Catching Up Notes ...

I've just returned from a conference at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on the lynching of Emmett Till. I couldn't be there for the whole conference, but still it was a remarkable experience: chilling to hear the testimony of first hand witnesses to the events of that dark Mississippi night in August fifty years ago, but also re-assuring to hear the cutting edge scholarship of three doctoral candidates, whose panel I chaired. This was also my first opportunity to meet Liberty & Power's David Beito and his wife, Dr. Linda Beito of the Stillman College faculty. They are among the country's leading scholars on the Till murder and I hope that they will edit a volume of articles based on the work presented at this conference.

Recurrently, in thoughtful essays at Mode for Caleb, Caleb McDaniel asks"Is This Progress?" You can follow them in"Is This Progress? Part I" and"Is This Progress? Part II." They are excellent reading.

I see in my absence that:
1) Our colleague, Tim Burke, continues to give his best advice to our major professional organizations. If he has his way, formal sessions of one to three papers, a critique, and discussion will be banished from their conventions. Apparently drunk on the power of internet edicts, Burke would also eliminate most of our print journals and bar most pronouncements by our professional organizations on public policy issues.
2) Brooklyn College officially denies that our colleague, KC Johnson, is even an unindicted elocuter. Not only that, but I hear that they are considering the possibility of restoring him to the College payroll.

More seriously, on 14 September, I received this note from our colleague-in-arms, Chris Bray: [ ... ]

So I learned last night that the battalion I've been assigned to doesn't have enough slots for all the Ready Reserve soldiers it picked up, and plans to cut us from the roster. Which means -- or would have meant, as I'll explain in a moment -- that we'll all be recycled through another replacement company, andstarted over in a new training cycle with another battalion that will arrive later at Camp Shelby. If no[ne] of that makes sense, here's the shorter version: The army called us back to do jobs that don't exist, and so plans to warehouse us for a few more months before we actually deploy and begin to strike days from our one-overseas-year service obligation.

Faced with the possibility of several extra months in the army, and several more months at the amazingly miserable Camp Shelby, I jumped today on an opportunity to take the battalion's only definitely open slot -- guaranteeing that I will deploy overseas in November, and so get home by December of 2006. I am now an operations NCO in the battalion S-3 shop, which largely means that I will be making coffee for officers. An exciting use of more than a year of my life, but the alternative was potentially much more unpleasant.

So. I have a slightly new address:

Sgt. Chris Bray
HHC, 2-128th Infantry
2490 25th Street
Camp Shelby, MS 39407

Fifth time I've moved in less than three months.

Having a great time.

-chris

Really, it's bad enough that the military would disrupt the graduate work of someone of Chris's obvious talent. But, given all the talk about manpower shortages in both Gulfs, it is simply outrageous that his time in service isn't more effectively used.