1424 Sharpton

Once upon a time, there was a very good newspaper called Newsday, now a shadow of its former shadow.  It had the snap and shape of a tabloid but the solidity of an old line broadsheet.  Even though it was published on Long Island, it was right up there with the print stars of the day.  Nationally,  it was the fifth largest in circulation and third in frequency of being quoted.

One of the people who made it so was a reporter-then-editor-then columnist called Les Payne. Mr. Payne is black.  That’s important to this story.

Then in the 1980s, there came a young girl named Tawana Brawley who also is black.  And that’s important to this story.

She charged that she was raped, bound, thrown in a garbage bag by racist whites.

She is the pilot light that lit the gas bag that is Al Sharpton. But while Sharpton was flogging the story, some of us were convinced the allegations were nonsense.  We took the facts of the case and divined that Miss Brawley was a scared teen, out after curfew and scared that her stepfather would punish -- maybe beat -- her and made up the story.

Evidently, Payne was one of those, investigated and found out it was so, then published the story which was then in effect lifted by the New York Times which got all but one element of the case steamrolled into a pancake and thrown away.

The element that survived?  Sharpton.  He insisted Brawley was telling the truth and like Goebbels, kept repeating the lie and today, he’s welcome at the White House.

There is only one thing you need to know about Al Sharpton; it should tell you everything.  Before he was a self-anointed member of the clergy, before he was an “activist,” before he was anything, he was a record promoter. Ethics on a scale of 1-10?  Minus five.

So first we had the giants of the modern era civil rights movement. MLK, James Farmer, Whitney Young, Fred Shuttlesworth, Ella Baker, and on and on.

Gradually and sometimes not so gradually, they were replaced by people like Jesse Jackson and Ralph David Abernathy.

And now, THEY are replaced by Reverend Hoodwink and Farrakhan.

Wonder what Les Payne thinks about all this.

Grapeshot:

-Question for Robin Meade: Why don’t you take more time off and give us a rest?

-Question for the New York Times: will lopping off 100 heads in the newsroom really help your bottom line or are you just flailing and rearranging deck chairs?

-Question for Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky: Are you happy you could now re-invade Cuba if you were alive?

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014

836 The Plasticarians

836 The Plasticarians

Say, someone tells you steak is nothing more than the recycling of cows. Even the biggest meat eaters would say that’s nuts, and it is. Cows, after all, are alive. They breathe, they (occasionally) move. They go “mooooo.”

So, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” doesn’t apply to cattle ranches. But what about plastic. Plastic is made from carbon and oil and such. Oil comes from... plankton? Dinosaurs? Aunt Martha?

So when Alexander Parkes made the first plastic in 1855, was he fooling around with what we now call celluloid, or was he creating life in a test tube?

The Plasticarians think the latter. When your grocery bags no longer are useful, do you recycle them like cows? Or do you give them a proper burial, either in a landfill or your back yard.

It may take them millions of years to come back in an equally useful form, but they WILL come back.

Do plastic objects have souls? Ask any practitioner of Voodoo and you’ll get a “yes.” And they’ll tell you the same about logs, little stuffed dolls, statues and drums.

So when you’re finished with the Glad Wrap or the grocery bag or the water bottle and you just casually throw it into a recycle bin somewhere, do you know what happens to it? Maybe it goes to the landfill. But maybe it’ll be cruelly tortured by being melted down and made into something else. There’s no way you can be sure unless you bury it yourself. While burying a human corpse in your backyard is illegal in many places, burying a zip-lock bag is not.

Would you tear a six ounce soda bottle from its one liter mom? Not if you think like a Plasticarian. Are you sure the bottle of liquid detergent and the bottle of liquid fabric softener that sit on your shelf have not fallen in love?

It’s a good thing Guinness and Newcastle Ale don’t come in plastic, else there might be a mini-war between the Irish and the British at the bottle melting factory! These too deserve proper burials. And not in the same place.

Time to organize! Prevent the abuse and torture of plastic. Eliminate the death penalty. Keep families together.

And while you’re doing that, please pass the recycled cow.

Shrapnel:

--Happy returns: Vincent D’Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe return for season ten of Law & Order Criminal Intent. Too bad it’s the last season.

--Unhappy returns: At the end of the month, the New York Times will return to charging for use of its on line edition for most users. Wouldn’t pay for Newsday; will do it for the NYT, which is a buck or so a week cheaper and remains worth reading.

--Mixed returns: The feds were pretty good about this year’s taxes. Getting back about enough to cover the real estate taxes.


I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com.
© 2011 WJR