About
New Year’s Day is a time for reflection, a time for charting new courses. I’ve advanced beyond weight-loss concerns … which is to say I’ve accepted a moderate middle-aged paunch and could give a damn. Like the gray beard, length of tooth and wrinkles, I’ve earned it. But I don’t know whether anyone entirely advances beyond self-image issues, and I’m thinking about my “About.”
As you may know, I’ve mocked Glenn Greenwald’s extensive, self-aggrandizing “About” once or twice. He’s published this, he’s been admired for that, he’s been extensively quoted here and there, blah blah blah. What does it really tell you about the man … or in his case, the mournful-looking Gumby-like figure? A fair amount, actually. Vain, vainglorious, pompous, self-important. But aside from that, what does it really tell you about the mournful Gumby-like figure?
I’m thinking now my own “About” is a little sparse.
Considering that blogging is all about “me” … the royal me, as in all the blogging mes out there … maybe I’ve been selling myself short. If I don’t sing my own praises, who will? And I’m thinking an “About” should be an adventure, containing some of life’s lessons.
Here’s this site’s “About” as it has been:
jules crittenden
is a Boston Herald city editor and columnist who has reported on politics, crime, science, maritime matters, foreign affairs and conflict in the United States, Asia, the Balkans and the Middle East.
You know, if Greenwald is embarrassingly self-obsessed in his extensive personal wank of an “About,” maybe I’ve been a little too airy-fairy cocktail-party blase, bogus pretentious offhand in mine. It’s like the basic black of “Abouts.” Look at me, I am so minimalist, yet cool. With that lower case “jules crittenden.“ And two or three too many areas of reportage listed, like I’m trying to impress someone.
Who am I kidding? I’m a second-string tabloid scribbler who parachuted into a few places back in the day. Big deal. Excuse me while I yawn …
You know, you could read that precious little turtlenecked blurb and not even have a clue that …
Jules Crittenden, a rightwing American tabloid editor based in Boston, is an international adventurer, art thief and rogue who has lived in five countries, worked in 10 or 12, depending on how you count, passed through about 40, and expected to be dead by now, but has failed to achieve that or produce much else of lasting worth, except three wonderful children …
OK, better already.
Crittenden was born in California in the second half of the 20th century to an Australian engineer and a registered nurse who had come to America to make more money, but quickly figured they could make even more if they went back overseas again.
Crittenden spent his early years in the jungles of Sumatra, where his first language was a combination of English and Bahasa Indonesia. He learned to squat before he learned how to sit.
After his father’s driver was shot in the head during the period of political unrest depicted in the Mel Gibson film, “The Year of Living Dangerously,” the wife and four kids were packed off to Sydney, New South Wales. Crittenden’s most enduring memories of this period include eating meat pies with his Auntie Helen at the lunch counter at Grace Brothers in Bondi Junction, and throwing up in Auckland, New Zealand.
Crittenden later lived in Dacca, East Pakistan, where his father was overseeing construction projects on the scale of the pyramids and employing many of the same time-honored methods, such as the use of gangs of native laborers in loincloths who carried baskets of dirt on their heads. It was there that Crittenden gained familiarity with venomous snakes and at the age of eight, first saw a man without a nose. Crittenden also was part of a team engaged in extensive experimentation in the fields of pyrotechnics, explosives, and gravity defiance. The Crittenden family pets at various times included two lesser primates, a large leatherbacked turtle, and an assortment of dogs, cats and waterfowl. Hangers-on included a monitor lizard in the swampy part of the front yard that even the plucky dachshund knew not to mess with. The standard poodle did what standard poodles do and hunted down the ducks, before he succumbed to malaria. Interesting factoid: even cobras, much like standard poodles, know better than to mess with geese.
I’m starting to run on a little, but seeing as Greenwald is my template, what the heck.
Later, in Thailand, Crittenden fell in with a gang of Boy Scouts who were led by American paratroopers and Green Berets. This association involved a fair amount of the usual adolescent torture, both received and administered, as well as introductory encounters with woodsmanship, firearms, cigarettes and beer, much of it in the vicinity of the Bridge on the River Kwai. Crittenden also enjoyed roaming the capital and the countryside in careening dangerous-looking buses he would not dream of setting foot aboard today, let alone riding through Bangkok traffic while hanging out the door. It was during this period that Crittenden startled a tiger.
Crittenden was educated in the company of Germans, Dutchmen, Canadians, Australians, Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Indians, Malays, Paks, a Nepalese or two, several Pommie Bastards, a Kiwi, the odd Frog or Yugoslav, and many, many Americans, most of whose fathers were also engaged in various forms of post-colonial enterprise and neo-imperialism. Businessmen, engineers, missionaries, soldiers, spies, and not a few well-intentioned humanitarians whose employment with the United Nations allowed them to bring in one luxury car each year free of onerous import duty and resell it at great profit. Crittenden enjoyed, at grown-up parties, sitting quietly in a corner and listening to the adults’ Maughamian, Kiplingesque and Conrad-like tales of rogue elephants, angry mobs and ancient vengeful ghosts, as well as the exchange of war stories by former members of the Wehrmacht, Royal Navy, United States Marine Corps and other branches of service now happily drinking together.
