Ronald E. Yates's Blog, page 51

My Retrospective on the Tiananmen Square Massacre Tomorrow

Please join ForeignCorrespondent tomorrow, June 4, for my personal retrospective on the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China–a horrendous event that I covered on that date in 1989. 

In light of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) continued repressive behavior toward Hong Kong and its obvious responsibility and culpability in allowing the COVID-19 virus to spread from Wuhan and infect the rest of the world, what happened in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square 32 years ago shouldn’t surprise anyone, least of all the Biden administration. Sadly, it apparently does–or there is some reason Biden is unwilling to hold China accountable for its despicable behavior regarding the COVID-19 virus.

On June 4, 1989, there was no doubt about who was responsible for the massacre that took place in the square. The Chinese Communist Party–the same party that I believe has compromised Joe Biden and/or his son Hunter. But that is another story for another time.

Tomorrow, if you visit the ForeignCorrespondent blog, you will learn just how brutal and treacherous the CCP can be.

 

   Covering Tiananmen Square 1989

 

Does Our Diversity Portend Disintegration?

I recall interviewing a World War II-era Japanese admiral in 1975 about the war, which at the time had ended just 30 years before.

“The Japanese military felt confident it could defeat America on the battlefield and at sea because America was considered a “mongrel” nation—a nation of many races blended lacking Japan’s homogeneity and strong national spirit,” he told me. “That was wrong.”

But America in the 1930s and 1940s was nowhere near the “mongrel” nation it is today. In fact, America at the outset of WW II was close to 90 percent white. Today, as Pat Buchanan points out in the commentary below, it is barely 60 percent white.

The idea of America being a “melting pot” was always considered its strength. But that idea emerged in a nation where racial and ethnic assimilation was the coalescing glue that held our diverse population together. Today, the concept of assimilation seems to have been abandoned in favor of tribalism, in which races, religions, ethnicities, and cultures prefer to segregate themselves into disparate, squabbling communities.

As someone who vividly recalls the enforced segregation in America in the past, I am disheartened by politicians, educators, activists, and community leaders who prefer to drive wedges between us and divide us further rather than bring us together.

For those who want to create partitions and wall us off from one another, such as Marxist organizations, including Black Lives Matter, ANTIFA, and the growing number of socialists in the Democrat Party, the melting pot is anathema. I wonder, as does Buchanan in his commentary if America will survive this destructive splintering.

Does Our Diversity Portend Disintegration?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

After nine people were shot to death by a public transit worker, who then killed himself in San Jose, the latest mass murder in America, California Governor Gavin Newsom spoke for many on the eve of this Memorial Day weekend.

“What the hell is going on in the United States of America? What the hell is wrong with us?”

Good question. Indeed, it seems that the country is coming apart.

In May, Congress, to address a spate of criminal assaults on Asian Americans, enacted a new hate crimes law to protect them.

May also witnessed a rash of assaults on Jewish Americans to show the attackers’ hatred of Israel and support for the Palestinians in the Gaza war.

Political commentator Pat Buchanan 

The terms “racist” and “racism” are now commonplace accusations in political discourse and a public square where whites are expected to ritually denounce the “white privilege” into which they were born.

In the year since the death of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter “Defund the Police!” campaign, the shootings and killings of cops and citizens in our great cities have skyrocketed.

In March and again in April, 167,000 immigrants were caught crossing our southern border illegally. The invaders are now coming from Central and South America, Africa, the Islamic world, and Asia.

And their destiny may be to replace us.

For as the endless invasion proceeds, native-born Americans have ceased to reproduce themselves. Not since the birth dearth of the Great Depression and WWII, when the Silent Generation was born, has the U.S. population experienced such a birth decline as today.

At the same time, a war of all against all in America seems to raise the question, to which recitation of the cliche — “Our diversity is our greatest strength” — no longer seems an adequate response.

Is there no limit to the racial, religious, ideological, political, cultural, and ethnic diversity the nation can accommodate before it splinters into its component parts?

In professions of religious belief, atheists, agnostics, and secularists have become our largest “congregation,” followed by Catholics and Protestants, both of which are in numerical decline.

Diversity of faiths leads to irreconcilable, clashing opinions about morality on our era’s most divisive social issues: abortion, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, etc.

Racial diversity, too, is bringing back problems unseen since the 1960s.

America was 80% white in 1960, but that figure is down to 60% and falling. In 25 years, we will all belong to racial minorities.

Are we Americans still united in our love of country? Do we still take pride in what we have done for our own people and what America has done for the world in the 400 years since Jamestown?

Hardly. Part of the nation buys into the academic and intellectual elites’ version of history, tracing America’s birth as a nation to the arrival of the first slave ship in Virginia in 1619.

We not only disagree about our history; some actually hate our history.

We can see that hate in the statues and monuments destroyed, not just of Confederate military heroes but of the European explorers who discovered America, the Founding Fathers who created the nation, and the leaders, from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson to Teddy Roosevelt, who built the America we became.

Yet, tens of millions from all over the world still see coming to America as the realization of a life’s dream.

Some look at Western civilization as 500 years of colonialism, imperialism, genocide, slavery, and segregation — practiced against people of color. This is the source of the West’s wealth and power, it is said, and that wealth and power should be redistributed to the descendants of the victims of Western rapacity.

For many, equality of opportunity is no longer enough. We must make restitution, deliver reparations and guarantee a future where equality of rewards replaces equality of rights.

Meritocracy must yield to equity. Elite high schools, such as Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, Stuyvesant in New York, and Lowell in San Francisco, must abandon their emphasis on grades, tests, and exams to gain admissions and prove progress.

And these schools must be remade to mirror the racial and ethnic composition of the communities where they reside.

And a new cancel culture has taken root in America.

Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, a CNN commentator, was fired for suggesting that Native American institutions and culture played no significant role in the foundation and formation of the American Republic.

“We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes, we have Native Americans,” Santorum said, adding: “There isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”

Impolitic though this rendition was, was it wholly false?

Something is seriously wrong with a country that professes to be great but whose elite cannot abide the mildest of heresies to its established truth.

Patrick Buchanan has been a senior advisor to three Presidents, twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and the nominee of the Reform Party in 2000.

LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY, IN A LAND THAT TIME FORGOT

I have no idea who put this together, but it showed up one day in my mailbox and I thought I would share it with my followers. It talks about a different time in America. Some say it was a simpler time without the complications, apprehensions, divisions, and violence our country faces today. Possibly. But as a kid growing up back then, I recall that not everything was nirvana. We had problems, that’s for sure. Nevertheless, I do remember that, unlike today, it was a more innocent era with much more civility and benevolence. I think that is what the author of this nostalgic ode is saying.

 LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY, IN A LAND THAT TIME FORGOT,

 BEFORE THE DAYS OF DYLAN , OR THE DAWN OF CAMELOT,

THERE LIVED A RACE OF INNOCENTS, AND THEY WERE YOU AND ME,

FOR IKE WAS IN THE WHITE HOUSE IN THAT LAND WHERE WE WERE BORN,

 WHERE NAVELS WERE FOR ORANGES, AND PEYTON PLACE WAS PORN.

 

 WE LONGED FOR LOVE AND ROMANCE, AND WAITED FOR OUR PRINCE,

EDDIE FISHER MARRIED LIZ, AND NO ONE’S SEEN HIM SINCE.

 WE DANCED TO ‘LITTLE DARLIN,’ AND SANG TO ‘STAGGER LEE’

 AND CRIED FOR BUDDY HOLLY IN THE LAND THAT MADE ME, ME.

 ONLY GIRLS WORE EARRINGS THEN, AND 3 WAS ONE TOO MANY.

