In "Fire And Forget," Vets-Turned-Writers Tell Their War Stories

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U.S. Army soldiers begin their journey home from Iraq on July 13, 2010.

Maya Alleruzzo/AP

U.S. Army soldiers begin their journey home from Iraq on July 13, 2010.

Maya Alleruzzo/AP

This Veterans Day, considers these lines from the preface to Fire And Forget, a collection of short stories by veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

On the one hand, we want to remind you … of what happened … and insist you recollect those men and women who fought, bled, and died in dangerous and far-away places. On the other hand, there’s nothing most of us would rather do than leave these wars behind. No matter what we do next, the soft tension of the trigger pull is something we’ll carry with us forever.

Fire and Forget

Short Stories from the Long War

by Roy Scranton and Matt Gallagher

Paperback, 234 pages | purchase

More on this book:

• NPR reviews, interviews and more

Veterans Roy Scranton and Jacob Siegel edited the collection, and each have a story in it.

Scranton served in the army from 2002 to 2006 and was deployed to Iraq from 2003 to 2004. He’s currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Princeton University English Department. Siegel is a captain in the New York National Guard, which he joined not long after Sept. 11. He served in Iraq from 2006 to 2007 and in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2012. He edits The Daily Beast’s Hero Project blog, which showcases the writing of veterans and covers issues pertaining to vets. Siegel and Scranton first met through the NYU Veterans Writing Workshop. They join Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross to talk about the experience of war and the challenges of telling their stories.

Interview Highlights

On the conflict soldiers sometimes face when telling war stories

Siegel: I think there’s this continuous media appetite for war as narratives of derring-do and of heroism, which is part of it. And then there’s an appetite for war where soldiers are just pawns in various political polemics. It’s all for people who often, to the soldier, seem like they have no genuine interest in what it’s really like, they just want to be entertained or have their opinions validated.

… I think there’s always a feeling among soldiers that what you bring home with you and what happened overseas may be something only you or your group will understand, and that any attempt to bring it to a larger audience or to tell the story of it is, in effect, a cheapening of it and a way of selling it rather than sharing it.

On coping with the fear of death on and off the battlefield

Scranton: I found that I had to shut down my imagination because it really turned into an enemy. The kind of daydreaming and extrapolation of ideas that I love to indulge in as a reader and as a writer was suddenly and completely maladaptive to the situation in Baghdad. The more I could imagine what could happen, the more different ways I thought I could die or fail or mess things up and it just would turn paralyzing. That’s where I started to tell myself that it doesn’t matter: “None of it matters; you’re already dead. Just get through your job.”

“ The kind of daydreaming and extrapolation of ideas that I love to indulge in as a reader and as a writer was suddenly and completely maladaptive to the situation in Baghdad.

- Roy Scranton

Siegel: For me, I didn’t think about death, the meaning of death, my own death; I thought about death in objects. It produced for me a fear of objects, of things; an adaptive fear. … You want to see a rock for a rock and an IED for an IED, and so the fear, in those situations, of death is the fear of the thing that brings death. It’s the fear of the instrument of death. And that was a powerful thing and something that created a kind of discipline in the mind in a certain way that was utterly exhausting.

On what, as a writer, Scranton hoped to gain from the war experience

Scranton: [I wanted] to be able to write with authority about war, about history, about love and life and so on. I think there’s a common sense, especially when it comes to the way we think about the culture we live in, that we sort of live in a mass media spectacle. The real stuff happens in Iraq or somewhere else. Real life is not here where we’re on the Internet and where we’re on our phones and where we’re watching TV.

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That’s a myth about war and about the way we live today that is immensely powerful, and I totally believed it and I wanted to go “over there”, wherever “over there” was, and encounter that reality with my body, with my existence [and] face danger, death and all the supposedly real, authentic things about war.

On the place of guns in the daily life of a soldier

Siegel: Wanting to carry a gun has almost nothing to do with – or nothing to do with — why I enlisted. … Guns are obviously the single most important instrument of warfare, they’re certainly the most symbolically potent instruments of warfare, but they don’t feel so much different than these other tools that you’re using.

