Wordslinger

Leonard Novarro

Description

Journal of Culture & Commerce, the only newspaper of its kind serving the entire Asian community in English.
I didn’t decide to write this book out of some noble dedication to the field of journalism.
Or to revitalize “the good old days” by recapturing the past.
Or tell a great story or two while singing the praises of newspapers.
God knows, the newspapers didn’t always get it right, although they did get it right more than they got it wrong.
Now, in this era of the Internet and social media, the opposite often is true. How else would you explain the fact that millions in the United States and abroad believe in a conspiracy theory that a ring of Satanworshipping pedophiles, cannibals and sex traffickers are working to unseat the president of the United States and take over the world -- a theory that began at President Trump rallies in 2018 and one that he clings to, along with many of his Facebook and Twitter followers?

Sujets

• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Journalism

Informations

• Publié par: AuthorHouse
• Date de parution: 14 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781665560467
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

WORDSLINGER
 
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A NEWSPAPER JUNKIE
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
LEONARD NOVARRO
 
 
 

 
AuthorHouse™
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.authorhouse.com
Phone: [phone]
 
 
 
 
 
 
© 2022 Leonard Novarro. All rights reserved.
 
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.
 
Published by AuthorHouse  10/12/2022
 
ISBN: 978-1-6655-6024-5 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6655-6025-2 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6655-6046-7 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022909589
 
 
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
This book is dedicated to Rosalynn Carmen, Ellen Burns, and Frances Kupidlowski Novarro for their inspiration, insights, and strength
and to the Asian Heritage Society and County of San Diego for making it happen.
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
 
Chapter 1       Based on Actual Events
Chapter 2       Fiorello and the “Funny Papers”
Chapter 3       There’s a Flying Saucer in the City
Chapter 4       Facts and Counter-Facts
Chapter 5       The Death Blow
Chapter 6       Endings
Chapter 7       Words Matter
Chapter 8       My Favorite Year
Chapter 9       By Any Other Name Would They Smell as Sweet?
Chapter 10     A Beatle, a Don, and an Ace
Chapter 11     Roots
Chapter 12     Good-Bye, New York; Hello, Florida (Or Best Friends and Other People)
Chapter 13     Of Migrants and Madmen
Chapter 14     Anything Goes
Chapter 15     Here’s the Rub
Chapter 16     Mayhem in Miami
Chapter 17     Back to the Future
Chapter 18     Hell Hath No Fury as a Woman …
Chapter 19     Taking to the Streets
Chapter 20     What a Way to Start a Movement
Chapter 21     Another “Big Show”
Chapter 22     A Delightful Interlude
Chapter 23     Recovery and Reaganomics
Chapter 24     America’s Finest
Chapter 25     Some People
Chapter 26     People and Places: A Fertile Field
Chapter 27     A Friend for All Seasons
Chapter 28     Places and Faces
Chapter 29     A New—ERR, Well, Chapter
Chapter 30     Day of Days
Chapter 31     We Get Letters
Chapter 32     Aftermath
Chapter 33     Loose-Hanging Fruit
 
