Audie Murphy had the kind of face you find on a baby shampoo bottle. He was every grandma’s grandson. So, after World War II, Hollywood wanted a crack at one of history’s most heavily decorated American soldiers. Among the amazing things about this man’s story is that, at least on the set, he didn’t crack.…
As horrors from the streets of Tehran snake-danced past America’s eyes the other night, I had an eerie TV experience: viewing comparably unconscionable ugliness on the streets of America. It came from the 2007 documentary Chicago 10 — footage from the bloody riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Chicago 10 is pulsing evidence that even in a…
They remind me of the springer spaniel I once knew who fell in love with a moldy piece of rug. The fight put up last week by the social conservatives on the State Board of Education reminded me of the bared-teeth tug of war that ensued when someone tried to take that piece of rug…
This time, as with last time, my Father’s Day offering to my dad is a nod upstairs. This is the second spring since his passing. Last spring about this time my brothers and I were elbow-deep in cleaning out the house of our childhood and his fatherhood. I’ll bet many who’ve been in this situation…
Water is an efficient conveyor of sound. At a peaceful, four-star hotel pool, even more so. Recently, in a departure from workaday toils at an education conference, I experienced at poolside how the nonworkaday world lives, and thinks. Two suntanners, who definitely are not fans of our president, were talking health care policy. Both appeared…
I am not going to ascribe to all Baptists the biblical stylings of Wiley Drake. He’s the preacher from California, a former vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, who told Fox News he prays for Barack Obama to die. Drake has an ironclad explanation should the Secret Service show up at his door. He…
I’d love to know back in the ’60s when that delicious sense of inevitability set in — that sense that, though struggles would remain, right was winning and Jim Crow was toast. It might have been like last week with these revelations: Both Dick Cheney and Ted Olson came out for same-sex marriage. That was…
Upon Senate passage of the state biennial budget, the well-attired David Dewhurst was busting his buttons. The lieutenant governor praised a state budget “that meets the needs of our growing state.” State Sen. Elliott Shapleigh, D-El Paso, had a different take: With this budget, the gorgeous state of Texas once again is jostling for the…