Today, I have an Impromptus column, devoted to various matters concerning Russia and Ukraine. Back in 1984, Jeane Kirkpatrick spoke of Americans who “blame America first.” There is a dose of that today, as some Americans fault the United States, or NATO, or the West, for Putin’s ongoing aggression.
In the course of my column, I mention Edward Snowden — who tweeted from his Russian home, “There is nothing more grotesque than a media pushing for war.” In reality, his government, Putin’s dictatorship, is threatening war. Other people are hoping to deter it.
Last week, I did a Q&A podcast with Kateryna Yushchenko. I will have more to say about her later, but for now: She was first lady of Ukraine. Her husband is Viktor Yushchenko, who survived a murder attempt in 2004. He was nearly poisoned to death, in the kind of operation for which Putin’s agents have become infamous. Kateryna Yushchenko spent the first half of her life in America. She was born in Chicago, to émigré parents. She worked in the Reagan White House. She moved to Ukraine just two months before independence, in the summer of 1991. She has much of interest to say.
I’d like to publish some reader mail. The first letter responds to an item I had in an Impromptus earlier this month. Let me paste that item, to set up the letter:
A school district in Washington — the State of Washington — has struck To Kill a Mockingbird from its required reading list. The racial politics of the book are too dicey, evidently. In 2020, a district in California forbade the teaching of the book altogether.
We who cherish American culture can only hope that young people, and other people, will read the book — Harper Lee’s classic — on their own.
I read it with Mrs. Mayo at Tappan Junior High School, in my hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich. I loved the book, and I loved the teacher. I remember what she wrote in my yearbook — something like, “We’ll always have a bond over Mockingbird.”
God bless her, and that book.
Okay, our reader writes,
Your item on To Kill a Mockingbird — that one hurt. Like many middle-school teachers, I teach both Social Studies and Language Arts. A novel like that is perfect: great literature combined with an accurate depiction of historical conditions. It is my favorite text to teach. I have seen kids in tears as we read about Tom Robinson’s death or during our discussions afterwards. More often there has been real anger at the outcome of the trial. I could talk myself blue telling them about the injustice of Jim Crow; they tend to glaze over reading histories of the era. But reading about a gross injustice to a character (albeit fictional) they care about brings it all home.
In a post or two, readers and I have talked about long song titles. (I mean, long titles of songs, not titles of songs that are long.) One of those titles belongs to a Hoagy Carmichael number of 1942: “I’m a Cranky Old Yank in a Clanky Old Tank on the Streets of Yokohama with My Honolulu Mama Doin’ Those Beat-o, Beat-o, Flat-on-My-Seat-o Hirohito Blues.”
David Churchill Barrow writes,
Howdy, Jay,
That perfectly describes my father’s WW II service, only he wasn’t that old. He was a “Swamp Yankee” Massachusetts farm boy of 19 when the Marine Corps sent him to Saipan to command an outdated Stuart Tank that had been retrofitted with a Ronson Flamethrower. This contraption was nicknamed “The Satan.” His job was to burn out diehard Japanese from caves and bunkers to stop them from killing and wounding his fellow Marines. The action scarred his soul for life.
Think about that. This country had to send 19-year-old kids to burn people alive in an existential world war, all because the previous generation was too isolationist, too appeasement-focused, and too forgetful that peace only comes through strength and the willingness to use it. It is a warning for the ages.