Tag Archives: anniversary

Where Were You When…

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. Anyone over the age of 55 will be asking everyone else over the age of 55: “Where were you when you heard the news?” We all know exactly where we were.

Here’s my story.

I was a senior at West Orange Mountain High School in West Orange, New Jersey. I was in drama class in the auditorium and the teacher, Miss Levin, asked me to go backstage to get some piece of business that she needed to demonstrate a point. Continue reading →

Fifty Years After Kennedy

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Originally published in The Hill

Five decades after the brutal murder of President Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, who had promised to keep America out of war in the election of 1912, became the first president to show a movie at the White House.

That movie, “Birth of a Nation,” directed by D.W. Griffith, was a wonder of technical achievement. It also portrayed the Ku Klux Klan in heroic terms, employed white actors in black face (presumably because the director refused to hire actual black actors) and generally denigrated the historic legacy of America’s 16th president.

Continue reading →

King and Obama

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Rereading Martin Luther King’s speech from 50 years ago, it is a remarkable piece of rhetorical wonder. The New York Times ran a front-page story on it yesterday.

King’s speech struck a chord because it went narrow and deep. It spoke specifically of a vexing problem: the persistent, violent, and inhumane treatment of black people in America.

There was no sugar-coating in Dr. King’s speech. He didn’t name names, but he did name a particular region of the country: The South.

And what he said was as direct as it was forceful: We have had enough of this crap.

Of course, King made the point with the magic of poetry enshrouded in the mysticism of spiritualism. He called forth for help from the almighty, mostly through allusion, to a specific goal: Let my people go. Continue reading →

The Day Distance Disappeared

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band lyrics notwithstanding, yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the birth of the World Wide Web.

The Web was invented in Switzerland. At the CERN laboratory near Geneva. The acronym CERN originally stood in French for Conseil Europen pour laRecherche Nuclaire (European Council for Nuclear Research). The name has since changed, but the acronym has stuck. Continue reading →

Hindsight

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Ten years.

It has been a decade since America invaded Iraq. Historians will have a field day analyzing every aspect of this war, from beginning to end, and at every point in between.

The war was a mistake, a giant mistake. It cost more than 8 trillion dollars and while it deposed an evil and brutal dictator, it did so with an unnecessarily high cost in blood and treasure. Continue reading →