More on the book in a moment but first a digression – who is Tim McCarthy? Another former rugby player, who I first met in 1981, when I returned from four years living in the Caribbean. I re-joined my NY based rugby club to find Tom had absconded with my first side position.
Tom was fast and cunning, and when he tackled you, it was important that your major medical be up-to-date.
Well, I gilded the lily a little bit in that last paragraph.
Despite the healthy competition for playing time – I was lucky in that Tom always seemed to be injured except, seemingly, for the big games, like against Boston or Old Blue – we became pretty good friends.
One of the interesting things about Tom was that he was an old-line leftist. I mean Che Guevera was a little bit too conservative for him. Tom had spent his formative years living abroad, in places like Afghanistan and South Africa, as his father was in the foreign service (CIA). Through some incredible transformation, this turned McCathy into a guy who after one or two beers, would walk around going “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh.”
So naturally Tom became a writer and editor.
And always has been, and always will be, a swell fellow and fine friend.
So a couple of days ago, he sent me a proof copy of a book his company is publishing entitled Patriots Act by Bill Katovsky, “Author of the award-winning Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq”.
The book is subtitled “Voices of Dissent: An Oral History”
I have NOT yet read the book, just paged through it and read a few bits and pieces.
The book has twenty brief chapters, each highlighting a different “dissenter.” And some of them are legitimate, like Daniel Ellsberg (“The Pentagon Papers”), and worldwide anti-war activist Kathy Kelly (who I met once at a demonstration at the UN; nice lady and very sincere), who has paid a tough price for her non-violent beliefs.
BUT, also included are people like Randi Rhodes and Paul Krugman! Very weird.
Randi Rhodes is the afternoon talk show host on Air America (listener-free radio) and twenty minutes of tuning in should convince you that she is A) a nut job and B) stupid.
Paul Krugman is the former acclaimed economist turned NY Times op ed writer, who has spawned a whole online cottage industry “The Krugman Truth Squad”, to correct his exaggerations, falsifications, and downright lies.
What Rhodes and Krugman both have in common is a genius for self-promotion, scarcely a qualification one thinks of when imagining a “dissenter”. Perhaps the author Katovsky felt that including them in the same group with Ellsberg and Kelly, might help him get some free publicity? Maybe Rhodes will talk about him and Krugman will write about him? That must be the angle. Pretty cynical for a progressyve.
The note that came with the book said:
Thomas,
Ho, Ho, Ho, Chi Minh
Tom
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