Olio
Leaves from an Editor's Notebook
by
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A Sunny, Sunday Afternoon What better way to spend a sunny, Sunday afternoon than to sit beneath an apple tree and try to come up with enough copy to fill a quarter-page hole on the opinion page?
A cool breeze blows through the tree’s dense foliage, and a bird chirps nervously from its nest a few feet above my head.
Butterflies flit erratically above the round bales of hay lined up in neat rows beyond the wooden fence on which wild berries and wild flowers climb in competition with obnoxious weeds and burrs, three of which have already affixed themselves to my shoe laces.
The dog lies on the ground beside my chair, panting softly, as is to be expected of a fellow who can never take off his heavy fur coat.
The peaceful sounds of nature are irregularly drowned out by the roar of rubber on asphalt, as vehicles drive past on the highway in front of the house.
The buzz of an airplane far above joins the fainter but more insistent buzz of an insect which persists in mistaking my bald head for a landing strip.
Annoying insect aside, all is right with the world ... except ....
... except ...
Except that half a world away young American soldiers, and some not so young, are killing and being killed in a war not of their choosing, in a war chosen by men who managed to suppress their own warrior instincts until they were safely beyond the risk of military service but who have come into full-blown, chest-thumping warriorhood now that they can call upon a later generation to do the dying, and the killing....
... and the killing ....
"The end of the soldier is not, as is sometimes falsely said, to die for his country; it is to kill for his country. In as far as he dies he is a failure; his work is to kill, and he attains perfection as a soldier when he becomes a perfect killer.”—John A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study, p. 133.
Killing leaves a mark on a soldier’s psyche. Even killing a uniformed enemy soldier on a conventional battlefield who is trying to kill you or your comrades, as was the case for the most part through World War II.
A line of ants travels busily back and forth on the bottom board of the wooden fence on which I have propped my feet. They touch heads momentarily as they meet, before going on about their task, whatever that may be. Their lives are short and to us meaningless, but they have the luxury of never being called upon to take the life of a sentient being.
A horse-drawn buggy passes by, and then another, arousing the dog from his lethargy and giving rise in my mind to the question of whether members of that religious society willingly enlist to die and kill to satisfy the egos and unspoken (unspeakable?) passions of armchair warriors.
An apple drops from the tree with a thud, narrowly missing the dog, who looks at it with bemusement.
The dog can kill, too. For all his tongue-lolling goofiness, he is quite capable of it, and has done so. Twice he has caught unwary squirrels, one who misjudged a leap from one limb to another and fell to the ground within the dog’s reach, and another who gambled that he could safely cross the open ground to another tree, and lost.
Each time the dog so grievously injured the squirrel that I had to finish killing it, cursing the dog for his viciousness as I bashed in the head of the squirrel with the same shovel I used to dig a small grave in the woods beside the house.
But the dog, who really is a good and sweet and gentle and lovable pet, had only succumbed to his instincts and done what was in his nature to do.
A long blade of grass waves snake-like back and forth above the bottom fence board as I inadvertently kill a tiny insect when I try to shoo it off the page, leaving a small smear on the white, unlined paper on which I am writing. I feel the tiniest twinge of remorse at having ended its life, nothing like what I felt when killing the two injured squirrels. And nothing within an order of magnitude of orders of magnitude like what our soldiers must feel when they kill another soldier in battle. Or kill a “suspected insurgent” in the streets of Baghdad. Or kill a child in an Iraqi slum who had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The souls of our soldiers, those who manage only to kill for their country rather than die for it, will eternally bear the scars of what they have been called upon to do to satisfy the desires of officials infinitely less worthy than any one of them.
A motorcycle hums by bearing a middle-aged couple, both wearing helmets. Both the humming (as opposed to the childish “Pay attention to me!” roar many motorcyclists delight in inflicting on the world at large) and the helmets are reassuring.
That thought is interrupted by the ringing of the cordless phone which I have slavishly brought outside with me. It is my sister-in-law, calling from the Tucson airport. A nurse (like my wife), she and several other nurses and doctors have spent the past week in a remote village in Mexico, giving the villagers medical care they would otherwise not have. There is sadness in her voice as she speaks of one child with a cleft palate that will never be repaired, two children who are each missing an ear because of birth defects, another child with eye problems.
I give the phone to my wife and come inside to type up my observations on this sunny, Sunday afternoon.
[This piece appeared on 13 July 2005.]
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About the Book
By their very nature, most newspaper columns and editorials are ephemeral. They are often written in haste to meet a deadline, and what excites interest today may elicit only yawns tomorrow or the next day. This is especially true of community newspapers, whose focus is on matters of interest to a smaller, parochial readership. This book is a collection of pieces that step outside that mold. The author's broad education (four degrees, including a Ph.D. and a J.D.) and wide range of work experiences (college professor, probation officer, prosecuting attorney, professional magician, novelist, editor, publisher, and grocery-store sackboy, to name a few) have provided him with a unusual perspective from which to observe and comment on the problems and pleasures of being a sentient being on Planet Earth in the twenty-first century—and on how we got to this point in human history. Inspired by the example and encouragement of the newspaper editor who gave him his first job in journalism, the author has inflicted upon the readers of several newspapers his reflections on a broad and eclectic range of subjects, from religious and racial intolerance to UFO "sightings" and the beauty of a toad's eye. Throughout it all, the author has been motivated by one unvarying purpose—to make his readers think. Not just about last week's school board meeting or next month's municipal elections, but about ideas and issues with a shelf-life longer than that of ripe tomatoes in your grocer's produce department. Here, then, are half a hundred of those pieces, rescued from dusty newspaper "morgues" and offered to a broader audience than the unsuspecting subscribers to whom they were originally addressed. The author will be pleased if you read them, but he will have failed in his purpose unless reading them makes you think.
About the Author
Guy Townsend grew up in Marianna, Arkansas, graduating from high school in 1961. After earning a B.A., an M.A. and a Ph.D. in history and teaching for five years at colleges from Florida to South Dakota—with a year-long intermission as a historian in the Louisville office of the Corps of Engineers—Townsend got his first taste of the newspaper business as bureau chief for the Blytheville (Ark.) Courier News. He left the Courier to edit two newspapers in Indiana before returning to the Courier as a staff writer. After a brief stint as associate editor of Practical Horseman Magazine in West Chester, Pennsylvania, he returned to his wife's home state of Indiana and established Brownstone Books, a publishing house devoted to works of mystery-fiction criticism. At age forty Townsend decided to become a prosecuting attorney, so he accepted an appointment as chief probation officer for Indiana's Fifth Judicial Circuit and a month later enrolled in the evening division at Chase College of Law, seventy-five miles away in Highland Heights, Kentucky. He completed the four-year course in three years and then ran for and was elected prosecuting attorney. He later served as deputy prosecutor in two other Indiana circuits and as assistant D.A. in two Tennessee circuits. Finding retirement not to his liking, Townsend returned to the newspaper business in early 2003, when he and his wife purchased the Flemingsburg (Ky.) Gazette. They sold the paper at the end of 2006 and now reside in Berea, Kentucky. In addition to scholarly articles, Townsend has written one novel (To Prove a Villain, 1985), co-written another (Loose Coins, 1998, with Joe L. Hensley), and edited a bibliography (Rex Stout: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography, 1980). He also edited and published The Mystery Fancier, a journal of mystery-fiction criticism, from 1976 to 1992.