In the Army, you talk about your “kit,” and it’s basically the stuff that you carry and it consists of your radio, your frag[mentation] grenades and your first aid pouch and your gun. … [Guns] didn’t feel to me so much different than those other parts of it, up until the point where it was engaged and then it did feel different.

Arts & Life

In "Fire And Forget," Vets-Turned-Writers Tell Their War Stories

Forget David Beckham, This is What Real Men Look Like

Forget David Beckham, This is What Real Men Look Like

A recent photo campaign is fighting sexism by tackling the problem at its root: men and hyper-masculinity. Jenny Francis and The Sun are putting “ordinary men” next to photo-shopped underwear models, to show just how ludicrous the common male ideal really is.

As demonstrated in the campaign, male models are muscular and poised. They command attention, and ultimately look powerful. This is in direct opposition to ads where female models look pretty and dainty. Men get muscles. Women get breasts and thinness. Men are supposed to do things with their muscles, and women are supposed to be looked at. Men are subjects, and women are objects.

This campaign, by presenting men who don’t resemble Superman, disrupts assumptions that uphold men’s power. The men’s musculatures aren’t defined like the models’, and they don’t command attention with the same authority. They don’t live up to what a man is supposed to be. This is a direct threat to the patriarchal power structure. By asserting multiple definitions and images of what a “man” is, especially when those images don’t resemble Adonis, the campaign asserts that men as a gender aren’t all physical embodiments of power. This understanding of gender could also disrupt the system that grants men power on a social level.

Masculinity is strictly enforced, because it grants men power. Those to whom it gives power are expected to uphold it as a social construct. When men defy the rigid construct of masculinity their existence becomes a threat to sexism as a whole. If there is no unified group to seize power, there can be no oppression.

PolicyMic

Forget David Beckham, This is What Real Men Look Like

Americans Are Being Treated to Political Theater: Forget the Government Shutdown – It’s About Shutting YOU Down

The government is red, the middle class is dead & they want us all dead

Americans are being treated to political theater at its finest. It’s not a theater of entertainment, however, but a coliseum of enslavement where in the world of deception, perception becomes reality. This theater requires audience participation, where we, the theater-goers, become part of the play. We are a truly captive audience, entranced into mindlessly choosing sides at the frenzied urging of the corporate media and partisan cheerleaders firmly seated behind the microphones and television cameras of the nationally syndicated media.

As the play progresses, we, the American people, become part of each act, believing that we actually have a voice in this pre-scripted performance. We are bombarded with lie after lie, each worse than the previous in an attempt to convince us that we can making a difference by choosing and cheering seemingly opposing sides on the stage before us. The biggest lie of them all is that there are not two sides, but just one. It’s “them versus us” in a fight to the death playing out before us in this 21st century Shakespearean tragedy. It’s not just death, but the premeditated murder of the middle class and anyone without a reservation at the globalists’ table. And the space at that table is limited.

The actors of this play are ostensibly at odds over funding the Affordable Care Act while a peek behind the curtain tells a different story altogether. Like any play, the ending of this has already been determined.  The ending, however, is not the same as written in the commemorative program you were given upon your arrival at this theater.

The house lights have been dimmed not just for the performance, but to induce us into a hypnotic trance further enabled by the media mouthpieces of malice. As you gradually become accustomed to the theater lighting, you’ll see that it’s not just a play, but you’re being played. You’re being manipulated into believing that the government shutdown is the actual plot of the play, while it is merely the method to continue the lie of a fictitious political paradigm.