AND ONLY BOYS WORE FLAT-TOPS, AND ONLY IN OUR WILDEST DREAMS DID WE EXPECT TO SEE

A BOY NAMED GEORGE WITH LIPSTICK, IN THE LAND THAT MADE ME, ME.

 WE FELL FOR FRANKIE AVALON, ANNETTE WAS OH, SO NICE,

 AND WHEN THEY MADE A MOVIE, THEY NEVER MADE IT TWICE.

 

 WE DIDN’T HAVE A STAR TREK FIVE, OR PSYCHO TWO AND THREE,

 OR ROCKY-RAMBO TWENTY IN THE LAND THAT MADE ME, ME.

 MISS KITTY HAD A HEART OF GOLD, AND CHESTER HAD A LIMP,

 AND REAGAN WAS A DEMOCRAT WHOSE CO-STAR WAS A CHIMP.

 

 WE HAD A MR. WIZARD, BUT NOT A MR. T, AND OPRAH COULDN’T TALK YET,  IN THE LAND THAT MADE ME, ME.

 WE HAD OUR SHARE OF HEROES, WE NEVER THOUGHT THEY’D GO,

AT LEAST NOT BOBBY DARIN, OR MARILYN MONROE.

 FOR YOUTH WAS STILL ETERNAL, AND LIFE WAS YET TO BE,

 AND ELVIS WAS FOREVER IN THE LAND THAT MADE ME, ME.

 WE’D NEVER SEEN THE ROCK BAND THAT WAS GRATEFUL TO BE DEAD,

 AND AIRPLANES WEREN’T NAMED JEFFERSON, AND ZEPPELINS WERE NOT LED.

 AND BEATLES LIVED IN GARDENS THEN, AND MONKEYS LIVED IN TREES,

 MADONNA WAS MARY IN THE LAND THAT MADE ME, ME.

WE’D NEVER HEARD OF MICROWAVES, OR TELEPHONES IN CARS, AND BABIES

 MIGHT BE BOTTLE-FED, BUT THEY WERE NOT GROWN IN JARS.

 

 AND PUMPING IRON GOT WRINKLES OUT, AND ‘GAY’ MEANT FANCY-FREE,

 AND DORMS WERE NEVER CO-ED IN THE LAND THAT MADE ME, ME.

 WE HADN’T SEEN ENOUGH OF JETS TO TALK ABOUT THE LAG,

 AND MICROCHIPS WERE WHAT WAS LEFT AT THE BOTTOM OF THE BAG.

 AND HARDWARE WAS A BOX OF NAILS, AND BYTES CAME FROM A FLEA,

 AND ROCKET SHIPS WERE FICTION IN THE LAND THAT MADE ME, ME.

 T-BIRDS CAME WITH PORTHOLES, AND SIDE SHOWS CAME WITH FREAKS, AND  BATHING SUITS CAME BIG ENOUGH TO COVER BOTH YOUR CHEEKS.

 

 AND COKE CAME JUST IN BOTTLES, AND SKIRTS BELOW THE KNEE,

 AND CASTRO CAME TO POWER NEAR THE LAND THAT MADE ME, ME.

 WE HAD NO CREST WITH FLUORIDE, WE HAD NO HILL STREET BLUES,

 WE HAD NO PATTERNED PANTYHOSE OR LIPTON HERBAL TEA

OR PRIME-TIME ADS FOR THOSE DYSFUNCTIONS IN THE LAND THAT MADE ME, ME.

 

 THERE WERE NO GOLDEN ARCHES, NO PERRIER TO CHILL,

AND FISH WERE NOT CALLED WANDA, AND CATS WERE NOT CALLED BILL

AND MIDDLE-AGED WAS 35 AND OLD WAS FORTY-THREE, AND ANCIENT WERE OUR PARENTS IN THE LAND THAT MADE ME, ME.

 

 BUT ALL THINGS HAVE A SEASON, OR SO WE’VE HEARD THEM SAY,

 AND NOW INSTEAD OF MAYBELLINE, WE SWEAR BY RETIN-A.

 THEY SEND US INVITATIONS TO JOIN AARP,

 WE’VE COME A LONG WAY, BABY, FROM THE LAND THAT MADE ME, ME.

 

 SO NOW WE FACE A BRAVE NEW WORLD IN SLIGHTLY LARGER JEANS,

 AND WONDER WHY THEY’RE USING SMALLER PRINT IN MAGAZINES.

 AND WE TELL OUR CHILDREN’S CHILDREN OF THE WAY IT USED TO BE,

 LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY IN THE LAND THAT MADE ME, ME.

 

If you didn’t grow up in the 1950s, you missed one of the greatest eras in history. I hope you enjoyed this read as much as I did.

The Democrats are Right: There are Two Americas

A while back Bob Lonsberry, a Rochester talk radio personality on WHAM 1180 AM, said this in response to Democrats’ opinions about Income inequality and the fact that as a result, there are two Americas.

It bears repeating and reposting, so here it is. In addition to his radio show, Lonsberry is a columnist and veteran.

Two Americas

By Bob Lonsberry

The Democrats are right, there are two Americas.

The America that works, and the America that doesn’t.

The America that contributes, and the America that doesn’t.

It’s not the haves and the have nots, it’s the dos and the don’ts.

Some people do their duty as Americans, obey the law, support themselves, contribute to society, and others don’t. That’s the divide in America.

It’s not about income inequality, it’s about civic irresponsibility.

It’s about a political party that preaches hatred, greed, and victimization in order to win elective office.

It’s about a political party that loves power more than it loves its country. That’s not invective, that’s truth, and it’s about time someone said it.

The politics of envy was on proud display a couple of weeks ago when President Biden pledged the rest of his term to fighting “income inequality.” He noted that some people make more than other people, that some people have higher incomes than others, and he says that’s not just.

That is the rationale of thievery. The other guy has it, you want it, Biden will take it for you. Vote Democrat.

That is the philosophy that produced Detroit. It is the electoral philosophy that is destroying America.

It conceals a fundamental deviation from American values and common sense because it ends up not benefiting the people who support it, but a betrayal.

The Democrats have not empowered their followers; they have enslaved them in a culture of dependence and entitlement, of victimhood and anger instead of ability and hope.

The president’s premise – that you reduce income inequality by debasing the successful – seeks to deny the successful the consequences of their choices, and spare the unsuccessful the consequences of their choices. Because, by and large, income variations in society are a result of different choices leading to different consequences. Those who choose wisely and responsibly have a far greater likelihood of success, while those who choose foolishly and irresponsibly have a far greater likelihood of failure. Success and failure usually manifest themselves in personal and family income.

You choose to drop out of high school or to skip college – and you are apt to have a different outcome than someone who gets a diploma and pushes on with purposeful education and/or employment.

You have your children out of wedlock and life is apt to take one course; you have them within a marriage and life is apt to take another course.

Most often in life, our destination is determined by the course we take.

My doctor, for example, makes far more than I do. There is significant income inequality between us. Our lives have had an inequality of outcome, but, our lives also have had an inequality of effort. While my doctor went to college and then devoted his young adulthood to medical school and residency, I chose another avenue.

He made a choice, I made a choice, and our choices led us to different outcomes. His outcome pays a lot better than mine. Does that mean he cheated and Joe Biden needs to take away his wealth? No, it means we are both free men in a free society where free choices lead to different outcomes.

It is not inequality Joe Biden intends to take away, it is freedom. The freedom to succeed and the freedom to fail. There is no true option for success if there is no true option for failure. The pursuit of happiness means a whole lot less when you face the punitive hand of government if your pursuit brings you more happiness than the other guy. Even if the other guy sat on his arse and did nothing. Even if the other guy made a lifetime’s worth of asinine and shortsighted decisions.

