Editorially speaking...
It’s Spring and I’ve been housecleaning my files.
Among the many newspaper clippings that have been gathering dust, this one since last September, is an obituary for Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough, aged 89.
What an amazing career.
The Massachusetts author who wrote about the Brooklyn Bridge and U.S. presidents john Adams, Harry Truman and Theodore Roosevelt among other historical subjects, was described as a joyous and tireless student of the past, some small thing that I can claim to share.He was also accused of being a romantic, that he became so empathetic with the characters he wrote about that he lost some of his objectivity. Meaning that he didn’t come down harder on the westward march of America which was made at the expense of its original inhabitants, for one.
And that he didn’t portray either President Adams and Truman with all their warts.
Yet this didn’t stop his being awarded a Pulitzer Prize for each of these biographical studies or his achieving millions of readers in the process.
In fact, his study of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge’s construction was ranked as no. 48 on the Modern Library’s list of the best non-fiction books of the 20th century.
McCullough’s response to criticism was that some people aren’t content with their leaders having feet of clay but they want their leaders “to be all clay”.
Another of his passions was the need for education and a knowledge and understanding of history. He’d come to fear that “history is being put on the back burner or taken off the stove altogether in many of most schools, in favour of math and reading”.
Hear, Hear!
* * * * *
If you appreciate irony, these two nuggets:
—USFWS Mountain-Prairie - Canada goose on Seedskadee NWR, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69188087
The Capital Region District has approved a cull and egg-addling program to reduce the number of Canada geese who’ve become year-round residents at the expense of parks, lawns and other greenery.
Where’s the irony in that, you ask? A native of the Arctic and other temperate regions of Canada, it was introduced to the United Kingdom, Ireland, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand, Japan, Chile, Argentina and the Falkand Islands.
Closer to home, it was encouraged to take up residence, with the result that it has so multiplied that its herbivorous appetite and constant defecating have riled municipalities and homeowners alike.
God knows that I do love to watch them flying overhead in their ragged V’s with their cacophonous honking.
The second irony is almost astounding in some ways.
Chinese immigration to Canada, it was reported recently, has hit a record high according to government statistics. What a turnaround from the days when Chinese immigrants were charged a head tax, were denied bringing their wives and families with them and were treated as little better than lepers—all the while finding employment from whites because they’d work for little better than slave wages.
They’ve been among our most honest and law-abiding citizens from Day One. Now they’re welcomed by a nation with a declining birth rate and almost 10,000 were granted permanent resident admission during the last reported quarter of July-September 2022.
* * * * *
Another clipping, this one beginning to turn colour:
I’m sure I needn’t tell this to my lady readers but, according a study some years ago by German scientists (I have the Times Colonist clipping), columnists (that’s me) are irresistible to women.
One more cross to bear, sigh...
* * * * *