The Long Way Home
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The Long Way home Compiled By J. L. HERRERA Dedicated to: Marianela, Carolina, Bernie, and all the family. And to the memory of Floridor Ugarte With thanks to: Patrick Herrera, Anthony Raymond, Ethel and Gordon Sewell, Ken Carroll, Ken Herrera, Ellen Gray, and Lise Levaque AND TO THE MEMORY OF: My great-grandmother Caroline Huband-Smith (née Martin) INTRODUCTION When I decided to focus on older and sometimes forgotten authors and books in A Well-Worn Trail I did not at first realise how fascinating some of the snippets I turned up would be. I don’t mean that all these books struck me as great literature or books that should be brought back from the edge of the grave, reprinted, republished, re-promoted as ‘forgotten classics’. No. But they were evocative of time and place. And, hidden in there, were books and ideas and memories which brought considerable enjoyment with them. So after some pondering I decided I would do a similar book, an almost sequel, another wander down memory lane. It would be overstating the case to say I am bringing forgotten writers, forgotten books, back from oblivion but perhaps this, at times, is the case. And talking of books I came upon a mention by P. D. James on how hard it actually is to read in bed. This is true. If you lie on one side your elbow gets tired. If you lie on your back both wrists get tired. If you lie on your tummy both elbows get tired. If you prop yourself up on pillows your top half gets cold. Why hasn’t anyone come up with an amazing invention which would make reading in bed the pleasure it promises? But even without the Amazing Turn as You Read Portable Armrest, Patent Pending, I still read and enjoy reading in bed. I hope you do too. J. L. Herrera Hobart 2017. P.S. After some thought I changed the title of The Final Chapter to A Final Chapter as I had not kept to my plan to compile calendars around a theme such as travel, childhood, politics. Sometimes there is a satisfying feeling in saying ‘there, that’s done’ but at other times I find I can’t let an idea, a theme, a series, go. I am now pondering on whether this should be A Long Way rather than The Long Way … 2 THE LONG WAY HOME January 1: Maria Edgeworth James Frazer January 2: Isaac Asimov John O’Donohue January 3: J. R. R. Tolkien January 4: Michele Turner * * * * * Paula Kamen wrote Finding Iris Chang which is about the author of The Rape of Nanking, though not precisely a biography. “Too long the ethic in journalism has been the short-sighted macho one of swallowing feelings, maybe compartmentalizing them, and facing trauma all alone, perhaps by medicating sorrows in drinks after work. Or reporters just leave themselves to feel the impact years later with a worsening of health. Journalism schools lack a basic curriculum to teach about trauma, along with a vocabulary for expressing it, the impact on victims, and its possible fallout to those who report about it. This is especially negligent considering that so much that journalists do involve trauma, from day one; typical first-year beat reporters pay their dues, as I did, covering crime and major accidents.” This is a little different to someone who carefully and conscientiously decides on a topic for a book then plunges into the research. Someone sent out to a siege, a road accident, a fire, prepares for something horrible but probably hopes it will all end safely. Someone choosing to write about atrocities knows they are not going to melt away, that they cannot say the victim was airlifted to hospital and is now in a stable condition. She goes on, “This blindness is deeply rooted in journalism. “The eternal culture of news organizations does not tolerate expressions of weakness,” observed longtime newspaper reporter Roger Simpson. He is also the founding director of the groundbreaking Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at the University of Washington in Seattle. He did give me some hope, saying that the ethic in journalism recently has started to slowly change. The Dart Center, founded in 2000 in the Department of Communication at the university, helps to educate journalism professors and organizations internationally about the process of trauma and its possible impact on journalists. Some of this corporate investment is out of common sense to keep reporters going over the long term, and some is out of fear of a major lawsuit for a news organization in the future. He described the center as following a greater national movement of trauma awareness, spurred by the past three decades of work by the women’s movement in exposing such issues as sexual assault, and by psychological research on post-traumatic stress disorder. “Simpson’s