Audience members who remain seated and captivated by the stellar performances of the actors, while maintaining a mental death-grip on the media cheering “their side,” are sadly in the majority. They are yelling at just above a throaty whisper at us and others who see beyond and behind the curtain, telling us to sit down and shut up, as we are reaching a critical moment in the performance.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking toward the October 17th deadline when we the U.S. will officially run out of money in this scripted, manufactured crisis. As the play builds up to its epilogue of evil, it serves its critical purpose of entertaining the masses and diverting our attention from the real issue, which is the killing of the U.S. dollar. The premeditated murder of the United States Petro-dollar is the real act taking place behind the velvet curtain. The play merely buys the actors, the murderers of the working class and the world as we will have once known it, time to arrange their own exodus from this coliseum turned theater.

The actors. aided by the media of malice, continue to perform brilliantly and are effectively distracting the majority of us through the final curtain call. Then, as the actors take their bows amid thunderous applause by the uninitiated, the majority of the audience will never see “it” coming.

They will not see the stagehands open the cages of the lions while simultaneously closing the doors and blocking the exits. The  thunderous applause at the curtain call will hide the sound of the engines on the Lear jets and the rotor noise on the helicopters that will whisk the actors to safety, away from the unspeakable carnage that was planned from the beginning.

By the time the screams from those who remained dutifully seated become unbearable, the globalist bankers, the money changers, the power brokers pulling the strings of the political puppets, will be far from earshot. When the house lights are turned on, the remaining theatergoers who survived will suddenly awaken to a different life. For it was never about what was seen, but always about what was hidden. It was never about the government shutdown, but the shutdown of the majority. The same majority that continues to cheer for their side, unable or unwilling to comprehend that there is only one side. Their side.

Global Research

Americans Are Being Treated to Political Theater: Forget the Government Shutdown – It’s About Shutting YOU Down

Obamacare"s Day 2 message: Forget Washington

Ironically, Obamacare appears to be benefiting from the government shutdown. | AP Photo

If there’s one message coming out of the White House about the Obamacare sign-up period, it’s this: Forget Washington.

While the nation’s capital remains in shutdown mode, lost in a seemingly hopeless partisan clash over whether the rest of the government’s operations and its creditworthiness should be held captive to the health care law, the administration’s six-month window to “enroll America” enters Day Two on Wednesday.

Continue Reading

After a series of first-day foul-ups that dominated media coverage Tuesday, White House officials say they’re focused on reaching outside the D.C. echo chamber to make sure folks who are eligible — and mandated — to purchase health insurance through state-by-state virtual marketplaces get themselves on the rolls of the new safety-net program.

(Also on POLITICO: Understanding Obamacare guide)

That will include a heavy dose of Twitter and celebrity endorsements, according to Tara McGuinness, the White House point person for Obamacare communications.

“The administration will kick off a national #GetCovered Day of Action — where American citizens, community leaders, artists and mayors will be encouraged to take to social media to spread the word about getting covered,” she wrote in an email to reporters. “Throughout the entire day, the #GetCovered hashtag will be seen by millions of Americans and provide an opportunity to share information, pictures and video with their friends, neighbors and fans.”

Actresses Alyssa Milano and Kerry Washington, and singer John Legend are among the celebrities who have agreed to promote the law to their fans, according to Reuters.

President Barack Obama and his aides have acknowledged that it may take some time for the enrollment process to work smoothly. Consumers were beset Tuesday by long wait times online, error messages, and blank drop-down boxes on Internet sign-up forms. The hybrid system of state and federal administration of the program created uneven experiences for people in different parts of the country, with some signing up easily and others unable to access websites or complete the enrollment process.

“Like every new law, every new product roll out, there are going to be some glitches in the signup process along the way that we will fix,” Obama said in the Rose Garden Tuesday.

Ironically, Obamacare appears to be benefiting from a government shutdown staged over GOP demands that Obama agree to defund it or delay its implementation. Republican lawmakers spent much of Tuesday arguing over a path forward on funding the government’s basic operations and whether to refuse to raise the nation’s debt limit — which the Treasury Department says will be breached later this month without congressional action. That robbed them of the opportunity to make political hay over the first-day glitches in the system.

“I do sort of regret that this message is getting confused with the rollout,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) told POLITICO. “It’s going to be a disaster for consumers,” he said, but “I’m afraid less attention may be paid to it.”