President Biden and the Democrats preach equality of outcome as a right, while completely ignoring inequality of effort. The simple Law of the Harvest – as ye sow, so shall ye reap – is sometimes applied as, “The harder you work, the more you get.” Biden would turn that upside down. Those who achieve are to be punished as enemies of society and those who fail are to be rewarded as wards of society.

Entitlement will replace effort as the key to upward mobility in American society if President Biden gets his way. He seeks a lowest common denominator society in which the government besieges the successful and productive to foster equality through mediocrity. He and his party speak of two Americas, and their grip on power is based on using the votes of one to sap the productivity of the other. America is not divided by the differences in our outcomes, it is divided by the differences in our efforts. It is a false philosophy to say one man’s success comes about unavoidably as the result of another man’s victimization.

What Biden offered was not a solution, but separatism. He fomented division and strife, pitted one set of Americans against another for his own political benefit. That’s what socialists offer. Marxist class warfare wrapped up with a bow.

Two Americas, coming closer each day to proving the truth to Lincoln’s maxim that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

 

‘Survival itself is no small achievement’

This is a re-post of a story I posted in 2019 about legendary Chicago Daily News foreign correspondent Keyes Beech, one of the most respected and ethical journalists I have ever known. If you didn’t see this the first time around, I encourage you to take a look now. You won’t be disappointed. 

Keyes Beech, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1951 for his Korean War battlefield coverage, was based in Hong Kong when he wrote the essay below for The Chicago Daily News centennial edition in 1976.  A renowned correspondent for The Chicago Daily News Foreign Service until it was closed in 1977, Beech died at age 76 in 1990.

Keyes Beech was a wonderful role model for any newly-minted foreign correspondent, which is what I was in 1974 when I was sent to Tokyo as the Chicago Tribune’s Far East Correspondent. We crossed paths often in places like Bangkok, Saigon, Taipei, Manila, and Hong Kong, where Keyes lived for many years. Like me, he was in Saigon on April 29, 1975, when the city fell to Communist North Vietnamese troops; and like me, it was not an even that he was proud of. 

And even though he worked for a competing newspaper I never really saw him as a competitor–just a fellow foreign correspondent doing the best he could to keep his readers informed. Keyes was not a great raconteur. In fact, he was a pretty quiet guy who let his writing do his talking. And his writing was exemplary and had a lot to say.

I recall after the Chicago Daily News folded Keyes had just moved to San Diego. I was based in Los Angeles with my office in the Los Angeles Times building. One day a friend from the L.A. Times came to my office and told me the Times had just hired Beech. He would be going back to Asia–specifically, Bangkok.

When I asked Keyes about it he told me: “I was hanging up a picture when the phone rang and the Times offered me the job. I think I wavered about 30 seconds and then said yes.”  He stayed in Bangkok until 1983, when he finally decided he had had enough.

Even though I was based in Los Angeles, my “beat” was all of Asia and Latin America–which meant I was traveling about 60 percent of the time. One week I might be in Singapore or Hong Kong and the next I could be in Mexico or Chile.

“Ridiculous,” Keyes told me one day when we were having lunch in Bangkok. “What the hell are the editors at the Tribune thinking?”

I didn’t have an answer. But in his essay below Keyes said what a lot of foreign correspondents think about when they look back on their careers of covering war and mayhem.

When asked what we have to show for years of slogging through jungles, racing for planes, running for cover, eating putrid food, and sleeping in fleapit hotels, many of us will answer as Keyes did in this 1977 essay.  

‘Survival itself is no small achievement’

By Keyes Beech

HONG KONG — I went to the Far East for The Daily News for a year’s tour of duty.

That was nearly 30 years ago. And I’m still out here.

It has, with a few exceptions, been a happy relationship. I still hold a grudge against the bookkeepers for refusing to pay $25 for a pair of glasses I broke on a Chinese Nationalist ship while dodging a piano that had gone berserk in turbulent seas in the Formosa Strait in 1958.

On a loftier plane, I can still work myself into a towering rage at my editors’ refusal to allow me to go into Communist China in 1957 when Peking had granted me a visa. I finally got back in — 18 years later.

I’ve always said that if I ever lost my capacity for indignation, I would get out of this business. The difference is that today I am more selective in what I get angry about. Which means, I suppose, that I am older, sadder and, I hope, wiser.

I didn’t really mean to stay in Asia so long, but things kept happening and I kept staying on because I wanted to be where the action was.

Of course, there were all those wars. I’m sensitive about covering so many wars: Some of my friends have suggested that I’m a warmonger. I should like to point out that I didn’t start those wars. I merely reported them. On my 25th anniversary in Asia, I was having dinner with a friend in Bangkok. He asked me, only half-jokingly, what I had to show for all those years.

“Well,” I said defiantly, “I survived.”

Beech, April 29, 1975, in Saigon, on the left in a white short-sleeved shirt and glasses looking down.

That in itself is no small achievement for anyone who has spent nearly 30 years of his life in this part of the world, racing for airplanes, jumping out of helicopters, dodging bullets now and then, sometimes wondering if your next step was going to come down on a land mine.

When I stop to think about it, more of my friends are dead than alive. And a shocking number of them died violent deaths in Korea and Vietnam. Yet during all those years, I have never been seriously ill. And the only injury I suffered during the better part of a decade in Vietnam was breaking a heel bone while hanging a curtain in my house in Saigon.

I wonder who’s living there now?

A staggering amount of history has been written since I arrived in Tokyo in May 1947. I was not long out of the Marine Corps as a combat correspondent and a rather cocky reporter who was soon to be humbled by how much he did not know and how much he would never know about the “mysterious Orient.”

I watched people starve in Shanghai and Peking as the Communist armies tightened their grip on the cities and the weary Nationalists disintegrated under the weight of their own corruption and incompetence.

I escaped from Seoul by the skin of my teeth in 1950 as the North Koreans rolled in. I watched the Japanese rebound from defeat to become the world’s third greatest economic power. I watched the newly independent countries of Southeast Asia grope for a form of government that would suit their needs.

In the process, I learned two things that should have been obvious to begin with. One was that there is no Asia, only Asians. “What do I have in common with an Indonesian?” a Japanese cabinet minister said coolly.

                 Keyes Beech ca. 1980

The answer was nothing, except that they both belong to the human race.

The other thing I learned was that democracy is at best a fragile export when transplanted to Asian soil. The only democracy left in Asia today is Japan, which alone among Asian nations had the machinery to make it work.

Over the years, I have seen the American stature in Asia steadily diminish. We emerged from World War II bright and shiny and noble — or so it seemed to many Americans and a great many Asians.

But time and attrition have damaged that image beyond repair. The myth of American omnipotence was shattered in the rice paddies of Vietnam.

Perhaps it was inevitable. Perhaps it was even healthy. But for one who remembers those heady days when Americans thought they could do anything, it takes a little getting used to.

One of the proudest moments of my life was the day in 1960 when hundreds of thousands of South Koreans cheered the American flag as the corrupt, tyrannical Syngman Rhee regime came to an end.

The saddest and most shameful day was April 29, 1975, when I left the American embassy roof in Saigon by helicopter as thousands of frightened Vietnamese clawed at the embassy gates. It was not a nice way to go.

 

Anne Keegan: An Original Lost to the Ages

  The other day I was thinking about some of the most interesting people I met and worked with during a 27-year-career as a reporter and foreign correspondent with the Chicago Tribune.

  One of the first names that popped into my head was Anne Keegan, a one-of-a-kind reporter and columnist for the Tribune. Anne and I worked together for several years before I was posted to Tokyo as the Tribune’s Far East Correspondent.

  She was a true original. When she passed away at 68 10 years ago, after a lingering illness, it was still a shock. That same day I posted about Anne on my blog.