recently reissued coauthored book, Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical Reporting about Victims & Trauma, points to the need for education of journalists on many specific dynamics of different traumas, including sexual abuse and domestic violence, terrorist attacks, war, and genocide. As he told me, a special challenge of tackling the topic of genocide is the typical denial involved, such as the Armenian genocide in Turkey from 1915, still a hot-button topic there. Talking to veterans should also involve familiarity with post-traumatic stress disorder and managing it in the interview.” * * * * * “For more than a year, a discharged GI, Ron Ridenhour, who had heard about the massacre (at My Lai), tried to interest the American press at home and those based in Saigon, notably Newsweek, without success. Finally, the story was broken not by any of the 600 accredited correspondents in 3 Vietnam, but by a young freelancer in the United States, Seymour Hersh, who regarded the murder of unarmed civilians by American soldiers as shocking. “In November 1969, Hersh had spotted a small press agency item that one Lieutenant William Calley had been charged with the murder of 109 ‘Oriental human beings’ and that had gone unnoticed. He tracked Calley down to Fort Benning in Georgia, where he interviewed him. He then set out on a journey in the United States of, he estimates, more than 50,000 miles, finding and interviewing more than fifty members of Charlie Company. In 1970, he wrote a reconstruction of the atrocity for the little-known Dispatch News Service. When Newsweek finally acknowledged his scoop, its banner headline said, ‘An American Tragedy’. This set the tone for the coverage of My Lai as an aberration that called for sympathy for Americans, not the Vietnamese – even though other atrocities were now being revealed.” John Pilger introducing Hersh’s report in Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism That Changed the World. * But sometimes the journalists who suffer the most are not the ‘big names’, the people with a prestigious paper or a major news service. Take for instance the case of Molly Norris in William Shawcross’s Justice and the Enemy. “Particularly poignant was the case of Molly Norris. In April 2010, Ms. Norris, a cartoonist on the Seattle Weekly, was appalled by the worldwide self-censorship over images of Mohammed. She drew a poster advertising an event—“Everybody Draw Mohammed Day”—on May 20, 2011. Her intention was not to abuse Islam but to create safety in numbers and to defend freedom of speech. This was honorable but rash. “To her horror, her idea went viral on Facebook with thousands of different sorts of drawings of Mohammed submitted. As worldwide arguments over her initiative began, she disassociated herself from it. Too late. Like some ghastly mythical fury lurking in faraway mountains, Anwar al-Awlaki immediately issued from his eyrie in Yemen a fatwa demanding the death of Molly Norris and everyone else who had drawn Mohammed. “The medicine prescribed by the Messenger of Allah is the execution of those involved,” he said in Inspire magazine. “The large number of participants makes it easier for us because there are more targets to choose from.” He said it would be difficult for the authorities to protect them all. And there were indeed more than enough radicalized American Muslims to pose a real and perpetual threat to Molly Norris. The F.B.I. declared it would not defend her and the Seattle Weekly announced “there is no more Molly.” She became a non person, hiding in Washington State—or somewhere else. “Molly Norris’s entire life, not just her freedom of speech, was ruined in the land of the First Amendment by a threat from an Islamist terrorist demanding the murder of yet more Americans. This is the route down which freedom dies. We make fun of Christianity, mock (or malign) the Jews, laugh at the Dalai Lama, but we often maintain a respectful silence about Islam. Why is one religion being accorded so much more deference than all the others?” It could be said that, like Salman Rushdie, she should have been aware of the forces she was dabbling with. But this seems unfair. Can anyone fully comprehend the mentality of an Anwar al- Awlaki? It could be reiterated, what other people have reiterated: that the people she was dealing with are peculiarly lacking in any sense of humour. But I would like to bring forward what seems to be the underlying problem. The boringness of the people she unwittingly tangled with, the tedium of their slogans, the lack of imagination and profound thought. Like Communist slogans, like advertising jingles, they soon become tired and dull. Unless … Yes, unless you can offer something dramatic to back them up.