In that way, the fiscal showdown consuming the political class provides cover for the White House to run its enrollment campaign without full-scale interference from the small but significant corps of congressional Republicans who say the law is an abomination. There’s also an inherent risk for Republicans who choose to bash the law amid the budget crisis: Many of their constituents simply want information on how to get the new insurance subsidies.

Still, the White House has its work cut out in signing up enough Americans to make the law work as intended. The Department of Health and Human Services reported that 2.8 million people visited the federal Obamacare Website www.healthcare.gov over a 15-hour span on Tuesday, but the number of people who actually enrolled remains a mystery.

McGuinness pointed only to the numbers in Kentucky — the gold standard for state health insurance exchanges so far — where 2,000 people applied for coverage on Tuesday. The figures appeared to be lower in many other states, according to various news accounts.

The White House noted that seven times as many people logged on to the website Tuesday as have ever been on www.medicare.gov at the same time, a measure that may look more robust than it is because people 65 and older — the set eligible for Medicare — don’t appear to have the same affinity for technology as the younger group for whom the Obamacare insurance subsidies are designed.

“Internet use remains strongly correlated with age, educational attainment, and household income,” the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported a week ago. “One of the strongest patterns in the data on Internet use is by age group: 44% of Americans ages 65 and older do not use the Internet, and these older Americans make up almost half (49%) of non-Internet users overall.”

Time is on the administration’s side, though, as consumers have until March 31 to register, and the White House’s Wednesday push has a first-day-of-the-rest-of-Obamacare feel.

“Dozens of influencers with millions of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram followers have committed to be part of the #GetCovered campaign to promote enrollment,” McGuinness wrote. The effort “includes a central hub that will house assets, including signs, social media icons, and other digital assets to share.”

POLITICO – TOP Stories

Obamacare"s Day 2 message: Forget Washington

Obamacare"s Day 2 message: Forget Washington

Ironically, Obamacare appears to be benefiting from the government shutdown. | AP Photo

If there’s one message coming out of the White House about the Obamacare sign-up period, it’s this: Forget Washington.

While the nation’s capital remains in shutdown mode, lost in a seemingly hopeless partisan clash over whether the rest of the government’s operations and its creditworthiness should be held captive to the health care law, the administration’s six-month window to “enroll America” enters Day Two on Wednesday.

Continue Reading

After a series of first-day foul-ups that dominated media coverage Tuesday, White House officials say they’re focused on reaching outside the D.C. echo chamber to make sure folks who are eligible — and mandated — to purchase health insurance through state-by-state virtual marketplaces get themselves on the rolls of the new safety-net program.

(Also on POLITICO: Understanding Obamacare guide)

That will include a heavy dose of Twitter and celebrity endorsements, according to Tara McGuinness, the White House point person for Obamacare communications.

“The administration will kick off a national #GetCovered Day of Action — where American citizens, community leaders, artists and mayors will be encouraged to take to social media to spread the word about getting covered,” she wrote in an email to reporters. “Throughout the entire day, the #GetCovered hashtag will be seen by millions of Americans and provide an opportunity to share information, pictures and video with their friends, neighbors and fans.”

Actresses Alyssa Milano and Kerry Washington, and singer John Legend are among the celebrities who have agreed to promote the law to their fans, according to Reuters.

President Barack Obama and his aides have acknowledged that it may take some time for the enrollment process to work smoothly. Consumers were beset Tuesday by long wait times online, error messages, and blank drop-down boxes on Internet sign-up forms. The hybrid system of state and federal administration of the program created uneven experiences for people in different parts of the country, with some signing up easily and others unable to access websites or complete the enrollment process.

“Like every new law, every new product roll out, there are going to be some glitches in the signup process along the way that we will fix,” Obama said in the Rose Garden Tuesday.