Approaching manhood, Crittenden first got dangerously drunk on the roof of a train in northeast Thailand, and acquired carnal knowledge in a brothel on a remote island in the South China Sea. Crittenden’s life at that time was in many ways the kind of heaven people dream of, involving white coral sand beaches, grass shacks, steamed crab, girls in bikinis, looking dashing and going down to the sea in boats. He could also be a somewhat sullen youth who skulked about a bit, however. Bookish, a voracious reader of history and fiction, seeking sense, structure and meaning in life through books … a useful if never fully satisfactory route. Crittenden now sometimes reflects that he learned more enduring lessons about life and what it is to grow old from the irritability of hoary old gibbons chained up outside Thai noodle shops than from any existential tome.
Crittenden arrived in San Francisco a few months shy of his 18th birthday with a suitcase and $600 between him and enlistment. Having spent only three years prior in his native land and being a stranger there, Crittenden spent the next six years variously pumping gas, driving an auto parts truck, and attending San Francisco State University, which was nearby and virtually free, while enjoying a moderately bohemian lifestyle and the company of a number of thinkers, artists, characters and lovely young women. While entertaining and educational, this period sufficed mainly to acquaint him with only the margins of American life.
As a result of an extended liaison with an Argentinian woman during this time, Crittenden found himself one afternoon half drunk, at full gallop across the Pampas, clinging to a horse they called “El Chueco” … The Lame One … only because said horse was pigeon-toed, though he was quite adept at dodging gopher holes and reliable if resentful at having been saddled with the Gringo.
“Crittenden, you ride very badly … ” he was informed by his then-amour’s father, a tough, hard-drinking poet, scholar and rancher, younger then than Crittenden is now, of an old conquistador family that once owned most of Cordoba Province under a Spanish land grant but pissed it away by generations, though this scion had through sheer determination and toil well beneath his station got some it back.
” … but at least you are not afraid,” he concluded. Crittenden was glad he had managed to convey that impression.
Shortly afterward, having graduated from college and seeking employment, Crittenden found himself living and working in New England’s old milltowns, among the sons and daughters of bluecollar Irishmen, French Canadians, Poles, Italians and Puerto Ricans. Most of whom had never ventured much beyond their brick alleys, triple-deckers and small ranch-styles unless it was to briefly to fight terrible wars elsewhere. As a reporter in these tough milltowns, Crittenden learned several important political lessons, to include:
“There are three kinds of people in a whorehouse. The people getting screwed, the people who are screwing, and the guy who’s playing the piano,” and;
“Getting even is spending the other guy’s money.”
He also learned of the kind of fierce loyalty one can have to rough surroundings and the people one shared them with, as well as generational feuds and epic power struggles within those seemingly narrow confines. It was during this time, moving from bucolic boards of selectmen to hard granite city halls to the Massachusetts State House, that Crittenden slowly began to develop an animus for liberalism and politicians in general and Democratic politics in particular.
But the surrounding hills, mountains and countryside, where Crittenden took to cross-country skiing in winter and camping, hiking and boating in summer, and the quaint villages still looked like Currier & Ives prints and Norman Rockwell paintings, and Crittenden often considered that he had landed in one of the more exotic destinations of his life, this place that had four seasons, picket fences, and few snakes.
In Boston, Crittenden met his future wife, the beautiful and talented daughter of a Boston firefighter turned New England fisherman. She set aside a career in politics to raise their three children, but later embarked with some notable success on a writing career. (See, and buy if you please, her novel “Tethered” in the Amazon link at left. It will help Crittenden out on the home front. Well-received by the New York Times Book Review and elsewhere, selling now on six continents in a half a dozen or so languages, it is a gritty and highly original pageturner.)
As a general assignment reporter for a tabloid newspaper in Boston, Crittenden generally wore boots because he never knew what he might have to step in on any given day. Covering crime, among other topics, he frequently found himself in the dingy kitchens of impoverished people who were grateful, even if something horrible had just happened, that someone was finally listening to them.
Expanding his horizons as a stunt reporter, Crittenden went scuba diving on the side of Mount Washington in February; helped raise some 300-year-old cannons from the notorious cannibalism wreck of the Nottingham Galley at Boon Island in the Gulf of Maine; accompaied the Coast Guard on boat boardings in inclement weather in the middle of the North Atlantic in mid-winter, and drove a cab in bad neighborhoods in Boston.
Crittenden also enjoyed going to sea with his father-in-law and brother-in-law, and recalls a day when, heavily laden with fish in heavy seas, gazing at the sea alternately above him and below him, he worked the nets while considering which way he would jump if the boat failed to roll back again. He remembers watching his hulking, stoic father-in-law hauling back the gillnets with ice hanging off him, and telling stories of some of the strange things one encounters on the deep briny, tales one doesn’t share with landsmen to avoid the skeptical looks. Crittenden’s in-laws also enjoy, in familiar company, exchanging tales from the family’s extensive involvement in firefighting and police work that often seem to involve the teller being blown out of buildings or grappling with knuckleheads.