Addendum
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Photos
References and Background
PREFACE
L ate in the afternoon on a muggy Miami day in the middle of May, with two hours of waiting accumulating in a sweat beneath my shirt, a black Cadillac sedan pulled up on the narrow side street and a voice from within beckoned, “Get in.” We drove off—but not before the man with the voice accompanying the driver wrapped a bandana blindfold around my eyes.
Twenty minutes later, as we pulled into a vacant lot, he told me, “You can take the blindfold off and get out of the car.”
As the sun left a sliver of late afternoon behind, the driver, bodyguard, and I entered an abandoned warehouse. In the middle of an open space, bereft of any furniture, a diminutive man sporting a short, precise moustache above a shirt of exaggerated colors and floral design slowly rose from a folding chair and motioned for us to step forward and join him. We each took a seat as I placed my tape recorder on top of a wooden crate separating us and introduced myself as a reporter for the Orlando Sent inel.
“Do you know who I am?” asked the man we were meeting.
“I was told that you can give me some background on anti-Castro activity in Florida. Especially in Miami and Orlando,” I replied.
“I can certainly do that,” he said. “I can also tell you who was behind the assassination of Letelier,” he added, referring to the September 1976 fatal car bombing of Chilean diplomat Marcos Orlando Letelier as he rounded Sheridan Circle on Embassy Row in Washington, DC. The assassination carried the scrutiny of every intelligence agency in the US, but no leads had been turned up—yet.
I pressed the record button on the tape recorder.
“OK, please go ahead,” I said, hoping that my uneasiness was not detected. “Can you begin with the assassination and who organized it?”
After ten seconds, the weight of a pregnant pause still in the air, he looked at me straightaway and said, “I did.”
Expect the unexpected.
When I started out in the newspaper business, editors must have recited that adage dozens of times. Surprises can be as delightful as actress Mitzi Gaynor, the star of South Pacific, stopping in the middle of a song as she sees you and yelps out your name during a sellout performance in Memphis, or as unsettling as Beatle Paul McCartney threatening to punch you in the face on a Staten Island ferry ramp. With some surprises, you narrowly escape death as a nearby cargo ship explodes, or you are touched deeply by the reaction of Rudy Jones conveying the reaction of an ill father to your profile of Mikhail Baryshnikov, “I want you to know that you made a tired, sick, old man very happy and his dying a little easier.”
INTRODUCTION
The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits “atrocities” but that it attacks the concept of objective truth.
—George Orwell
The most courageous act is still to think for yourself.
—Coco Chanel
I didn’t decide to write this book out of some noble dedication to the field of journalism. Or to revitalize “the good old days” by recapturing the past. Or to tell a great story or two while singing the praises of newspapers.
God knows the newspapers didn’t always get it right, although they did get it right more than they got it wrong.
Now in this era of the internet and social media, the opposite often is true. How else would you explain the fact that millions in the United States and abroad believe in a conspiracy theory that a ring of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, cannibals, and sex traffickers were working to unseat the president of the United States and take over the world—a theory that began at Donald Trump rallies in 2018 and one that he clung to for the duration of his presidency, as did many of his Facebook and Twitter followers? But that was mild compared to what soon followed: the claim that this president won the 2020 presidential election when he was soundly defeated by almost 8 million popular and seventy-four electoral votes.
Before he became president of the United States, this soon-to-be giant scab on the political and social climate of our times was regarded as a loser and a huge joke in his native New York, where I grew up. Except for the New York Post’s “Page Six,” its gossip repository, he was reviled as a conman, carnival barker, and hanger on to people like Jeffrey Epstein, who actually did run a child pedophile ring.
Yet here he was, for four years, the most powerful individual on the planet, running a country of 330 million people into the ground.
It’s like watching Elvira host Santa Claus Conquers the Martians or being trapped inside a movie theater watching an endless loop of Reefer Mad ness.
The aim of practical politics, said writer and journalist H. L. Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” Which is certainly the case here. As a result, before this book is complete, the United States will probably lose more lives than World Wars I and II and Vietnam combined because of a pandemic hailed as a hoax and an aversion to vaccines by an element of the population who doesn’t like being told what to do—unless like-minded conspiracists are doing the telling. We used to revere the First Amendment to the Constitution. It’s important. That’s why it is the First Amendment. While it guarantees freedom of speech, press, assembly, and the right to petition the government, we have almost half the population believing legitimate discourse to be “fake news” and legitimate assemblies to be threats to the government needing to be met by local and federal resistance. Indeed, to paraphrase the words of Willem Dafoe’s character in the movie Platoon, “the world has definitely turned” for us.
Wear a mask, don’t congregate in large crowds, and keep a safe distance—simple steps to avoid contagion during a pandemic, according to science and medical experts. So 250,000 bikers flock to Sturgis, South Dakota, without masks, hundreds gather in like manner throughout the country, and the leader of the country stages one rally after another in states where this devastating virus surges. At the same time, while declaring a hoax Trump readily admits otherwise to journalist Bob Woodward in recorded conversations, thereby giving new meaning to Mencken’s assessment of a democracy as “the art and science of running the circus from the monkey-cage.”
So why am I writing this book? Indeed, you could say, “Trump made me do it.”
But there are other reasons.
Pieces of history abound here, including the exploits of a man who flew into battle aboard what can be best regarded as a rickety crate to emerge as the main soul behind the most important plane in history.
It is sociology, in its attempt to unravel the dizzying array of emerging factors—technological, cultural, and economic—that could brin