Ironically, Obamacare appears to be benefiting from a government shutdown staged over GOP demands that Obama agree to defund it or delay its implementation. Republican lawmakers spent much of Tuesday arguing over a path forward on funding the government’s basic operations and whether to refuse to raise the nation’s debt limit — which the Treasury Department says will be breached later this month without congressional action. That robbed them of the opportunity to make political hay over the first-day glitches in the system.

“I do sort of regret that this message is getting confused with the rollout,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) told POLITICO. “It’s going to be a disaster for consumers,” he said, but “I’m afraid less attention may be paid to it.”

In that way, the fiscal showdown consuming the political class provides cover for the White House to run its enrollment campaign without full-scale interference from the small but significant corps of congressional Republicans who say the law is an abomination. There’s also an inherent risk for Republicans who choose to bash the law amid the budget crisis: Many of their constituents simply want information on how to get the new insurance subsidies.

Still, the White House has its work cut out in signing up enough Americans to make the law work as intended. The Department of Health and Human Services reported that 2.8 million people visited the federal Obamacare Website www.healthcare.gov over a 15-hour span on Tuesday, but the number of people who actually enrolled remains a mystery.

McGuinness pointed only to the numbers in Kentucky — the gold standard for state health insurance exchanges so far — where 2,000 people applied for coverage on Tuesday. The figures appeared to be lower in many other states, according to various news accounts.

The White House noted that seven times as many people logged on to the website Tuesday as have ever been on www.medicare.gov at the same time, a measure that may look more robust than it is because people 65 and older — the set eligible for Medicare — don’t appear to have the same affinity for technology as the younger group for whom the Obamacare insurance subsidies are designed.

“Internet use remains strongly correlated with age, educational attainment, and household income,” the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported a week ago. “One of the strongest patterns in the data on Internet use is by age group: 44% of Americans ages 65 and older do not use the Internet, and these older Americans make up almost half (49%) of non-Internet users overall.”

Time is on the administration’s side, though, as consumers have until March 31 to register, and the White House’s Wednesday push has a first-day-of-the-rest-of-Obamacare feel.

“Dozens of influencers with millions of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram followers have committed to be part of the #GetCovered campaign to promote enrollment,” McGuinness wrote. The effort “includes a central hub that will house assets, including signs, social media icons, and other digital assets to share.”

POLITICO – TOP Stories

Obamacare"s Day 2 message: Forget Washington

Forget MOOCs

Harvard University students.

Photo by Darren McCollester/Getty Images

For a year or two there, free online classes seemed like they just might be the future of higher education. Why, some influential computer scientists wondered, should there be thousands of colleges and universities around the country all teaching the same classes to small groups of students, when you could get one brilliant professor to teach the material to the whole world at once via the Internet? In a March 2012 Wired cover story about the phenomenon, Udacity founder and Stanford artificial-intelligence whiz Sebastian Thrun predicted that within 50 years there would be only 10 institutions of higher learning left in the world. Udacity, he reckoned, might be one of them.

As of this month, that prediction is looking overblown. After a year in which almost every big-name university in the United States rushed to get in on massive open online courses, or MOOCs, the backlash is in full force. And no wonder: The idea of free online video lectures replacing traditional classrooms not only offends many educators’ core values, but it threatens their jobs. Worse, the early evidence suggests the model may not work very well: A partnership between San Jose State and Udacity this spring ended with more than half the students failing. In the same spaces where advocates not long ago trumpeted the MOOC revolution, critics now warn of the “MOOC delusion.”

As much as everyone wants to see college costs reined in, replacing thousands of professors and classrooms with a handful of websites populated by remote talking heads cannot be the answer. But before we throw the whole idea out the window, it’s worth asking: Mightn’t there be a way that online lectures could complement the traditional higher-education experience rather than replace it?

Anant Agarwal, president of EdX, believes there is. Like Coursera and Udacity, EdX began by offering full-service online classes for free, taught by professors at Harvard and MIT, the initial partners in the venture. Unlike Coursera and Udacity, though, EdX is a nonprofit, which frees it from the expectations of venture capitalists bent on reaping millions from the concept. As a result, EdX has appeared less focused on getting big quickly and more open to experimentation in terms of how it can best serve professors and students. One of those experiments is what UC–Berkeley professor Armando Fox calls SPOCs—“small private online classes,” as opposed to massive open ones. The approach is also known, less acronymically, as “hybrid” or “blended learning.”

