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At the end of this piece there will be found a corrected copy of “War Movies”
, the poem misprinted in last week’s column. It got thoroughly trashed in
the process of being converted from e-mail to a blog entry, making it
unintelligible to readers and requiring reprinting to correct the problem. My apologies
to all my victims.
The transcription that takes place means that there are usually typos of some
kind in these articles, I’m afraid, in spite of my efforts to prevent them,
but I am hoping to improve in this area in the not too distant future. Stay
tuned.
Misprints and misspellings and other shortcomings in my writing bother me
greatly because I learned the trade in a school where the Jayson Blairs would
never have lasted past the first week. Elegant writing was not taught there,
but exactitude was. The classrooms where the lessons were taught were not in
school buildings but on the sidewalks of New York and while they were not always
conducted under shot and shell, they went on often enough between bricks and
bottles.
Police word involves a massive amount of reporting, but few people think much
about it, because the physical side of the business is so much more
interesting. I see TV series about “Greatest Police Chases”, but no one will ever do
one about “Outstanding Incident Reports”. Still they have to be done.
I mean, when six cops fire seventeen shots on the streets of Astoria at a
robber who’s just taken a hostage while escaping from the robbery and is now
holding her at gunpoint on the roof of an apartment building while exchanging fire
with detectives and wounding one of them, then getting hit himself and
collapsing on the scene, and someone has to pull it all together and make sense out
of it and do a narrative of it that will make everything crystal clear to the
Police Commissioner, the Firearms Review Board, the District Attorney, the
Corporation Counsel and the world at large, well, that’s where the exactitude
comes in.
And that’s where you get the separation between the Jayson Blairs and the
real reporters, the bureaucrats like myself who can’t invent, but have to get the
story straight for the administrators and above all, for the courts that will
examine it and the lawyers who may very well challenge it. The Blairs may be
better writers, but they don’t have to meet any such standards, as we have
seen, so they are not better reporters. Neither are their colleagues, who aren’t
all as different from Blair as they would have you believe. If they were it
wouldn’t be so painful to read the stories of events in which you yourself
have been involved, which you find twisted out of all recognition. Every cop has
met reporters trying to meet a deadline begging for even a scrap of
information to use in a story, then supplying it themselves when you couldn’t.
As I’ve intimated here before, I took such pride in my compositions that I
saved copies of them for -- what? Well, maybe I’d write a book someday, or
find some use for them. And after all, they all had my name on them, didn’t
they? Now I’m glad I’ve got them. This includes stuff I didn’t write, but that
came as a handout from the police department. I’ve previously written about
the 1977 Mayoral order calling on us for a 2% (!) reduction in robbery, but
now I’ve come across one from 1979 setting a 1% goal -- which wasn’t
achieved. Maybe Rudy Giuliani wasn’t such a miracle man after all. He couldn’t
possibly have failed to do better than that.
There are eight million stories in the naked city, as they used to say, and I
wrote a lot of them. I’m far from having the whole collection on hand, but
what I have is representative. One I particularly miss having is the original
report of the shooting of Patrolman Frank Serpico. I didn’t write that one
myself, but I revised it for the Inspector who did. After looking into the
eyes of the Chief Inspector and hearing him tell him that a completely accurate
report was required, he had a mistake in the first line. He found my help
useful after I spotted that. Although I was only a contributor, not an author, I
would rather have this report on hand than all the others I’ve saved. Nobody’
s ever offered me any cash for them.
Literary activity continued for me when I left the police department and went
to work for the Lincoln Savings Bank. Reporting went on there too, some of
which was excellent and quite readable and some of which came from people who
didn’t seem to think consecutively. They had a tendency to start a story in
the middle, go on to the end, and then return to the beginning, not failing at
each point to denounce the tellers who, in spite of all the manager’s warnings,
had permitted a fraud to be perpetrated against the bank. I became an editor
for these before forwarding them to the police or the Federal Reserve or
other interested parties. The stories had less violence in them than the police
reports, but the crimes were cleverer and more entertaining.
Now we come to the lost masterpiece which got trashed in last week’s printing:
WAR MOVIES
There was always an actor named Richard Jaeckel,
Who joined up as a new recruity,
Just in time for the next debacle,
Where he died in performing his duty..
Then his buddies all swore to avenge him,
And to wipe out everything German
Oh you’d better retreat from the movie elite,
When on such revenge they determine.
So Errol wiped out a division
And Tyrone an army or two,
While over each town Spencer’s bombs rained down
On the insidious Nazi crew.
The war went on as before
With all its uproar and commotion
While Paramount ruled on the shore
And Columbia was the gem of the ocean.
We kids were in every campaign
Altho’ it was only vicariously
Till at last led on by John Wayne
We emerged from it all victoriously!
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