Mary's Notes, May 1, 2007

We’re taping the Ralph Ellison show at 4:00 pm today to accommodate Ellison biographer Arnold Rampersad who has a gig at the Harvard Book Store later this evening. The game plan for the show is to let Rampersad outline the details of Ralph Ellison’s life for the first segment and then bring in Robert O’Meally and Adam Bradley to answer Chris’s question: what happened to Ralph Ellison’s vision of blackness and how would he have responded to things like Hurricane Katrina or Barack Obama or hip hop music and the Imus mess?

There’s a lot of buzz suddenly over Lt. Col. Paul Yingling’s article in the Armed Forces Journal blasting the military brass in Iraq:

After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America’s general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public… For reasons that are not yet clear, America’s general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq’s government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq.

Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, A Failure in Generalship, Armed Forces Journal, April 2007

The blog riff on this piece is that Yingling is one of the few in the military with the moral courage to say all this. Both Katherine and Chris have tried to convince Lt. Col. Yingling to come on the show and talk about it. He says he’s done his bit as a citizen to tell the truth but he doesn’t want to start a campaign or put himself in the forefront of a movement by talking further publicly. Katherine has found at least one high ranking person, US Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who’s willing to talk openly about what went wrong in Iraq and she’s hot on the trail of others.

David has landed a hotshot French journalist for the French election preview on Thursday. David’s sources say Christine Ockrent is known as the smartest journalist on French television. Sam is looking for bloggers; we’re hoping that Alexandre Enkerli will give us a tour of the francophone blogosphere. Any other ideas?