The basic idea is to use MOOC-style video lectures and other online features as course materials in actual, normal-size college classes. By assigning the lectures as homework, the instructors are free to spend the actual class period answering students’ questions, gauging what they have and haven’t absorbed, and then working with them on projects and assignments. In some cases the instructors also use some MOOC-style online assessments or even automated grading features. But in general they’re free to tailor the curriculum, pace, and grading system to their own liking and their own students’ needs.

The notion isn’t entirely novel. A similar approach has been popularized at the high-school level in recent years by Salman Khan, who encourages teachers to use his free online lessons to “flip the classroom”: Students watch lectures at home and then do their “homework” in class. Freed from the need to prepare a lecture for each class session, instructors can focus their time on the rest of the educational experience—the individualized, hands-on instruction and collaboration that no MOOC can provide. In this model, as I’ve noted in the past, the online lecture starts to look less like a poor substitute for traditional classes and more like a 21^st-century twist on the traditional textbook.

The early results are promising. At San Jose State—the same college where so many students failed the Udacity course taught entirely online—a SPOC partnership with EdX has gone much better. There, professor Khosrow Ghadiri used an online circuits and electronics course taught by Agarwal, the EdX president, as part of a flipped-classroom model for two of the three sections of his required engineering class. At home, students would watch Agarwal’s lecture, then fill out a survey designed to gauge which parts they understood and which gave them trouble. Ghadiri spent the first part of each class reviewing the parts that proved most problematic. Then they’d break into groups of three and work on solving problems together, after which each student would be quizzed individually on the day’s material. Ghadiri told me the students were skeptical at first. But as the semester progressed, they consistently outperformed their peers in the nonflipped classroom on the quizzes. And in the end, 91 percent passed Ghadiri’s course—a huge improvement, Ghadiri says, over the 65 percent average pass rate over the past seven years.

In other cases the approach has allowed instructors and students to tackle high-level material that they might not have attempted otherwise. Jaime L’Heureux, an information technology professor at Bunker Hill Community College near Boston, told me that she signed on to co-teach an experimental SPOC using online materials from an EdX class on the Python computer programming language. It was a daunting assignment: Neither she nor her co-professor were fluent in Python. And although the online course was billed as introductory, it was taught by an MIT professor and geared to MIT students. But L’Heureux said EdX worked with her to adapt the material to a slower-paced syllabus, and the flipped-classroom model allowed her to learn along with her students. Even then, half the students ended up dropping out. But those who stuck with it all earned a B-minus or above.

Asked whether she was worried that the MOOC material made her replaceable, L’Heureux laughed. Her students would never have made it through the course, she says, without both the instructors’ hands-on help and the persistent motivation of having to come to class and work through the difficulties alongside their classmates and the people who would be assigning their grades.

EdX isn’t the only MOOC provider experimenting with hybrid classes. In fact, Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng has been enthusiastic about the model from the outset, and several of Coursera’s university partners have adopted it in one form or another, including Duke and Vanderbilt. “We’re not interested in replacing professors,” Coursera’s partnerships manager, Connor Diemand-Yauman, told me. “When it comes down to it we understand the instructors’ place in an on-campus educational experience.”

Key questions remain, the biggest of which is whether a flipped classroom using video lectures is really any better than one that uses good old textbooks. Ghadiri believes students find the videos more engaging and are more likely to actually watch them than they are to complete their assigned readings. Ian Bogost, a Georgia Tech computer science professor and acute MOOC critic, acknowledges that replacing textbooks with MOOCs might make the material more accessible to some otherwise unmotivated pupils. But in an essay last year, he asked, “If the lecture was such a bad format in the industrial age, why does it suddenly get celebrated once digitized and streamed into a web browser in the information age?”

