About E.T.

This author has not yet filled in any details.
So far E.T. has created 45 blog entries.

March 2013

Iraq

2016-12-28T21:37:57+00:00March 20th, 2013|Defense|

Originally published March 20, 2013

I was in the 8th grade, riding back from an oboe lesson, when President Bush crackled on the radio and declared the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. I wasn’t sure why we were going to war. I didn’t know the first thing about Iraq and I certainly couldn’t find it on a map.

Over the next few days, I caught daily glimpses of the CNN feed over Baghdad, after lunch and before Algebra. American airpower made for beautiful pyrotechnics; I remember hoping those buildings were deserted. The campaign from the air was followed by a brilliant campaign of maneuver – Saddam Hussein’s army crumpled in five weeks.

Iraqi Freedom wasn’t really over, of course. By late high school – 05-07 – American servicemen were dying at a rate far exceeding those initial few weeks of invasion. In that period, I discovered politics and became a leftie, using Iraq as a catalyst. I wrote my first op ed about the horrors of the war, citing white phosphorus, American imperialism, and Bush the war criminal. It all seemed very straightforward: black and white, right and wrong.

(more…)

> Read More
 1

October 2012

McGovern

2016-12-28T21:37:57+00:00October 21st, 2012|Politics|

Originally published October 21, 2012

I was sad when I saw that George McGovern had entered hospice last week, and I was sad to hear that he passed earlier today. We’re losing an important generation of American statesmen; McGovern ranked high on that list.

My dad gave me a McGovern pin when I was little and speaks fondly of his time volunteering for the ’72 McGovern campaign. For a lot of young people who had embraced 60s counterculture, McGovern pushed them to finally participate in the system they’d spent the last decade fighting against. His subsequent (crushing) defeat turned many of them away from politics forever.

Read a McGovern obituary and you’ll see that it was his principles and ideas, not his accomplishments, that earned him a place in American history. He was a champion of lost causes. He had supporters, but never enough. He was lauded and respected by both sides, but seldom listened to. I suspect that often, when McGovern would take the stage, more than a few in the (polite) audience were thinking, “There he goes again…”

(more…)

> Read More
 0

March 2011

Remembering the Great War

2016-12-28T21:37:57+00:00March 24th, 2011|Defense|

Originally published March 24, 2011

Last month, 110-year-old Frank Buckles — our final surviving veteran of World War I — died peacefully in his sleep. His passing marks the end of an era and the fading of a conflict that is increasingly footnoted and ignored in American studies of history.

In some ways, this diminishment is inevitable. WWI began the better part of a century ago. Its causes are diverse and complicated. It offers no cosmic battle between the evils of fascism and the good of democracy, and it has no happy ending. Literature regrets it, video games ignore it and Tom Hanks hasn’t even done a miniseries about it.

Yet four million Americans fought in it, joining a staggering total of 65 million combatants who took up arms between 1914 and 1918. The extent of their sacrifice was unprecedented. And the significance of their struggle — one which profoundly changed both east and west — haunts us to this day.

(more…)

> Read More
 0

Somme

2015-01-20T03:27:09+00:00March 20th, 2011|Writing|

Originally published March 20, 2011

Because the sun hung so cheerful and bright, he pretended there was no war, and that his trench did not smell like bloating death.

Shaving by a shard of glass, he imagined he still looked a child of seventeen, instead of an old man of twenty.

Wincing as shells roared overhead, he pictured fireworks.  The first time he’d been taken to a show, he’d cried until his mother brought him home.  He had not gone to the fireworks after that.

(more…)

> Read More
 0

March 2008

Two Worlds

2016-12-28T21:37:57+00:00March 15th, 2008|Life|

Originally published March 15, 2008

Staring at a monitor in sleepy and familiar Habersham county, it’s difficult to imagine a place like Penn. It’s near impossible to believe it’s a place in which I’ve spent the last six months of my life. I know a lot of college kids have weird homecomings, but I’d contend that mine are weirder than most. It stems from the disconnect between the worlds of Habersham county, GA and the UPenn campus.

I board an afternoon train in bustling 30th Street Station. 13 hours later, I’m deposited into the dead quiet of Toccoa, GA at 5:45 am. The streets are deserted, the traffic lights are set to blink red, and the air smells amazing. My room looks like I never left it, and after a nap I’m catching up with folks who wear Dixie Outfitter shirts and call people “Jew” if they’re being dumb.

It’s like landing on another planet. Not necessarily a worse planet–a lot of times I appreciate Habersham more than Penn–but a very, very different one. Watching the sun set over Highway 365 or walking with my dad in the hundreds of acres of national forest that surround our house, half a square mile of urban Philadelphia seems like a strange six months’ home.

(more…)

> Read More
 0
Go to Top