and for comparing his South Carolina primary victory to Jesse Jackson’s. Hillary Clinton has been compared to the sex-starved Glenn Close character in “Fatal Attraction.” George Bush’s verbal gaffes are endlessly panned by late-night comics and Comedy Central. But Barack gets the special-ed treatment. Our first affirmative action candidate. The New Yorker made a “damn-fool decision,” said George Lockwood, a lecturer on journalistic ethics. David West of Brookings wailed to USA Today of the cartoon: “It’s the mass media at its worst. It perpetuates false information, and it’s highly inflammatory. ... It gives credibility to what’s been circulating for months, and that’s what makes it dangerous.” But dangerous to whom? Again, it is only a cartoon. Barack called the cartoon “an insult against Muslim Americans.” His campaign called it “tasteless and offensive.” That they are miffed is understandable. After all, 12 percent of Americans think Barack took his oath on the Koran, 26 percent think he was raised a Muslim, and 39 percent think he went to a madrassa. Yet, the reaction of our cultural elites is the more interesting and instructive. For it suggests that Obama is an untouchable to be protected. As an African-American, he is not to be treated the same as other politicians. Remnick and Hertzberg obviously felt intense moral pressure to remove any suspicion that they had satirized the Obamas. No problem, however, if they were mocking the American right. Bottom line: If you wish to stay in the good graces of the cultural elite, don’t mess with Michelle and Barack. On display here is not only the sensitivity of the Obama folks to portrayals of him as a radical, but the sensitivity -- the naked fear -- of an elite magazine that it might be perceived as lending aid and comfort to any who would dare question the nobility and patriotic ardor of the Obamas. If conservatives allow such a media to determine the weapons they may use and to limit the terrain upon which they are to be permitted to fight, they will lose this election. They have to peel the bark off Barack. As for the New Yorker, it emerges from the episode as not just unheroic, but just another magazine desperate not to offend its readership or the people whose approbation it seeks as the measure of its moral worth. (Copyright 2008 Creators Syndicate Inc.) |
