What ever happened to Marilyn (A correction)

[liz_marcs]

A few of you asked about Marilyn in my last post.

Ask and ye shall receive.

Marilyn died in 2002 of cancer.

I'm pleased to report that the reporter who wrote it knew Marilyn exactly the way I remembered her.

I was also reminded that I may have been wrong about the timing of when I interviewed her. So, I had cause to go digging around to find my scrapbook (which was buried in a box in the back of a storage closet where I had thrown it when I moved here two years ago).

Strangely enough, my recollection of the autumn air and the kids being out of school is absolutely correct, since it appears I interviewed her the day after Thanksgiving. It was unseasonably warm that year and it is possible that time and distance had muddled it in my mind. VJ Day was important to her, and she did talk quite a lot about VJ Day in the interview I had with her, although that part did not get into the articles I wrote.

The articles I wrote at that time are not online (sadly enough) and I have no ability to put them online.

I will correct the original post (truth is important), and link to this post so the correction can be explained.

Also, there were some typos and I wrote that three planes on 9-11 flew out of Logan when there were only two. The other flights were out of Newark and Dulles.

I want to thank everyone who emailed me privately with their corrections.

I apologize for any inconvenience.

Comments

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

The comments hera are mostly of the form "I won't watch that" rather than "It shouldn't be on". I took the attitude that if I ever want to know what the fuss is about, I'd better be in a position to watch it. So I turned on the vcr -- somewhat after it started, I admit. The part I watched seems to be a rather confused spy intrigue, where I regularly don't know what's going on enough to explain to my 13-year-old who's who even. There's very little attempt to place any of the events in historical context. From what I've seen, the show seems too incompetently put together to clearly exhibits an unconscionable bias. The one thing that I did seem to detect is a bias in favour of action instead of determining what action to take. That's so endemic in the American media culture that it's hardly specific to this program, though. Perhaps I should watch the rest, but I'm exhausted, and will go to bed instead. I found the whole thing boring. If there's a good reason for not broadcasting the show, it's that it's incompetently put together.

[alchemy-gryph.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that I am always pleased to find that such polemics (of which there appear to be distressingly many in American discourse nowadays) usually fail on artistic merits anyhow. When the "message" means more than the actual story, quality has a tendency to get shafted.

The one thing that I did seem to detect is a bias in favour of action instead of determining what action to take.

Interestingly, that is Colin Powell's perspective on the Clinton administration (if you presume that "determining what action to take" was an end in itself). He was then chair of the Joint Chiefs and wrote on it in his autobiography; the "dorm room bull session" approach in policy meetings was not his cup of tea, and he, like most of the military, thought that Clinton's initial picks for defense-related Cabinet posts were less than stellar. Clinton eventually came to the same conclusion after realizing that academics who studied warfare were not quite the same as people who were actually in the military.

- Madox