A Man Of Peace

Ironically, I happened upon the obituary for Colman McCarthy as Trump and Netanyahu dropped their bombs on Iran. 

I’ll get to the irony—but first, a few words about McCarthy.

He was a journalist for the Washington Post—wrote a column on politics for 20-something years.

I used to read him from time to time, when one of his articles made it to Chicago through syndication. I’d be thinking—damn, how did he slip this past his editors? I mean, the dude was a lefty—offering a world view you almost never find in the mainstreams. 

What I did not know--until I read Michael Rosenwald's compelling obituary in the New York Times--is that McCarthy took a curious route to his job with the Post.

After graduating from college, where he played on the golf team and dreamed of making the P.G.A. Tour, McCarthy wound up spending more than five years at a Trappist Monastery in Georgia.

“As a lay brother, he took temporary vows," Rosenwald wrote. "When he wasn't tending cows or shoveling manure, he basked in the stillness of time, reading hundreds of books and writing endlessly in his journal.

Eventually, the monastery's abbot realized McCarthy was wasting his talents, basking in all that stillness, and urged him to re-join the outside world.

And so, one thing leading to another, McCarthy found successive work as a freelance writer, speech writer, editorial writer and then columnist. He left the Post in 1997.

Hold it! That’s too wimpy. He left after the Post dropped his column. And the bosses said they dropped it cause syndication numbers were falling.

To which, McCarthy said…

“Go fuck yourselves!”

No. That’s what I—a man  of grudges not peace—would have said. He was much wiser, saying….

“Work for a corporation, and you play by its rules.”

Truer words were never spoken.

Through it all, almost to the end of his life, he had what you might call an outside gig as a peace advocate, teaching classes on the subject of non-violence to children at schools in and around Washington, D.C.

McCarthy was old school—he wore a tie when he taught the kids about peace & love...

Again, from Rosenwald's obituary...

"McCarthy offered $100 to anyone who could identify a list of historical figures that included Robert E. Lee, the Confederate war general; Napoleon, the French emperor and military leader; Dorothy Day, a journalist and anarchist; and Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress and the only member to vote against entering both World Wars.

"The students typically knew the warriors; no one heard of the peacemakers."

To which McCarthy concluded...

"I can always count on American mis-education. Students get the point of the quiz: they've been well taught about men who break the peace but know little or nothing about women who make the peace."

And now for the irony…

The same issue of the Times  that featured the Colman’s obit was filled with quotes from politicians and journalists, mostly men, urging Trump to keep dropping those bombs.

And nary a word sounding the case for peace and non-violence.

It’s as though McCarthy never existed, even though his life and work were written up right there in the obit section for anyone to see.

In retrospect, I gotta wonder how he kept that job at the Post for so long. Cause when you think about it—a pacifist on the editorial page of a mainstream newspaper is about as likely as one on the P.G.A. Tour. Which means not very likely at all.

He truly was one of a kind.

RIP, Colman McCarthy.