Upon hearing of Michael Jackson’s death, two pained sensations struck me: The first was sadness over creative brilliance being snuffed. The second was the knowledge that our celebrity construction/deconstruction machine was about to perform up to its usual, um, standards. And what a bravura performance it has been. I know this and I have abided…
Details“You have no right to remain silent. You have no right against self-incrimination. No attorney shall be appointed for you. Don’t like it? Who asked you?” Such are the court-tested Miranda warnings for the lab animals otherwise known as students. But at least one civil right now is affixed for students— the right not to…
DetailsFew athletes have had better college careers than Curtis Jerrells. For four years, he started every game at Baylor University, leading the team in scoring and assists each year. No one could watch this fearless floor leader from Austin’s Del Valle High and not project him in a pro uniform. No one, that is, except…
DetailsAudie 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.…
DetailsAs 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…
DetailsThey 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…
DetailsThis 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…
DetailsWater 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…
DetailsI 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…
DetailsI’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…
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