  Since then, the Chicago Headline Club has created the Anne Keegan Award for distinguished journalism about ordinary people in extraordinarily well-reported and well-written prose–an Anne Keegan specialty.

  Some of you may not have seen it, so I thought I would post it again. At the end of my post is a short YouTube video produced by Anne’s husband, Len Aronson. Take a look. I think you will enjoy it.

  Thursday, May 19, 2011

Anne Keegan: An Original Lost to the Ages

  Today I learned that Anne Keegan, a friend and colleague from my days with the Chicago Tribune, passed away. What a loss to Chicago journalism.
How can I describe Anne Keegan? She was a walking, talking paradox. She could be tough, with an ability to display, at a moment’s notice, the vocabulary of an angry truck driver or Marine drill sergeant. But she could also be sensitive and pliable, almost nun-like in the deep-felt emotions she (occasionally) wore on her sleeve. 

She was what some people call a jelly bean. Hard on the outside, soft on the inside. 

It was those qualities that made Anne Keegan a first-rate reporter and a great writer. In fact, she was one of the greatest writers I ever had the pleasure of working with at the Chicago Tribune–which once upon a time, was a truly great newspaper.

The 1970s and 1980s were Anne Keegan’s prime years at the Tribune–though they could have stretched on into the 1990s and even 2000s had the paper’s editors made an effort to understand her and find a way to use her enormous and unique talent. As it was, Anne left the paper the same year I did (1997) when it became clear that the Tribune had long ceased to be a writers’ paper in favor of one that encouraged predictable and formulaic journalism that made the bean counters and stockholders happy at the expense of originality.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Anne was given a front-page column at the Tribune–testimony to her talent at storytelling, which at its heart is what great journalism is all about. I first learned of Anne’s wonderful talents when I was working as the paper’s weekend city editor under managing editor Bill Jones.

Jones had an eye for talent and he knew how to encourage it and nurture it. Later editors at the Tribune seemed mystified by anybody who was the least bit iconoclastic, which is what Anne definitely was. Jones was not afraid of iconoclasts.

On Saturdays and Sundays when the paper was essentially in my hands I was blessed to have a group of reporters on the City Desk who were some of the best to ever wield a notebook and pen in Chicago. There was Mike Sneed, now a successful columnist at the Sun-Times. There was Jack Fuller, who went on to become the Tribune’s editor and then president and CEO of the Chicago Tribune. There was Bill Gaines, who would go to win two Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting. And there was Anne Keegan.

My job was easy. I would come in on Saturday morning and announce that we needed a good local story for the front page of the Sunday paper. After everyone had finished their coffee and read through the Sun-Times, Chicago Daily News, and Chicago Today (in those days there were four competing dailies in Chicago–not to mention City News Bureau and the Chicago Defender), I would simply say: “Go find me a good reader for the front page.”

Keegan and Sneed would be out the door in flash. And invariably, one of them would return with just what was needed.

I recall once when Keegan was on assignment to do a story on truckers who were angry about something–it may have been the 55 mph speed limit imposed during the first oil crisis in 1973. She called the office from a payphone at a truck stop to dictate a story. After she had finished one of the truckers she was writing about grabbed the phone and asked:

“What kind of girl reporters does the Tribune have? This one can out-swear all us!”

Then, I heard Keegan’s unmistakable voice in the background: “Don’t call me a girl, you asshole!”

I laughed out loud. That was Anne Keegan, alright. She could hold her own with any potty-mouthed truck driver.

The story she wrote belied her skills with Anglo-Saxon expletives. It was fair, provided context, and was even, by Keegan’s tough standards, a little sympathetic.

In the mid-1970s I was posted to Tokyo as the Tribune’s Far East Correspondent and Anne and I never really worked together again.

However, I followed her career and she followed mine. A few times Anne came to Asia to write stories about a range of topics such as S.E. Asian refugees.

Invariably, as she did in Chicago, Anne would unearth characters who found their nirvana in places like Bangkok.

Her stories about some of these people were wonderful studies of the human condition and spirit–people such as A. J. “Tiger” Rydberg, a gruff, rough and tumble construction worker who built airstrips all over South Vietnam during the war.

In the 1970s and early 1980s Rydberg operated a watering hole in Bangkok called the “Tiger’s Den” for former CIA Air America pilots, off shore oil riggers, itinerant hacks and various and sundry soldiers of fortune. Anne discovered “Tiger” and told me about him.
“Look him up, Yatsie,” she said. (She always called me Yatsie, never Ron). “You’ll like him.”

I did look him up and she was right, I did like him.

“You work with Anne Keegan?” Rydberg asked me when I introduced myself to him in his Tiger’s Den. “What a broad! She can out-cuss me and I thought I knew every swearword in the English language.”

She also did a wonderful story on a Chicago priest, Father Raymond Brennan, who operated an orphanage for Thai children in the Thai coastal city of Pattaya, some 120 miles southeast of Bangkok. Her powerful story, along with Tribune photographer Val Mazzenga’s riveting photographs, resulted in an avalanche of donations for the orphanage that housed about 150 homeless children.

After Anne left the Tribune she continued to write. In 2007 she published “On the Street Doing Life,” a book about former Chicago cop Mike Cronin who spent years working on Chicago’s rough, gang-infested West Side. It is a gritty story about a cop walking a fine line between toughness and fairness. Eventually, Cronin rose through the ranks to head two of the Chicago Police Department’s top units: Narcotics and Gangs. Cronin did all of this despite the fact that he lost a leg in Vietnam and had to convince the Chicago Police Department to hire him despite his disability.

Anne also wrote a children’s book called “A Cat for Claire” that, at first glance seems like a significant departure from the kinds of stories she was famous for. In fact, however, that book displays Anne’s “soft” side–a side of her character that she was very careful about sharing. In this case, the book was written for her granddaughter.

Another side of Anne Keegan’s disposition was her almost total lack of ego–a rarity in newsrooms then and now. She never boasted about her work or sought celebrity from her ground-breaking stories; never blew her own horn; never allowed herself to become the story, the way so many journalists do today in this self-absorbed era of tweeting and ubiquitous social media.

As she once told the Chicago Reader: “I may have led a very interesting life, but there are people whose stories are far more fascinating than mine.”

And nobody told them better than Anne Keegan did.

 

Happening Now: The Marxist Conspiracy to Transform America

In 1958 a man named W. Cleon Skousen published a book entitled “The Naked Communist,” which examined the goals of Communism in the United States. In his book, Skousen revealed the strategies the Communist Party in America was using to destroy American society and its constitutional form of government.

W. Cleon Skousen

Today, 63 years later, the Communist/Marxist objectives to overthrow the United States that Skousen forewarned and cautioned us about have almost all been achieved—or are about to be.

The transformation of America from a free republic into a totalitarian socialist nation is moving right along— impelled by Marxist organizations such as Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and the increasing number of avowed socialists who currently inhabit a significant segment of the Democrat Party, Congress, and even the White House.

The goal of these America-haters is to institute “cultural Marxism,” an offshoot of western Marxism that is different from the failed Marxist-Leninist ideas of the old Soviet Union. It is more commonly known as “multiculturalism” or, less formally, Political Correctness.