Whether or not SPOCs amount to some sort of pedagogical revolution, it seems clear that they hold more promise than pure MOOCs when it comes to delivering students a full educational experience—not to mention saving academics’ jobs.

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Slate Articles

Forget MOOCs

Forget the Old South: Trayvon Martin Was No Emmett Till

Why are so many people so desperate to hold onto the idea that America is as racist as it has ever been?

The phenomenon is apparent in much of the commentary on the George Zimmerman case. Facts were blithely ignored — the fact that Zimmerman is Hispanic, not white, by current standards; the evidence that he and not his victim, Trayvon Martin, was pummeled and wounded; the failure to find any hint of anti-black bias in Zimmerman’s past.

Instead there was a desperate longing to see this unhappy incident as a case of a white racist hunting down and murdering an innocent black — with a view to establishing that this kind of thing happens all the time.
It isn’t. Yes, young black men are homicide victims in large and tragic numbers. But the perpetrators are almost always other young black men, as in President Obama’s hometown of Chicago, where almost every weekend there are multiple such murders.

Nevertheless, journalism is full of opinion articles, many written by people who should know better, likening the death of Trayvon Martin to the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955.

Till was a 14-year-old black boy raised in Chicago who, on a summer trip to his native Mississippi, “wolf-whistled” at a white woman. Two white men abducted and brutally murdered him.

They were tried, and the all-white jury acquitted them after deliberating 67 minutes. Months later, the defendants told Look magazine’s William Bradford Huie that they had indeed killed the young man.

The Emmett Till case attracted national attention, with heavy media coverage. Rep. Charles Diggs, one of three blacks in Congress, attended the trial. National magazines ran pictures of the grinning defendants.

In the process, Northerners were forced to confront the brutality with which white Southerners enforced the subjection of blacks.

This went beyond the laws requiring segregated schools, buses and drinking fountains. Also in place was an unwritten code of behavior, breach of which could result in violent retaliation.

Blacks were called by their first names and could approach whites’ houses only by the back door, and black men could never, never ogle white women.

This was unknown to most Northerners. As I explain in my forthcoming book, “Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics,” there was almost no migration between South and North in the years between the Civil War and World War II.

Southern mores were so unknown in the North that Yale psychologist John Dollard’s 1937 book “Caste and Class in a Southern Town,” based on five months’ field work in Indianola, Miss., was hailed as a great revelation, akin to Margaret Mead’s writing on Samoa.

Yet everything in it was common knowledge for every 10-year-old, black or white, in Indianola.

The great genius of the civil rights movement was to make Northerners face the reality — and the violence — of the segregation system. The Emmett Till case was one of the first incidents that forced them to do so. It was followed a year later by Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus in 1955 and Martin Luther King’s resulting Montgomery bus boycott.

It is sometimes said that laws cannot change customs. But the Civil Rights Act of 1964, banning racial discrimination in hiring and public accommodations, did in fact change behavior in the South. It not only ended legally enforced segregation but effectively ended the unwritten code of black subjugation.

Which is to say that the America of our time — the America of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman — is hugely different from and hugely better than the America of Emmett Till.

Back in the 1950s, most Americans — not just in the South but across the nation — opposed interracial marriages. As blacks were migrating in large numbers to Northern cities, whites moved out of neighborhoods when they moved in.

Today things are different. Our president, twice elected with majorities of the vote, is the product of a mixed-race marriage. Black presence in neighborhoods no longer results in rapid white flight.

Yet many Americans have a desperate need to believe nothing has changed. They yearn for the moral clarity that enables almost all Americans today to retrospectively condemn the old Southern code.

The irony is that those who claim they lead the civil rights movement today have a vested psychological interest in denying its great triumph. 

Michael Barone is Senior Political Analyst for the Washington Examiner, co-author of The Almanac of American Politics and a contributor to Fox News.

RealClearPolitics – Articles

Forget the Old South: Trayvon Martin Was No Emmett Till

"Let Us Not Forget," Obama Says As U.S. Marks Memorial Day

Enlarge image i

President Obama speaks during a Memorial Day ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va.

