2006-02-10 - 11:36 a.m.
He was managing editor for a mid-sized regional paper, a slightly-balding man of sixty who even now believed he and his generation had changed the world for the better.
He remembered Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. He remembered Woodward and Bernstein. He believed the press had to be both brave and free to serve as a bulwark against tyranny. (He had once actually written those very words in an editorial.) He used to be so proud and sure of himself, but as he shaved he looked searchingly in the mirror and softly sang: Na, na, na, na, na, na...
Once upon a time he would have sided with his news staff, but it was he who had made the final decision not to publish. Half the staff had quit in protest. And just this morning came news that authorities at UPEI, a university in that vast land to the north once synonymous with freedom and salvation for so many of his generation, had confiscated all copies of a student newspaper that had dared carry the offending cartoons.
Na, na, na, na, na, na...
The words to a song, the anthem of a generation, now came back to mock him:
Gotta get down to it.
...
Should have been done long ago.
...
How can you run when you know?
Na, na, na, na, na, na...