The advocates of cultural Marxism discovered that they could be more effective if they concealed the true Marxist nature of their ideas under the cloak of “multiculturalism.” Their goal is not only to destroy capitalism, but to build a socialist order through subversion of established American morality, history, and culture, as well as the eradication of the traditional biological family. And it is happening right now, while most Americans seem oblivious to it.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at this list of Communist goals from Skousen’s 1958 book. (Note: comments in parenthesis are mine)

Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If the U.N. charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (God help us if the America-loathing United Nations ever attains THAT kind of power over us)Capture one or both political parties in the United States and establish one-party rule. (In David Horowitz’s book The Shadow Party, he shows how the Democrat Party is now under the control of what he calls the “Shadow Party of Socialist-Communist” influences. At the same time, “woke” Democrat leaders in Congress are intent on destroying the Republican Party by branding its members “domestic terrorists” and worse.) Get Control of the Schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ unions and associations. Put the Party line in textbooks. (Think, Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project).Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions. (Journalism today is no longer about presenting unbiased and accurate news. It’s all about the leftist “narrative.”)Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures. (Once again, it’s all about the leftist narrative)Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. Eliminate all good sculptures and historic statues from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward, and meaningless forms. Promote ugly repulsive, meaningless art.Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.Present degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, and healthy.”Infiltrate churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”  (A.C.L.U. lawyers accomplished this goal in four short years after the publication of “The Naked Communist.”)Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.  (In 2012, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsberg said exactly this while visiting Cairo, Egypt.)Discredit the American founding fathers. Present them as selfish white aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.” (Refer to them as racists whose only reason for fomenting the American Revolution was to preserve the institution of slavery, not to achieve freedom from Great Britain, which is the idiotic argument of the 1619 Project)Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of factual American history (Think once again about deceitful Critical Race Theory and the dishonest 1619 Project, both of which are being rammed down children’s throats today in thousands of American schools.)Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture, education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.Infiltrate and gain control of big business. (Then move the jobs overseas to stifle the American economy. Import goods from other countries in order to create a damaging imbalance of trade.)Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influences of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks, and retarding of children to suppressive influence of the parents.Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use “united force” to solve economic, political, or social problems. (Think about the BLM and Antifa riots, and the burning and looting that infested American cities in 2020 and which could return in 2021) Repeal the U.S. Connally Reservation which amended the U.S. ratification of the United Nations charter to bar the International Court of Justice from having jurisdiction over domestic matters “as determined by the United States.” (The Connally Reservation prevents World Court jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike. It also protects the U.S. from the overturning or delegitimizing of the U.S. Constitution by the World Court.)

So, where does all of this leave our country?

It leaves us in a precarious position in which many of our rights, such as the First and Second Amendments, as well as the Constitution as a whole are under constant threat from leftist radicals, anti-white racists, and “woke” America haters such as the fatuous and anti-Semitic “squad.”

Most of all, it leaves our nation divided—which is exactly the strategy Communists have employed in every nation they have dominated and oppressed.

Divide and conquer works.

You generate tribes of politically, socially, and racially disparate people. Then you do whatever it takes to keep them apart and at each other’s throats, thereby maintaining control of the nation.

I don’t know about you, but THAT is NOT the America I want to live in. I spent four years in the U.S. Army Security Agency performing top-secret tasks antithetical and hostile to the Socialist and Communist enemies of the United States.

I see no reason why I, or any other military veteran, should now countenance and permit the same treacherous socialists and Communists we battled during the “Cold War” to take control of our democratic republic.

At least in 1958 when “The Naked Communist” was written, we knew who and where our enemies were.

Today, they are among us, masquerading as elected members of Congress and unelected government bureaucrats.

And some even inhabit the White House.

 

 

 

THE LITTLE KNOWN STORY OF LEICA & GERMANY’S JEWS

Given the explosion of antisemitism in the United States and much of the world today, I thought I would re-run the following post that I published on ForeignCorrespondent in 2019. I think it has significant relevance in today’s political climate. I hope you find it as interesting as I did. Please read on.

I ran across this story not long ago and put it aside until I could do some of my own reporting. It tells of how Ernst Leitz II who headed E. Leitz, Inc., designer and manufacturer of the Leica Camera, Germany’s most famous photographic product, defied the Nazi’s and saved scores of German Jews. As with most of the public, I wasn’t aware of the story. Now, I am pleased to share it.

The Leica was the first globally popular 35mm camera. It’s a German product – precise, minimalist, and utterly efficient. Behind its worldwide acceptance as a creative tool was a family-owned, socially oriented firm that, during the Nazi era, acted with uncommon grace, generosity, and modesty. E. Leitz Inc., designer, and manufacturer of Germany’s most famous photographic product saved its Jews.

The Original 1927 Leica

And Ernst Leitz II, the steely-eyed Protestant patriarch who headed the closely held firm as the Holocaust loomed across Europe, acted in such a way as to earn the title, “the photography industry’s Schindler.”

As soon as Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany in 1933, Ernst Leitz II began receiving frantic calls from Jewish associates, asking for his help in getting them and their families out of the country. As Christians, Leitz and his family were immune to Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg laws, which restricted the movement of Jews and limited their professional activities.

To help his Jewish workers and colleagues, Leitz quietly established what has become known among historians of the Holocaust as “the Leica Freedom Train,” a covert means of allowing Jews to leave Germany in the guise of Leitz employees being assigned overseas.

Employees, retailers, family members, even friends of family members were “assigned” to Leitz sales offices in France, Britain, Hong Kong, and the United States, Leitz’s activities intensified after the Kristallnacht of November 1938, during which synagogues and Jewish shops were burned across Germany.

                                                                                           Ernst Leitz II

Before long, German “employees” were disembarking from the ocean liner Bremen at a New York pier and making their way to the Manhattan office of Leitz Inc., where executives quickly found them jobs in the photographic industry Each new arrival had around his or her neck the symbol of freedom – a new Leica camera. The company paid the refugees a stipend until they could find work. Out of this migration came designers, repair technicians, salespeople, marketers, and writers for the photographic press.

Keeping the story quiet The “Leica Freedom Train” was at its height in 1938 and early 1939, delivering groups of refugees to New York every few weeks. Then, with the invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany closed its borders. By that time, hundreds of endangered Jews had escaped to America, thanks to the Leitzes’ efforts.

How did Ernst Leitz II and his staff get away with it? Leitz, Inc. was an internationally recognized brand that reflected credit on the newly resurgent Reich. The company produced cameras, rangefinders, and other optical systems for the German military. Also, the Nazi government desperately needed hard currency from abroad, and Leitz’s single biggest market for optical goods was the United States.

                            The Leica “Freedom Train” tunnels in Wetzlar, Germany through which Jews escaped.

Even so, members of the Leitz family and firm suffered for their good works. The Gestapo jailed a top Leitz executive for working to help Jews and freed him only after the payment of a large bribe.

Leitz’s daughter, Elsie Kuhn-Leitz, was imprisoned by the Gestapo after she was caught at the border, helping Jewish women cross into Switzerland. She eventually was freed but endured rough treatment in the course of questioning. She also fell under suspicion when she attempted to improve the living conditions of 700 to 800 Ukrainian slave laborers, all of them women, who had been assigned to work in the plant during the 1940s. (After the war, Kuhn-Leitz received numerous honors for her humanitarian efforts, among them the Officier d’honneur des Palms Academic from France in 1965 and the Aristide Briand Medal from the European Academy in the 1970s.)

Why has no one told this story until now? According to the late Norman Lipton, a freelance writer, and editor, the Leitz family wanted no publicity for its heroic efforts. Only after the last member of the Leitz family was dead did the “Leica Freedom Train” finally come to light.

Several years ago Frank Dabba Smith, a California-born Rabbi living in England penned a book about the Leitz family’s efforts entitled: “The Greatest Invention of the Leitz Family: The Leica Freedom Train.”

After World War II Leitz refused to talk about his efforts on behalf of his Jewish workers, and the story remained unknown for decades.

As the late radio commentator Paul Harvey used to say: “Now you know the rest of the story.”

A Hedge Fund Vulture Plunders my old Home: The Chicago Tribune

There are only a few places, outside of my actual home, that I ever felt I could call “home.”