Joshua Roberts/Getty Images

President Obama speaks during a Memorial Day ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va.

Joshua Roberts/Getty Images

Americans gathered at cemeteries, memorials and monuments nationwide to honor fallen military service members on Memorial Day, at a time when combat in Afghanistan approaches 12 years and the ranks of World War II veterans dwindles.

President Obama laid a wreath Monday at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery across the Potomac River from Washington.

“Let us not forget as we gather here today that our nation is still at war,” Obama said.

“When they give their lives, they are still being laid to rest in cemeteries in quiet corners across our country, including here in Arlington,” he said. He told the stories of three soldiers who had died. Each had been devoted to their mission and were praised by others for saving lives.

Earlier in the morning, he and first lady Michelle Obama hosted a breakfast at the White House with “Gold Star” families of service members who have been killed.

Another wreath-laying ceremony was planned at Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island in New York City. The park is a tribute to President Roosevelt’s famous speech calling for all people to enjoy freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

At the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, about 30 bicyclists clustered around World War II veteran and museum volunteer Tom Blakey, a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division who jumped at Normandy on D-Day — June 6, 1944 — and in May 1945 helped liberate the work camp at Wobbelin in northwest Germany.

“Most of us wondered why we were there, killing people and being killed,” he said. “We didn’t do anything to deserve it. When we got to that camp and saw what was there, the lights came on.”

The cycling group makes regular weekend training runs, and on Monday started a Memorial Day ride about seven miles away at the national cemetery in Chalmette, where the Battle of New Orleans — the last in the War of 1812 — was fought.

“I’m glad I took this ride to hear a personal story,” Scott Gumina, 41, said. “Hearing one man’s account of his personal experience was pretty impressive to me.”

Across much of New England, several days of heavy rain gave way to sunny skies for parades in towns large and small.

In Portland, Maine, kids and even pets displayed the Stars and Stripes as veterans, youth groups law enforcement officials and civic organizations paraded to Monument Square to the tunes of a marching band, sirens from a police car and the rumble of motorcycles.

“It’s a very important day, not only for the Veteran of Foreign Wars but every veteran organization, every branch of the service, and every patriot in general — every American. This day is hugely significant and should never be forgotten,” said David Olson, 66, of Portland, the VFW’s state senior vice commander.

He said he was pleased to see a large turnout of youngsters, both in the parade and along the parade route. “As they get older, they’ll realize exactly why we do this,” he said.

For some veterans, it was a somber event.

Richard Traiser, a Marine injured when his tank came under attack in Vietnam, helped deliver a three-volley salute with the Marine Corps League.

Memorial Day gives those who served an opportunity to get together and remember friends who didn’t make it.

“I think about them a lot, especially the people I lost in my platoon,” Traiser said. “A couple of kids were 19 years old. I don’t dwell on it in a morbid way, but it’s on your mind.”

In Connecticut, a Waterford man who was killed in the Vietnam War was honored with a hometown park area named for him. Arnold E. Holm Jr., nicknamed “Dusty,” was killed when his helicopter was shot down on June 11, 1972. A group of at least 100 dedicated the park this weekend.

In suburban Boston, veterans gathered in a park to mark Memorial Day this year rather than hold a parade because of failing health and dwindling numbers. The city of Beverly called off its parade because so few veterans would be able to march. The parade has been a fixture in the town since the Civil War.

In Atlanta, a dedication of the History Center’s redone Veterans Park was scheduled for early evening. Soil from major battlefields will be scattered by veterans around the park’s flagpole.

The holiday weekend also marked the traditional start of the U.S. vacation season. AAA, one of the nation’s largest leisure travel agencies, expected 31.2 million Americans to hit the road over the weekend, virtually the same number as last year. Gas prices were about the same as last year, up 1 cent to a national average of $ 3.65 a gallon Friday.

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"Let Us Not Forget," Obama Says As U.S. Marks Memorial Day