Daily Prompt | The Gad About Town

Jimmy Carter’s Moment

Posted on August 20, 2015 by Mark Aldrich

“The course of human events, even the greatest historical events, are not determined by the leaders of a nation or a state, like presidents and governors and senators. They are controlled by the combined wisdom and courage and commitment and discernment and unselfishness and compassion and love and idealism of the common ordinary people. And if that was true in the case of Russia where they had a czar or France where they had an emperor, how much more true is it in our own case where the Constitution charges us with a direct responsibility for determining what our government is and ought to be?”—Jimmy Carter, then Governor of Georgia, May 4, 1974, “Law Day.” University of Georgia, Athens, GA.

Just a Perfect Day

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Mark Aldrich

“You’re going to reap just what you sow.”

“Um, excuse me?”

“You’re going to reap just what you sow.” And he says it three more times.
Read More

Tortured

Posted on August 18, 2015 by Mark Aldrich

This column was revisited one year later, in August 2016, here: “One Year Ago: A Public Torture.”

* * * *
The cane broke. Isn’t that all we need to know? The switch broke.

Raymond Johansen allowed himself to be tortured yesterday in solidarity with Saudi writer Raif Badawi. He was hit 50 times with a cane in Trafalgar Square, where public corporal punishments were once seen regularly but not since the 1830s. He had difficulty walking after and even expressed confusion as to where he was upon speaking with a reporter.

When a caning is administered it sometimes does not look as severe as one thinks a beating would look; even one of the words we use minimizes the severity: lashes. In writing about the Saudi Arabian writer Raif Badawi, who was sentenced last year to 1000 lashes and 10 years in prison, I have run into this weakness of language. All language is analogy, and I have wanted the analogy to convey the pain of judicial corporal punishment. Few do. Perhaps none do. Raymond Johansen’s action pumped life into the analogies.
Read More