CSM COLUMN OUT TODAY; AL-HAYAT COLUMN YESTERDAY:

CSM COLUMN OUT TODAY; AL-HAYAT COLUMN YESTERDAY: Busy times we live in.  The Christian Science Monitor column was titled “Military occupations – the good, bad, and ugly”, which makes me think the copy editor who composed it must have read my earlier lengthy post here by that title…

I wrote the piece Tuesday, and then had a good, productive time working with my editor on it.  I do note, though, that in the layout phase the powers-that-be in Boston sliced up some of the middle grafs into single-sentence chunks.They say they sometimes need to do that to fill white space on the page. I say that it makes me look a little, well, staccato.

Not much reaction to that yet yet.  Talking of “reaction”, though, I just signed up on something called Tag-board: once I get it installed into my template here will give me (give us all, y’all and me) a way to do short comments etc.  Fun!

And then yesterday, the latest of my twice-monthly columns came out in al-Hayat, the leading pan-Arab daily out of London.  They don’t have an English-language version for me to link you to.  If you read Arabic, you can read it here.

That column, I actually wrote on Wednesday of last week.  A terrible day,because everyone knew that Bush’s 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam would expire that evening.  And I knew, since I write my columns for them in English and they subsequently have to translate them, that it would almost certainly not appear until after the U.S. had already launched its threatened assault against Iraq.

That piece was titled (in English), “The anti-war movement moves to the next phase”.  It attempted to make a sober assessment of the state of the anti-war movement here in the USA. Maybe after a couple of days, once Al-Hayat has milked it of every penny they can in syndication re-sells, I’ll put a link to it up here.

(I have this rich fantasy life in which the publications that pay me their mere pittances to produce my wonderful columns for them are then turning around and making vast amounts of money by syndicating the same texts elsewhere.  Who knows, it might even be true?)