One was the U.S. Army Security Agency where I spent almost four years on active duty. Another was the University of Kansas where I earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism.

However, perhaps the most significant of these ersatz “homes” was the Chicago Tribune, where I spent almost 28 years as a reporter and foreign correspondent covering turmoil and war from Asia to Latin America and a few other places on the planet.

So naturally, I am concerned when I hear that my “Tribune home” is about to be gobbled up by the Alden Global Capital hedge fund. Alden, which already owns nearly one-third of Tribune Company, stands to take full control of the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, the New York Daily News, the Orlando Sentinel, and a half-dozen other Tribune papers by June 30 in a deal worth roughly $630 million.

Why does that concern me? The Tribune, which was founded in 1847 and has a storied journalism past, may not survive the Alden seizure. Hedge funds are notorious for acquiring newspapers, sacking staff, selling off everything of value, wringing them dry of cash, and then depositing them on the journalistic scrapheap.

As with a plethora of other American newspapers, the Tribune has watched powerlessly as the collapse of print advertising eroded its revenues. That has made legacy newspapers sitting ducks for vulture investors like Alden.

The Tribune is not alone in this precarious place.

     Once Upon A Time when Chicago Families Read the Sunday Tribune

The newspaper industry has struggled during the digital age as revenues dwindled because of a precipitous and persistent decline in print advertising.

In the past two decades, publishers have shut down more than 2,000 newspapers. Newsroom employees shrank by more than half — from 71,000 to 35,000 — between 2008 and 2019, according to the Pew Research Center.

 

Even though millions of newspaper readers have migrated to digital editions, that has not offset the considerable loss of once-lucrative print advertising.

Last year, Tribune Publishing’s employment fell by 30%, dropping from 4,114 employees at the end of 2019 to 2,865 employees at the end of 2020, according to the company’s annual reports.

The writing was on the wall for the once influential and financially robust Chicago Tribune when five years ago it sold the iconic Tribune Tower for $240 million and moved to a much less imposing abode.

   Tribune Tower

Constructed in 1925, the 35-story Gothic tower was an iconic fixture on the northern edge of Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile” at 435 North Michigan Avenue.

I can recall my heart hammering when I entered the Tribune Tower’s cavernous lobby on my first day as a general assignment reporter in July 1969. I had been hired just days after my graduation from the University of Kansas—an unheard-of opportunity the Tribune seldom granted newly-minted journalism school graduates.

Naturally, I was determined to show everybody that I belonged in this epitome of renowned and legendary Chicago “newspaperdom.”

But when I got out of the elevator on the fourth floor and entered the Tribune’s yawning newsroom I was (input an appropriate adjective here) overwhelmed, stupefied, staggered, dumbfounded, flummoxed.

If the lobby was daunting, the Tribune’s newsroom was even more intimidating and overwhelming.

 

The place was humungous. It was also louder than the “clatter wheels of hell,” as my grandpa used to say. Telephones were ringing, people were yelling, typewriters were clacking, telex machines were dinging and clattering, copy boys and girls were scurrying, and above it all, I could hear my heart pounding like a bass drum in my ears.

 The “Old” Tribune Newsroom 1975 with its “New” Computer Terminals

God, what have I gotten myself into? I wondered.

Of course, I didn’t start my life at the Tribune in that outsized grotto of the fourth estate. No, not by a long shot. Instead, I was assigned, as were all rookie reporters in those days, to something called “Neighborhood News” off in a much quieter and less imposing area of the tower.

But nine months later, after I proved that I could write intelligible and accurate stories about the lesser regions of the Chicago Metropolitan area, I was hurled into the reportorial breach of the city room and found myself ensconced at an ancient battleship gray wooden desk that was shared by several other nomadic reporters.

In those days, new general assignment reporters “hot-desked it,” meaning you sat at a vacant desk as long as some old-timer sporting a fedora and smoking a big stogie didn’t tell you to move.

Yes, boys and girls, back then the Tribune newsroom was saturated with cigarette and cigar smoke. Hell, some crusty old copy editors wearing green eyeshades even had spittoons next to their chairs.

      Chicago Tribune Copy Desk ca. 1970

And sometimes (gasp!) the drawers on those old wooden desks contained half-full bottles of Old Grandad or Wild Turkey.

Ah yes, it was a very different time.

But I digress. In front of me on that scuffed and gouged wooden desk sat a big black Underwood typewriter. I was sure the damned thing was just daring me to write something on it.

I could almost hear it shouting with a distinctive Chicago inflection, “Go ahead, ya big Kansas hick. Write somethin.’ I dare ya! I double dare ya!”

I’m sure I gulped several times watching the turbulent activity in front of me with reporters running in and out of the newsroom amid a discordant cacophony of bellowing editors and tolling telephones.

I wondered how long before I would be one of those reporters. My heart thumped. My palms sweated. My mouth dried.

I didn’t have to wait long. From about thirty feet across the room, I heard somebody shouting my name.

“Yates, Yates,” the voice said.

I jumped to attention, just like I did on my first day of basic training in the U.S. Army when a rock-solid staff sergeant with a tan campaign hat covering his square, close-cropped head, called my name.

Only this voice didn’t come from my drill sergeant. It emanated from a bespectacled man in shirtsleeves sitting in the driver’s seat of the Tribune’s horseshoe-shaped City Desk. He was flanked on both sides by a squad of rewrite men (not many women back then), a photo assignment editor, and a bank of squawking radios blaring raspy police and fire department calls. A couple of the grizzled rewrite men even wore (you guessed it!) green eyeshades and garters on their shirtsleeves.

The man impatiently calling my name was the Chicago Tribune’s Day City Editor. His name was Don Agrella.

I looked over at him just in time to hear him say. “Yates, take an obit.” I looked down at the black telephone on my desk just as it started ringing.

An obit? I found myself thinking. Geez, what a start!

“Hello,” the voice on the other end said, “this is Weinstein’s Funeral Home on West Devon. Are you ready for me?”

“No, I’m not dead yet,” I quipped.

The voice on the other end of the phone wasn’t amused.

“Okay, NOW are you quite ready?”

“Sorry. It’s my first day.”

I looked around the newsroom. No one was paying attention. I was relieved. But I was also thankful to be even a tiny cog in that enormous, churning throng of reportorial humanity.

By the end of the day, after writing I don’t know how many obits and three-paragraph stories that Tribune editors enigmatically referred to as “four-heads,” I was sure I would earn my journalistic spurs in Tribune Tower.

Today, I can’t imagine working as a Tribune reporter in any place BUT Tribune Tower. But that is not the case today. First, the newspaper moved out of the Tribune building in 2018 and into the Prudential Building across the Chicago River. Then, in January 2021 The Tribune moved once again—this time into the paper’s Freedom Center printing plant at 777 W. Chicago Ave.

That means neither of Chicago’s two remaining major dailies has newsrooms in the city’s immediate downtown area. The Chicago Sun-Times, which had been at 350 N. Orleans St., relocated to 30 N. Racine Ave. on the Near West Side in 2017.

                 Abandoned Chicago Sun-Times Building

Things could be worse, I guess.

Chicago could become the first large American city not to have a single newspaper covering it.

That’s an unthinkable prospect when you consider that at one point in the early 20th century there were 10 competing newspapers in Chicago.

Oh well, as the ancient Romans used to say:

“Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.” (“All things are changed, and we are changed with them.”)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Commencement Speech that Every College Graduate Should Hear

We are in the middle of graduation season when high schools, colleges, and other institutions of higher and (sometimes) lower learning hold their commencement ceremonies. When that happens, of course, you can expect to hear a surfeit of advice–some good, some bad, some forgettable, and some unforgettable from a broad range of personages who may (or may not) feel entitled to hold forth while wearing assorted academic caps, gowns, and other scholarly regalia. 

