At the top of a street called Rua da Matemtica, up the hill from my pension in Coimbra, Portugal, a politician hangs in effigy from a rooftop. His droopy face mask is non-descript, but in the window below, a wanted poster sports George Bush’s lithographed face. “Terrorist,” it says in Portuguese. “Find him.” A few […]
Barry Yeoman
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If I were a rich man
Sunday afternoon The most important men in town would come to fawn on me! They would ask me to advise them . . . And it won’t make one bit of difference if I answer right or wrong. When you’re rich, they think you really know! –Tevye, “If I Were A Rich Man” As soon […]
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Bush’s other lies
So. There were no weapons of mass destruction after all. After months of repeatedly offering up Saddam Hussein’s murderous potential as justification for invading Iraq, President Bush is finally forced to backpedal on his claim. Was he simply the victim of bad intelligence, as former weapons inspector David Kay claims? Or was he deliberately misleading […]
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Public spirit
The churchwomen standing behind me on the aluminum bleachers gave my own body a considerable bounce, as they rocked and clapped and sang along with the gospel chorus across the 10-foot chain-link fence. “Thank you so much for enjoying God with us!” shouted a young musician in an orange blouse, standing on a makeshift stage. […]
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Hope for Durham
When I moved to Durham in 1985, it was a city filled with possibility. While most mid-sized Southern cities were still run by a small cabal of white business leaders, Durham had started evolving into a model of representative government. A biracial council, headed by Mayor Wib Gulley, had turned City Hall into a place […]
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Soldiers of good fortune
At a remote tactical training camp in a North Carolina swamp, six U.S. sailors are gearing up for their part in President Bush’s war on terrorism. Dressed in camouflage on a January afternoon, they wear protective masks and carry nine-millimeter Berettas that fire nonlethal bullets filled with colored soap. Their mission: recapture a ship–actually a […]
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The General Assembly
When I started covering the state legislature for The Independent in 1986, I was a 25-year-old novice who thought he understood the rough-and-tumble political world from three years in Louisiana, where political corruption ranks alongside zydeco dancing and cockfighting as a form of entertainment. North Carolina, by contrast, was supposed to be the “good government […]
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Silence in the Fields
The Greyhound pulls up to a two-story metal warehouse in the tiny town of Vass. Efraín Madrigal gets off the bus. It’s only 10 o’clock in the morning, but the 24-year-old already feels exhausted. Madrigal has been traveling nonstop for four days. Since he left the ranch where his family lives in Nayarit, Mexico, there’s […]
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Dial me, lose my vote
I voted for one Republican last week, a judicial candidate named Bob Edmunds. I didn’t plan to. But the night before the election, in the middle of the dinner hour, I received a phone call from Edmunds’ Democratic opponent. “Hello, my name is Franklin Freeman, and I’m running for the N.C. Supreme Court,” came the […]
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Easily Tricked
It doesn’t take a political scientist to figure out that the theme of this month’s Republican National Convention was racial diversity. With Gen. Colin Powell and Congressman J.C. Watts heading up a long list of black, Hispanic and Asian speakers, the Philadelphia gathering was orchestrated to send a prime-time message that the GOP is no […]
