Chris Hedges
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July 2, 2023
Dr. David Fialk, Editor / Publisher
I worked on my high school's newspaper alongside a classmate who is now famous in journalistic circles. Chris Hedges was the New York Times bureau chief in the Middle East for years before he quit and made a name for himself as an activist journalist. He's anti-capitalist, and anti-Israel and anti a few other things, I don't now know what because I stopped listening to him.
I had enough when I heard Chris report that he had seen Israeli soldiers luring Palestinian children up to the border fence and shooting them dead. Now that's just not the kind of thing you can cover up. Someone's conscience is going to crack, someone in uniform who knew what was going on, who pulled the trigger or should have stopped the person who was pulling the trigger. It's another blood libel, a completely monstrous behavior we Jews have been accused of, like baking gentile blood into Passover matza or poisoning wells.
When, years ago, a friend mentioned Chris Hedges' reporting, I mentioned Hedge's child-killing fabrication. "So, you are calling Chris Hedges a liar?" my buddy queried. I was and I am. I know he's a liar, because in one podcast he said that he was editor of his high school, of our high school newspaper, and he wasn't. I was. He also claims to have taught boxing in a bad neighborhood in Boston. A claim I find hard to reconcile with the short, pudgy boy I recall.
Our high school, Loomis Chaffee, is a prep school in Windsor, Connecticut. I worked on the school paper starting in my junior year. Hedges worked harder than I did. Newsprint ink ran in his veins. But I was chosen to be editor for our senior year. I made my mark, turning the biweekly one-sheet newspaper into a biweekly sixteen-page magazine. It was 1974 and feminism was flowering. One of the feature-length articles we ran in my new format was titled, A Woman's Role on Campus.
I beat out Chris for the job of editor, starting my publishing career in my senior year, because I was better liked particularly by the previous editor, Susan, with whom I had a make-out session towards the end of my junior year. Susan was pretty. And like so many 18-year-old girls, she had a great body, not that I ever went that far in my explorations of it.
The Katherine Brush Library at the Loomis Chaffee School has three floors, but the top floor was always locked. Anyone winding their way up the enclosed, amply carpeted, switchback stairway exited into the second floor. Susan and I wound our way up to the third, where the landing before the locked door was wide and long enough for us to stretch out and involve ourselves, pressed together, in some heavy kissing and some light petting.
Katherine Brush Library
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I was, no doubt, the first boy to fondle her breasts, probably the first to ever kiss her. The whole thing lasted 20 minutes, without ever a repeat performance. But shortly thereafter, at the last newspaper meeting of the year, when it was announced that the outgoing staff had chosen me to be the new editor-in-chief, Susan beamed a smile at me that over brimmed with appreciation, not all of which was professional. Poor, disappointed, Chris Hedges noticeably scowled. Anyway, Hedges lacked the people skills to make a good editor.
A dozen years later, as a naturopathic doctor in Connecticut, I published a state-wide quarterly publication devoted to health, turning a few industry heads with my efforts. I probably should have stuck at it. Here in San Miguel, I renewed my publishing career, starting my online event calendar in 2012, six months after arriving, and then this magazine in 2015.
The pandemic hurt a lot of businesses, including mine, including Atención's. Most of the reason people read Atención was to find out about events; even if you didn't attend them, it was good to read about them. With the pandemic Atención lost all those articles announcing events, at least 60% of their copy. The paper struggled to replace that copy, but never really found its way.
The closing was announced to the staff on Friday. Saturday, at the organic market, speaking with a former editor of Atención about doing a retrospective series, I stated, "Atención used to print an eight-page calendar. And now it's less than two pages." She proudly corrected me, "In my time, we used to print 16 pages of calendar."
For me, with my publishing background, it was simple math. The rule of thumb is that for a paper to make it the proportion of advertising to articles needs to be 3:2, 60% ads and 40% copy. For the last two years Atención has only been 10-12% ads. Add to that Atención's being forced to separate from la Biblioteca, with the loss of goodwill that entailed, and the writing was on the wall.
The publisher, to his credit, spent a lot of energy and money trying to revive her, but the old lady wouldn't come back.
Referring to the Friday of the death notice, and the flurry of messages I sent and received, I wrote my daughter, "In one afternoon and evening Lokkal has gained a lot of stature in the community. Suddenly, I look real smart."