As a former college Dean at the University of Illinois, I presided over at least eight of these rituals and listened to an assortment of both predictable, and occasionally, unpredictable commencement speeches.

Looking back, I wish someone had given the commencement speech in my College that I am about to share with you.

Now, here is a little confession: This commencement speech has never been given, but it should be. It was written by former syndicated talk show host Neal Boortz in protest of never having been invited to give a commencement address. It became the springboard for his first book, “The Commencement Speech You Need to Hear.” Later he produced an audio CD of the speech complete with crowd noise and applause, which was aired on his radio program. Read on. You won’t be disappointed.

                                                                            Neal Boortz

“I am honored by the invitation to address you on this august occasion. It’s about time. Be warned, however, that I am not here to impress you; you’ll have enough smoke blown up your bloomers today. And you can bet your tassels I’m not here to impress the faculty and administration.

You may not like much of what I have to say, and that’s fine. You will remember it though. Especially after about 10 years out there in the real world. This, it goes without saying, does not apply to those of you who will seek your careers and your fortunes as government employees.

This gowned gaggle behind me is your faculty. You’ve heard the old saying that those who can – do. Those who can’t – teach. That sounds deliciously insensitive. But there is often raw truth in insensitivity, just as you often find feel-good falsehoods and lies in compassion. Say goodbye to your faculty because now you are getting ready to go out there and do. These folks behind me are going to stay right here and teach.

By the way, just because you are leaving this place with a diploma doesn’t mean the learning is over. When an FAA flight examiner handed me my private pilot’s license many years ago, he said, “Here, this is your ticket to learn” The same can be said for your diploma. Believe me, the learning has just begun.

Now, I realize that most of you consider yourselves Liberals. In fact, you are probably very proud of your liberal views. You care so much. You feel so much. You want to help so much. After all, you’re a compassionate and caring person, aren’t you now? Well, isn’t that just so extraordinarily special? Now, at this age, is as good a time as any to be a liberal; as good a time as any to know absolutely everything. You have plenty of time, starting tomorrow, for the truth to set in.

Over the next few years, as you begin to feel the cold breath of reality down your neck, things are going to start changing pretty fast… Including your own assessment of just how much you really know.

So here are the first assignments for your initial class in reality: Pay attention to the news, read newspapers, and listen to the words and phrases that proud Liberals use to promote their causes Then, compare the words of the left to the words and phrases you hear from those evil, heartless, greedy conservatives.

From the Left you will hear “I feel.” From the Right, you will hear “I think.” From the Liberals, you will hear references to groups — The Blacks, the Poor, the Rich, the Disadvantaged, the Less Fortunate. From the Right, you will hear references to individuals. On the Left, you hear talk of group rights; on the Right, individual rights.

That about sums it up, really: Liberals feel. Liberals care. They are pack animals whose identity is tied up in group dynamics. Conservatives think — and, setting aside the theocracy crowd, their identity is centered on the individual.

 Liberals feel that their favored groups have enforceable rights to the property and services of productive individuals. Conservatives, I among them I might add, think that individuals have the right to protect their lives and their property from the plunder of the masses.

In college, you developed a group mentality, but if you look closely at your diplomas you will see that they have your individual names on them. Not the name of your school mascot, or of your fraternity or sorority, but your name. Your group identity is going away. Your recognition and appreciation of your individual identity starts now.

If, by the time you reach the age of 30, you do not consider yourself to be a conservative, rush right back here as quickly as you can and apply for a faculty position. These people will welcome you with open arms. They will welcome you, that is, so long as you haven’t developed an individual identity. Once again you will have to be willing to sign on to the group mentality you embraced during the past four years.

Something is going to happen soon that is going to really open your eyes. You’re going to actually get a full-time job!

You’re also going to get a lifelong work partner. This partner isn’t going to help you do your job. This partner is just going to sit back and wait for payday. This partner doesn’t want to share in your effort but in your earnings.

Your new lifelong partner is actually an agent; an agent representing a strange and diverse group of people; an agent for every teenager with an illegitimate child; an agent for a research scientist who wanted to make some cash answering the age-old question of why monkeys grind their teeth. An agent for some poor demented hippie who considers herself to be a meaningful and talented artist, but who just can’t manage to sell any of her artwork on the open market.

Your new partner is an agent for every person with limited, if any, job skills, but who wanted a job at City Hall. An agent for tin-horn dictators in fancy military uniforms grasping for American foreign aid. An agent for multi-million dollar companies that want someone else to pay for their overseas advertising. An agent for everybody who wants to use this agent’s unimaginable power for their personal enrichment and benefit.

That agent is our wonderful, caring, compassionate, oppressive government Believe me, you will be awed by the unimaginable power this agent has–power that you do not have. A power that no individual has, or will have. This agent has the legal power to use force, deadly force to accomplish its goals.

You have no choice here. Your new friend is just going to walk up to you, introduce himself rather gruffly, hand you a few forms to fill out, and move right on in. Say hello to your own personal one-ton gorilla. It will sleep anywhere it wants to.

Now, let me tell you, this agent is not cheap. As you become successful it will seize about 40% of everything you earn. And no, I’m sorry, there just isn’t any way you can fire this agent of plunder, and you can’t decrease its share of your income. That power rests with him, not you.

So, here I am saying negative things to you about government. Well, be clear on this: It is not wrong to distrust the government. It is not wrong to fear government. In certain cases, it is not even wrong to despise government for government is inherently evil. Yes, a necessary evil, but dangerous nonetheless, somewhat like a drug. Just as a drug that in the proper dosage can save your life, an overdose of government can be fatal.

Now let’s address a few things that have been crammed into your minds at this university. There are some ideas you need to expunge as soon as possible. These ideas may work well in the academic environment, but they fail miserably out there in the real world.

First is that favorite buzzword of the media and academia: Diversity! You have been taught that the real value of any group of people – be it a social group, an employee group, a management group, whatever – is based on diversity. This is a favored liberal ideal because diversity is based not on an individual’s abilities or character, but on a person’s identity and status as a member of a group. Yes, it’s that liberal group identity thing again.

Within the great diversity movement group identification – be it racial, gender-based, or some other minority status – means more than the individual’s integrity, character, or other qualifications.

Brace yourself. You are about to move from this academic atmosphere where diversity rules, to a workplace and a culture where individual achievement and excellence actually count. No matter what your professors have taught you over the last four years, you are about to learn that diversity is absolutely no replacement for excellence, ability, and individual hard work. From this day on every single time you hear the word “diversity”, you can rest assured that there is someone close by who is determined to rob you of every vestige of individuality you possess.

   Who Were Those Masked Graduates?

We also need to address this thing you seem to have about “rights.” We have witnessed an obscene explosion of so-called “rights” in the last few decades, usually emanating from college campuses.

You know the mantra: You have the right to a job. The right to a place to live. The right to a living wage. The right to health care. The right to an education. You probably even have your own pet right – the right to a Beemer for instance, or the right to have someone else provide for that child you plan on downloading in a year or so.

Forget it. Forget those rights! I’ll tell you what your rights are. You have a right to live free, and to the results of 60% -75% of your labor. I’ll also tell you this. You have no right to any portion of the life or labor of another.

You may, for instance, think that you have a right to health care. After all, our president said so, didn’t he? But you cannot receive health care unless some doctor or health practitioner surrenders some of his time – his life – to you. He may be willing to do this for compensation, but that’s his choice. You have no “right” to his time or property. You have no right to his or any other person’s life or to any portion thereof.

