Friday is “clean up your desktop” day and I’ve been going through a 450 item-filled folder called “Incoming” that’s full of URLs, text file scraps, and ephemera I thought should be filed on the “interesting” spectrum somewhere.
Anyway, since the Oscars are on Sunday and one of my favorite movies of the year (Good Night And Good Luck) is up for some awards here’s a relevant quote from another journalist who succumed from lung cancer.
“It’s a logical assumption that hatred – far left, far right, political, religious, economic, or paranoid – moved the person or persons who today committed this combined act of murder and national sabotage. There is in this country, and there has been for too long, an ominous and sickening popularity of hatred. The body of the President, lying at this moment in Washington, is a thundering testimonial of what hatred comes to and the revolting excesses it perpetrates. Hatred is self-generating, contagious, it feeds upon itself and explodes into violence. It is no inexplicable phenomenon that there are pockets of hatred in our country, areas and communities where the disease is permitted or encouraged or given status by those who can and do influence others. You and I have heard, in recent months, someone say, “Those Kennedys ought to be shot.” A well-known national magazine [The National Review] recently carried an article saying Chief Justice Warren ought to be hanged. In its own defence, it said it was only joking. But the left has been equally bad. Tonight, it might be the hope and resolve of all of us that we’ve heard the last of this kind of talk, jocular or serious, for the result is tragically the same.”
Huntley was talking about the JFK assassination, but he might as well have been talking about the suceeding forty-three years. Good night and good luck indeed.