legacies

Ethics Dunce: Ashlea Johnson And The Supporters Of Her Petition

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Crack Mayor

How wrong is the Change.org petition posted by Ashlea Johnson and demanding that TMZ remove and apologize for the above headline announcing the death of Marion Barry?

1. This is an attempt to whitewashing a very soiled legacy.

2. Barry, and no one else, ruined his legacy. Next to using crack while Mayor of Washington D.C. (and being filmed in the process), Barry is best known for his immortal quote after his arrest with an old girl-friend and drug pal: “Bitch set me up!”

3. TMZ has both the freedom to publish whatever it chooses however it chooses, as long as it is true. This is true. Barry was “the Crack Mayor.” Deal with it.

4. It would have been good for all if Barry’s enablers and supporters forced him to apologize and be accountable for his various crimes, hustles and misdeeds, of which the crack was only the most spectacular. Instead, Ashlea Johnson and those like her kept electing Barry, who was unrepentant and unreformed, to office,  sending the message to District politicians that character and honesty, even good citizenship, don’t matter as much as group identification and cronyism

The TMZ headline was certainly not kind, polite or diplomatic, but rogues, miscreants and thieves do not deserve pleasant or respectful obituaries. When Bernie Madoff dies, he will be called a swindler, because he was one. When Anthony Weiner passes on, he will be noted as the “sexting Congressman,” because that was his legacy. Monica Lewinsky will be eulogized in the press as Clinton’s intern plaything, or something nastier: what else should she be remembered for? Marion Barry could have earned a headline describing him as a transformative mayor of the nation’s Capital, for he had the ability to be that and more. Barry chose to be the Crack Mayor instead.

Ashlea should have sent him a petition about forty years ago, demanding that he stop being such a jerk.

________________

Pointer: Mediaite

 

Frank Buckles, Speaker Boehner, and the Duty To Remember

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Frank Buckles is our last chance to remember...

They fought overseas in battles with strange names like the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. They sang charmingly upbeat songs like “Over There!” and “Inky-Dinky Parley-Voo.” A lot of them were gassed, about 200,000 were wounded, 120,000 died, and many of them who  came home were never the same, dubbed “the lost generation” by Ernest Hemingway. They were America’s “doughboys,” the young homegrown heroes of World War I, who arrived late to a pointless war they didn’t start, and became the first American soldiers to die in large numbers in foreign lands.

The last of them died last week. His name was Frank Buckles, and he had lied about his age to become a soldier at the tender age of 16. In his 110 years, Buckles took part in a lot of history, sailing for the Continent on the Carpathia, the very same ship that rescued the Titanic’s survivors; traveling the world by sea as ship’s purser, which afforded him an accidental encounter with Adolf Hitler, and having the bad luck to be in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded, ending up as a prisoner for most of World War II.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), and Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, (R-W.Va.) have introduced resolutions to allow fellow West Virginian Buckles to lie in honor in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, where the public could pay their respects to him by filing past his casket. Though usually reserved for former presidents and distinguished members of Congress, unelected American citizens of distinction have laid in state in the Rotunda, such as civil rights icon Rosa Parks and Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

Apparently Speaker of the House John Boehner doesn’t think Buckles makes the grade, for he has rejected the idea and decreed that the last World War I soldier in a special ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, but not at the Capitol. Continue reading →