You may also think you have some “right” to a job; a job with a living wage, whatever that is. Do you mean to tell me that you have a right to force your services on another person, and then the right to demand that this person compensate you with their money? Sorry, forget it. I am sure you would scream if some urban outdoorsmen (that would be “homeless person” for those of you who don’t want to give these less fortunate people a romantic and adventurous title) came to you and demanded his job and your money.

The people who have been telling you about all the rights you have are simply exercising one of theirs – the right to be imbeciles. Their being imbeciles didn’t cost anyone else either property or time. It’s their right, and they exercise it brilliantly.

By the way, did you catch my use of the phrase “less fortunate” a bit ago when I was talking about the urban outdoorsmen? That phrase is a favorite of the Left. Think about it, and you’ll understand why.

To imply that one person is homeless, destitute, dirty, drunk, spaced out on drugs, unemployable, and generally miserable because he is “less fortunate” is to imply that a successful person – one with a job, a home, and a future – is in that position because he or she was “fortunate.”

The dictionary says that fortunate means “having derived good from an unexpected place.” There is nothing unexpected about deriving good from hard work. There is also nothing unexpected about deriving misery from choosing drugs, alcohol, and the street.

If the Liberal Left can create the common perception that success and failure are simple matters of “fortune” or “luck,” then it is easy to promote and justify their various income redistribution schemes. After all, we are just evening out the odds a little bit. This “success equals luck” idea the liberals like to push is seen everywhere.

Former Democratic presidential candidate Richard Gephardt once referred to high-achievers as “people who have won life’s lottery.” He wants you to believe they are making the big bucks because they are lucky. It’s not luck, my friends. It’s a choice. One of the greatest lessons I ever learned was in a book by Og Mandino, entitled, “The Greatest Secret in the World.” The lesson? Very simple: “Use wisely your power of choice.”

That bum sitting on a heating grate, smelling like a wharf rat? He’s there by choice. He is there because of the sum total of the choices he has made in his life. This truism is absolutely the hardest thing for some people to accept, especially those who consider themselves to be victims of something or other – victims of discrimination, bad luck, the system, capitalism, whatever.

After all, nobody really wants to accept the blame for his or her position in life. Not when it is so much easier to point and say, “Look! He did this to me!” than it is to look into a mirror and say, “You S. O. B.! You did this to me!”

The key to accepting responsibility for your life is to accept the fact that your choices, every one of them, are leading you inexorably to either success or failure, however you define those terms.

Some of the choices are obvious: Whether or not to stay in school. Whether or not to get pregnant. Whether or not to hit the bottle. Whether or not to keep this job you hate until you get another better-paying job. Whether or not to save some of your money, or saddle yourself with huge payments for that new car.

Some of the choices are seemingly insignificant: Whom to go to the movies with. Whose car to ride home in. Whether to watch the tube tonight, or read a book on investing. But, and you can be sure of this, each choice counts.

Each choice is a building block – some large, some small. But each one is a part of the structure of your life. If you make the right choices, or if you make more right choices than wrong ones, something absolutely terrible may happen to you. Something unthinkable. You, my friend, could become one of the hated, the evil, the ugly, the feared, the filthy, the successful, the rich.

The rich basically serve two purposes in this country. First, they provide the investments, the investment capital, and the brains for the formation of new businesses. Businesses that hire people. Businesses that send millions of paychecks home each week to the un-rich.

Second, the rich are a wonderful object of ridicule, distrust, and hatred. Few things are more valuable to a politician than the envy most Americans feel for the evil rich.

Envy is a powerful emotion. Even more powerful than the emotional minefield that surrounded Bill Clinton when he reviewed his last batch of White House interns. Politicians use envy to get votes and power And they keep that power by promising the envious that the envied will be punished: “The rich will pay their fair share of taxes if I have anything to do with it.” The truth is that the top 10% of income earners in this country pays almost 50% of all income taxes collected. I shudder to think what these job producers would be paying if our tax system were any more “fair.”

You have heard, no doubt, that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Interestingly enough, our government’s own numbers show that many of the poor actually get richer, and that quite a few of the rich actually get poorer. But for the rich who do actually get richer, and the poor who remain poor .. there’s an explanation — a reason. The rich, you see, keep doing the things that make them rich; while the poor keep doing the things that make them poor.

Speaking of the poor, during your adult life you are going to hear an endless string of politicians bemoaning the plight of the poor. So, you need to know that under our government’s definition of “poor” you can have a $5 million net worth, a $300,000 home and a new $90,000 Mercedes, all completely paid for. You can also have a maid, cook, and valet, and a million in your checking account, and you can still be officially defined by our government as “living in poverty.” Now there’s something you haven’t seen on the evening news.

How does the government pull off this one? Very simple, really. To determine whether or not some poor soul is “living in poverty,” the government measures one thing — just one thing. Income.

It doesn’t matter one bit how much you have, how much you own, how many cars you drive or how big they are, whether or not your pool is heated, whether you winter in Aspen and spend the summers in the Bahamas, or how much is in your savings account. It only matters how much income you claim in that particular year. This means that if you take a one-year leave of absence from your high-paying job and decide to live off the money in your savings and checking accounts while you write the next great American novel, the government says you are living in poverty.”

This isn’t exactly what you had in mind when you heard these gloomy statistics, is it? Do you need more convincing? Try this. The government’s own statistics show that people who are said to be “living in poverty” spend more than $1.50 for each dollar of income they claim. Something is a bit fishy here. Just remember all this the next time Charles Gibson tells you about some hideous new poverty statistics.

Why has the government concocted this phony poverty scam? Because the government needs an excuse to grow and to expand its social welfare programs, which translates into an expansion of its power. If the government can convince you, in all your compassion, that the number of “poor” is increasing, it will have all the excuse it needs to sway an electorate suffering from the advanced stages of Obsessive-Compulsive Compassion Disorder.

I’m about to be stoned by the faculty here. They’ve already changed their minds about that honorary degree I was going to get. That’s OK, though. I still have my PhD. in Insensitivity from the Neal Boortz Institute for Insensitivity Training. I learned that, in short, sensitivity sucks. It’s a trap. Think about it – the truth knows no sensitivity. Life can be insensitive. Wallow too much in sensitivity and you’ll be unable to deal with life, or the truth, so get over it.

Now, before the dean has me shackled and hauled off, I have a few random thoughts.

* You need to register to vote unless you are on welfare. If you are living off the efforts of others, please do us the favor of sitting down and shutting up until you are on your own again.

* When you do vote, your votes for the House and the Senate are more important than your vote for President. The House controls the purse strings, so concentrate your awareness there.

* Liars cannot be trusted, even when the liar is the Speaker of the House. If someone can’t deal honestly with you, send them packing.

* Don’t bow to the temptation to use the government as an instrument of plunder. If it is wrong for you to take money from someone else who earned it — to take their money by force for your own needs — then it is certainly just as wrong for you to demand that the government step forward and do this dirty work for you.

* Don’t look in other people’s pockets You have no business there. What they earn is theirs. What you earn is yours. Keep it that way. Nobody owes you anything, except to respect your privacy and your rights and leave you the hell alone.

* Speaking of earning, the revered 40-hour workweek is for losers Forty hours should be considered the minimum, not the maximum. You don’t see highly successful people clocking out of the office every afternoon at five. The losers are the ones caught up in that afternoon rush hour The winners drive home in the dark.

* Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no protection.

 * Finally (and aren’t you glad to hear that word), as Og Mandino wrote,

 1. Proclaim your rarity. Each of you is a rare and unique human being.

 2. Use wisely your power of choice.

 3. Go the extra mile, ‘drive home in the dark.

Oh, and put off buying a television set as long as you can. Now, if you have any idea at all what’s good for you, you will get out of here and never come back. Class dismissed.”