An ABC camerman was out today (Wednesday 1/26) with Marines on patrol when they were ambushed.  The camerman kept shooting film throughout the entire fight, in which one of the U.S. Marines he'd been chatting with moments before lost his life.

Apparently the cameraman was so crazy-brave in keeping his camera rolling that Bill Dolan interviewed HIM on ABC News, and I expect it will be shown again at 11 PM tonight.  The cameraman was really ashen, and spoke very movingly about the dead Marine, how the Marines were the same age as his kids, how this day has changed his life as it has, obviously and more devastatingly, changed the lives of all those who were waiting for this young Marine to come home.

It's an uncommonly moving interview, and not likely to be shown a lot because, well, it shows what the damn war is really about.

The cameraman, Joe Tesauro, 47, from Long Island, is my dear friend, a terrific human being, and my wife's first cousin.  May he reach home safely.

I lived in Atlanta in the ealry 1970s.  Memories of Dr. King were still, of course, very fresh.  I can't remember the man's name -- alas, I remember him in part because of his appearance (he had some congenital disorder that made him shorter than ordinary, and ramrod-straight).  The man in question was one of the few white employees of SCLC.  His job included editing audio tapes of speeches and sermons given by Dr. King, many of them in smalltown black churches across the South, and few of them well known to a general audience.  In those days, there was a weekly radio show produced by SCLC, and Dr. King's sermons etc. was an important part of it.

I used to have friendly, but let us say spirited, discussions of religion with my friend the audiotape editor.  He had been raised in rural Georgia in a hardcore fundie family, and did not have much patience with anything having to do with religion generally, and Protestant Christianity in particular.  (More)

In 1994 there was produced (by a British company) an expose of American government and religious leaders who flew children around for sex parties.

The show was scheduled to air on cable when, at the last minute, Congress threatned legislation crucifying the cable industry unless the expose went bye-bye.  And it did.

While supposedly all copies of the final cut were bought up and destroyed to protect the guilty (QUERY: since some of those implicated are still active in public life, is it possible that all copies WEREN't destroyed, but remain in private hands and are being used for blackmail) . . .

My father, liberal, Christian, Democrat and anti-racist, grew up in the FL panhandle.  My late mother, from Pittsburgh, was a Mayflower descendant (although she did not know it), an Ike Republican, and while by no means a rabid bigot had a dollop of prejudice against anyone not WASP. I am white, old-stock, lower middle-class, descended from 8 Revolutionary patriots (including Moses Bush, possibly kin to George Bush) and had ancestors on both sides at Gettysburg.  I am middle-aged, was born in Manhattan, have lived in the South, and am married to the grand-daughter of 4 Italian immigrants, we have an adopted Vietnamese daughter, and we moved specifically to send our kids to a highly diverse school. I am a Democrat, was a Vietnam-era draft resister, and tend toward the left on economic and environmental issues, and a bit more toward the center on social issues.