As a news reporter, Crittenden entered a period in which he was dispatched to some of the more wretched and tragic war zones of this world, where he had dealings with half a dozen armies from India through the Caucasus and the Middle East to the Balkans. He narrowly escaped death in competition with overloaded, gaudily decorated third-world buses and trucks on several cliff-hanging roads, in addition to varying degrees of exposure to landmines, bullets and mortarfire, hazards that initially induced somewhat manic giggle fits. When Crittenden later would find himself denounced as a chickenhawk, he thought it curious that such a chicken and handwringing peacenik as himself should have become such a hawk, but it just goes to show. You never know where life will take you. Speaking of which, Crittenden was compelled during this time to use some of the most frightful toilet facilities ever half-constructed but found his early life experience helpful in this regard.
They had mostly been other people’s wars, but eventually, they all became ours, and Crittenden’s as well, and at long last Crittenden after all his wanderings finally felt himself fully a citizen of his own country when he found himself in the company of young, standard-issue Americans, in harm’s way in a couple of foreign war zones, bearing witness as they tried at great risk to themselves to to do something good for other people. There came a day when Crittenden went, expecting to die with them. He didn’t, however, instead finding himself subject to a profound alteration of perspective still not fully understood, but which as a practical matter appears to have contributed to a new focus and directness. Crittenden subsequently had to readjust to the prospect of life going forward, contrary to expectations. With a wife and three children, Crittenden is grateful to be with them and see them grow, a privilege others have sacrificed in these wars. Even if it means he must also now learn the secrets of growing old, hinted at decades earlier by those cranky chained gibbons outside provincial Thai noodle shops that bite people who get too close. In mid-life, Crittenden has found that most of the friends of youth have gone their own ways, discovering as well it’s when the going gets rough that you learn who your friends are. So many of his friends now are people he has never met, thanks to this blogging thing, as well as a growing circle of old war horses, with whom he shares the badly kept secret of what it is to move forward into fire.
When it became apparent his newspaper, due to financial issues, would no longer be sending people to exotic locales or war zones with any kind of regularity, Crittenden became an editor. Crittenden now enjoys telling reporters what to do, even if, being less burdened by years than he is, some of them apparently know more than he does. Crittenden also enjoys firing potshots at other people in his profession, as like most people in this crappy business and out of it, he figures he could do it better.
Crittenden has not written any New York Times bestsellers, but has been published in a variety of places and has been a guest on a number of national media programs. In addition to the Boston Herald, a great American tabloid newspaper for which Crittenden is proud to toil, those venues include the Weekly Standard, the New York Post, The World’s Most Dangerous Places, NPR, FOX, NBC, CNN, RealClearPolitics.com, PajamasMedia.com and Poynter.org (the latter venue, being skittish and morally weak, having denounced him at the first hint of trouble: See note re “friends” above). Crittenden is also pleased to have been written about, due to various allegations of war crimes and looting, in unflattering terms by Pravda, al-Jazeera and Cuba Socialista, as well as less reputable publications such the Boston Globe, the New York Times, USA Today, the Age, Poynter.org and CNN, in addition to other newspapers worldwide such as the Jerusalem Post and the Fiji Times.
Crittenden believes he has at times been able to make himself understood with various odds and ends of Thai, German, Spanish, Cambodian, Bengali, Albanian, Arabic and English, as well as improvised sign language and shouting. He enjoys carpentry, drinking beer, burning stuff, splitting wood with his medieval-looking Balkan axe, riding his lawn tractor, playing MarioKart Wii, and reading about great military victories and debacles. He derives his greatest satisfaction from family life, being blessed with three delightful children and a lovely, talented wife, to whose influence and diligence he attributes the fact that said children are as of this writing well-behaved and academically accomplished beyond any reasonable expectations Crittenden might have harbored given his own history.
OK, that’s better. It is what it is, anyway.
Topics: everything
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:59 pm on Thursday, January 1, 2009
9 Responses to “About”
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January 1st, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Not only vain, vainglorious and pompous, Glenn Greenwald is also promoting his specious drek to unsuspecting readers!
To quote a popular 20th Century pundit:
“What a maroon!”
January 1st, 2009 at 2:56 pm
You’re going to have to try harder if you hope to fit the Greenwald mold. I read right through to the end, enjoyed every colorful detail along the way, and am happy to know more about the wide ranging life that informs your lively commentary.
It must kill you to know that if you had started writing your memoirs in San Francisco, you could be POTUS-elect right now.
January 1st, 2009 at 4:03 pm
All that was missing was the explanation for the lower case “j” and “c”.
January 1st, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Loved it! I agree with WP Zeller that an explanation of the reason for the lower case introductory letter would be appreciated.
January 1st, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Heh. I agree with JM Hanes; your new “about” is fantasting and much too interesting to be similar to Greenwald’s.
January 1st, 2009 at 5:49 pm
One day, I will learn how to spell.
January 1st, 2009 at 8:47 pm
And for that you expect a cookie.
January 2nd, 2009 at 9:37 am
All well and good, Jules. But what have you done lately?
:)
January 2nd, 2009 at 11:42 am
You’ll have plenty of tales to tell your grandchildren, Jules, but they won’t believe half of it.