Dunkirk

We got around to watching “Dunkirk” a few weeks ago, and while I thought it was good, what I did not appreciate was the quote used at the end:

This film is dedicated to all those whose lives were impacted by the events at Dunkirk.

Seriously? All those? Including Hitler? His life was certainly impacted. Goebbels? Goring? Speer? Seriously? Because their lives were impacted by it, to be sure. Also, please use “affected” rather than “impacted.” Please.

Reading Beyond a Headline or Title

As a journalist, I am accustomed to receiving angry mail and such after an article is published. Another thing I’m accustomed to is how often the mail comes from people who have not read the article. What people often do is look at the headline or title and react. Or perhaps they skim the opening lines or a paragraph or two. I suspect this is what happened to poor Professor Bruce Gilley with his “The Case for Colonialism.” I’m a bit late with this, but I finally got around to reading it and am linking it here. If you read the whole thing, you will see there is nothing remotely racist/insensitive/every-other-name-you-can-imagine to be found about it. You might not agree with it all (or at all), but you’d be hard-pressed after reading it to understand the madness that followed its publication.

National Poetry Month

It is National Poetry Month – for the occasion, I wrote this poem. It isn’t very good – it doesn’t even rhyme. But it’s mine.

OLD-FASHIONED

I once lived in Paris

In an apartment with four other girls and four thousand cockroaches

My mother sent me letters about getting married

And books about getting married

And – in her tiny, precise script – advice about getting married

Advice hard come by; decades of marriage and few flowers behind her

 

She sent me articles about things that would kill me:

Date rape drugs

And certain vegetables

And taking strangers’ suitcases across borders

And unpasteurized cheese, of which I ate beaucoup with butter and baguette

Fears saved up from a lifetime of hurt, only occasionally dulled by her beloved Old-Fashioneds

 

I was dating, if you could call it that

And studying French poetry and such

At the Sorbonne

I read about roses and profiting from my youth

Allons voir si la rose and cueilliez vostre Jeunesse

A sort of French, Gather ye rosebuds while ye may

 

Until a man who looked like the lead singer from A-ha

Fell in love with me and bought me roses

We saw ‘Goodfellas’ together

I laughed at the lowlifes

He was horrified by my laughter

He loved me so much I was sure I would shrivel up and fall

 

I sometimes look at his Facebook page

Half dreading I will see

“I’m so glad that girl wouldn’t marry me”

But I never do

I just see his big, splashy paintings, violet and red streaks like petals

And still the lead singer from A-ha, crinkle-eyed and bearded now

 

I became a journalist and wrote articles

about a German Shepherd who raised tiny baby kittens as her own

and about women over 40 getting pregnant at the sperm bank

gathering their rosebuds in a panic

which is something a friend of mine did and something I never contemplated

As I am old-fashioned