The LongBow Papers

Liberal-oriented columns, commentary and archived articles on national and international news, politics, and the communication arts--with emphasis on China--by Joseph Bosco, author, journalist, director and actor; Professor of Drama and Communications at Beijing Foreign Studies University.

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Sylvia, Where Are You?

12:18 PM

Forgive a personal plea, folks, but I need help. I have been trying to reach my sister Sylvia by telephone in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, for many hours and cannot get through. From my last phone conversation with her I know that she and my mother were not going to stay in the beach house, and were probably going to ride out the storm in Gulf Hills, just north of Ocean Springs. That was well before Katrina suddenly veered east of New Orleans and hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast instead. I have lost Sylvia's cell phone number; if anyone in Mississippi--or elsewhere--knows anything about Sylvia, my mother Wilma Bosco, or my niece Reagan, please e-mail me. Look for the link in the right hand corner of this blog.

It would be the greatest 57th birthday present I could receive--yes, it's my birthday. Thank you.

12:18 PM / Editor / permalink 4 comments

Monday, August 29, 2005

Katrina Is No Lady

1:27 PM

During the next 24 hours, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where I lived for most of the first four and a half decades of my life, will be changed forever by a monstrous storm. Again. In 1969, the "Perfect Storm" that forever changed the coastline of the upper Gulf of Mexico was named Camille.

While I am greatly relieved that my son Joe, his beautiful bride Michelle, and his courageous mother Linda, were able to get out of New Orleans--evacuating all the way to Memphis, Tennessee, where they were lucky to get hotel reservations--and that my sister and mother safely evacuated our family's beach front home in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, I am agitated to no end at the imminent destruction of so much of a topography and a geography I love beyond measure.

A strangely despondent anxiety and a damnable sense of helplessness prevent me from expressing what I am thinking and feeling here in Beijing, some 10,000 miles away. Being jet-lagged to the max doesn't help; we flew in from the States late Sunday night.

Just over a week ago, Ellen and I were in New Orleans and Ocean Springs, Mississippi; it was a wonderful visit. Below are some pictures that capture one of the charms that so distinguishes that very special part of America--its cuisine.

Perhaps a few pictures will suffice to tell a part of the story for now.

Joe, Michelle, and the old dude eating boiled shrimp and crabs in Belle Chasse, Louisiana, on the Westbank of the Mississippi River.

This is what it's all about...

Letting the good times roll: the old dude in his new hat, Michelle, Ronnie "Scoop" Jackson, Joe, and Ellen.

"We're leaving," my son said immediately and simply into his cell phone...

1:27 PM / Editor / permalink 0 comments

Saturday, August 06, 2005

Gone to Hollywood

1:47 PM

We're off to the States for 20 days, starting with a week in Los Angeles, then a week in New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, one day in New York, and then a week in a tiny coastal village north of San Francisco. We return to Beijing on August 26.

I do not know how much Internet time I will be able to squeeze in, but I will try. In the meantime, I am putting up a couple of pictures taken by Russ Moses during our latest stroll through a hutong in the Baitasi area of Beijing.

The first one is a favorite of mine. There is a vitality to the photograph that to me is Beijing.

The photograph below serves two purposes. It reminds me how much I have to learn about the old China before it disappears. It also gives my detractors--and they are legion--a perfect "target."

The Chinese characters painted on the wall behind me in American English translate as "This Property is Condemned," or more literally in Chinese as "Tear Down." There is much room for fun and abuse in that juxtaposition.

1:47 PM / Editor / permalink 0 comments

Monday, August 01, 2005

The Day I Cried on National TV

7:11 PM

I will never forget the day during the O.J. Simpson criminal trial when Johnny Cochran and Chris Darden hammered each other, soul and tongue, for hours on whether or not the mostly black jury could hear the "N" word--perhaps the ugliest word ever attached to an ethnic group in the history of the English language--dispassionately enough for "the state" to receive "a fair trial." The irony of that sharp switchback of modern American history was as thick as raw pinesap and as ugly tasting in my mouth.

I walked out of that insanely pressurized, tiny little courtroom and all too soon another television camera was in front of my face and another "what do you think?" question was hanging in the broadcast air.

And I started to cry. What a fool I made of myself. It's live TV, and I'm crying. Finally, clumsily, I strung together semi-audible words to the effect that basically "30 years after we thought we had changed things in America, what's happening in that courtroom is the proof that we failed. I failed!" and other such words. I was embarrassed. I thought I had committed TV broadcast journalism heresy.

I apologized profusely to people I spoke with several times a day, a lot of it on camera, five days a week for more than a year, and stepped away only to find that other national networks and L.A. TV stations wanted me to cry for them.

Why am I recalling this very bad moment now? Because of a Yankee writer who came south and brought his journalistic and literary talents with him; twice, in fact, a decade apart. His name is Richard Rubin. In 1995 he wrote a fine book about Mississippi racial criminal justice history, "Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South." And in this weekend's The New York Times Magazine, he writes one of the best pieces of journalism in the voluminous, ugly history of the 1955 Emmett Till murder case. A case my readers will remember from other posts; the murder has strangely haunted me for 50 of my 57 years of life.

Within the article, "The Ghosts of Emmett Till," Mr. Rubin asks a question. Below are a few graffs from inside Richard Rubin's truly fine article about one of modern America's very worst moments. The kind that lingers over centuries. And that is as it should be.

This is from his interview with one of Emmett's murderers' defense attorneys, now a very old man:

At first he offered something about Anglo-Saxons having "a reputation for being a little harder against people who get out of line than do others," but he quickly set that aside and explained: "You said 'Anglo-Saxon,' the jury would understand what you were talking about. You're talking about a white man.' He added, making a pointed reference to another trial that at that very moment was also polarizing the country, "I guess you could say I was playing the race card."

And it occurred to me, right then, just how much the defense of O.J. Simpson owed to the defense of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, and how little, in some ways, the country had changed in the past 40 years. The issue of race was still so potent that it could overwhelm evidence and hijack a jury, even when the case at hand was a brutal, savage murder. I found it interesting that Whitten made the connection; I wondered if anyone in that courtroom in Los Angeles had.

Yes, Mr. Rubin, I did, every day of the almost 16 months spent in that courtroom starting in the Summer of 1994; unlike "normal" murder cases, the Simpson press corps was in court almost five days a week from the Prelim that summer until the verdict October 3, 1995.

In truth, Mr. Rubin, there were very few days during those years when I did not think about Emmett Till. Except, apparently, we saw 'mirror' ironies comparing the two courtrooms over half a century.

The Ghosts of Emmett Till in The New York Times

7:11 PM / Editor / permalink 2 comments