|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
January 23, 2024 visit to Tennessee World Affairs Council (TNWAC), Nashville
Share this:
2024 – A Wakeup Call for the Sahel: Panel Discussion at the U.S. Capitol
Share this:
Charles Ray Meets Demand For New Westerns With “Badge For Hire”
January 17, 2024|Authors, DSP Articles
For many authors, one series is enough and keeps them extremely busy each month. For Charles Ray, four or five series at one time is no sweat at all. Each month Charles turns out a new book for each of his Western series—and today we will see the release of “Badge For Hire,” the latest book in his “Adventures of Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves.” Tomorrow, perhaps, we will see the release of a new book in his “Caleb Johnson: Mountain Man” series. It’s all go in the world of Charles Ray, from managing many of the authors involved in the “Gone To Texas” series through to co-writing a horror series. He’s just a one-man band of achievement, and after reading “Badge For Hire” you will see that he doesn’t just produce—he produces the best quality material. That’s why he consistently ranks within the top one hundred bestselling Western novels—usually towards the top of the list too. What can we say? He’s one of the most talented and you’ll love “Badge For Hire.”
What Is “Badge For Hire” About?
Bass is given a stack of warrants for fugitives to capture, but this time there’s a difference. One of the fugitives is a deputy marshal suspected of accepting bribes to look the other way for an outlaw gang. Bass, a strong believer in following the law, feels that lawmen should be held to an even higher standard than everyone else, and even though there’s no reward for bringing in the crooked deputy, he’s happy to take the case. The law might not be perfect, he thinks, but it’s a lot better than no law at all, and when those charged with enforcing the law fail to respect it, it’s getting too close to there being no law.
Along with his friend, Henry Lone Tree, Bass and his posse roam Indian Territory from the Creek Nation to Fort Sill and the Comanche/Kiowa Nation, rounding up those who would walk on the wrong side of the law.
Where Can I Get My Copy?
“Badge For Hire” is available now from Amazon!
Share this:
Removing the Confederate Monument from Arlington National Cemetery wasn’t ‘cancel culture’, it was the right thing to do
The U.S. Army’s December 2023 decision to remove a Confederate memorial from Arlington National Cemetery generated quite a bit of controversy, particular from 40 Republicans from the House of Representatives who claimed that the monument “does not honor nor commemorate the Confederacy: the memorial commemorates reconciliation and national unity.” Some groups, like Defend Arlington and Save Southern Heritage Florida, even went to court to block the removal, claiming that doing so violated the National Environmental Policy Act and that the army had failed to take care of grave sites around the memorial during the memorial.
On December 19, 2023, US District Judge Ronnie D. Alston ruled that the removal could proceed after finding that the groups who tried to halt it had failed to prove that keeping the monument was in the public’s best interest. The judge’s order said that the ‘Plaintiff’s complaints regarding the removal efforts being likely to damage the gravesites are misinformed or misleading.”
This is not the first time that groups sympathetic to the Confederate cause have used misleading arguments to block removal of Confederate names and symbols from US military property. The efforts to rename army posts named for Confederate generals were resisted and called efforts to ‘cancel culture,’ or to ‘disparage American heritage and tradition.’ Those efforts, in the case of posts in North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, failed, and it’s right that the effort to maintain the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery failed as well.
Arlington National Cemetery was established in 1864 on the grounds of the plantation belonging to the family of Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s wife. The cemetery was established as a place for Union Civil War dead. Because of the inability to distinguish Union from Confederate among the many full or partial remains found unburied within a 35-mile radius of Washington, DC, they were all buried together. Other Confederate battlefield dead were buried there and by April 1865, several hundred of the more than 16,000 graves at Arlington contained Confederate dead.
Initially, the federal government banned the decoration of Confederate graves. Cemetery officials refused to allow the erection of any monument to Confederate dead and did not permit any new Confederate burials. In 1898, after the Spanish-American War, President McKinley, touring the Deep ‘south to promote Senate ratification of the Treaty of Paris and racial harmony, announced that Confederate graves at Arlington would be cared for. This opened the door for former Confederates and Confederate sympathizers to try for more. A former Confederate, Samuel Lewis, for example, was angered that Confederate gravestones were similar to the gravestones of Black people interred there, and petitioned for a ‘Confederate section’, which McKinley approved. Among those opposing this move, and wanting to move Confederate graves ‘south,’ was the United Daughters of the Confederacy UDC).
Once the section was approved and laid out though, and Confederate groups noticed that space had been left for a memorial, although a memorial was not mentioned in the authorizing documents, they began discussing constructing one. Among the groups pushing for this: the United Daughters of the Confederacy. They asked the War Department for permission in 1902, 1903, and 1905, but were turned down. Despite the refusals, the group began raising money and in 1906, Secretary of War William Howard Taft finally granted permission, reserving the War Department’s right to approve the design and inscriptions.
Supposedly representing not only the ‘valor’ of southern soldiers and the losses suffered by the south, two figures on the memorial are especially controversial. One is of a uniformed black enslaved person following his master to war, representing, according to the UDC, ‘a faithful Negro body-servant following his young master.’ The other shows a military officer kissing his infant child held in the arms of a weeping black woman (a black mammy, or enslaved nursemaid), while another child clings to her skirts. These ‘faithful black servants’ were purposely included by the sculptor, Moses Ezekiel, a former Confederate who specialized in Confederate art, to undermine what he called the lies about slavery and the south in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He wished to rewrite history to show black slaves’ support for the Confederate cause.
At this point I’d like to stress the importance of the foregoing paragraph, especially for those who decry the removal of this and other Confederate symbols from our military and federal facilities as ‘cancel culture’ or denigration of our history and heritage. Don’t forget that at the time of the dedication of this memorial, as well as the appendage of Confederate names to military bases and the proliferation of other Confederate symbols, we were in the midst of the Jim Crow era which saw a hardening of segregation, especially in the south, with laws and practices designed to keep the formerly enslaved in their place legally. The military and the federal government were segregated as well, and the forces of repression and segregation were in firm control in the Deep South.
The military was desegregated by executive order from President Truman in 1949, but when I joined the army in 1962, many of the attitudes of the old segregated military were still present, and the rest of society and the government still followed local practices. For example, in the 1960s, the US State Department’s Foreign Service Institute (FSI0 in Arlington, Virginia, followed Virginia law and did not allow Black Foreign Service personnel to eat in the same cafeteria as the White employees.
I served my country for 50 years, 20 in military uniform and 30 as a diplomat, so I defend the right of groups like the UDC to have their distorted and self-serving take on history, but not to force it down the throats of everyone by putting it on display in facilities paid for by the American taxpayer, and most especially not in places that are intended to honor those who fought and died for this country. Arlington National Cemetery is a place to honor those who fought for the country, not against it. It is a place for patriots. To their sympathizers, Confederates might be considered patriots, but to me, the descendant of enslaved people, they’re either traitors to their country, or if you’re one of those people who say they were just exercising their ‘right’ to separate from a government they didn’t agree with, they’re foreign invaders who made war on the country.
There is, in my opinion, no middle ground.
So, removing the memorial from Arlington is not rewriting history, but correcting it. We no longer live in an age when those who were enemies of the country, Confederate soldiers or German POWs, are valued more highly than men and women of color who wore the country’s uniform and were willing to die for it. The heritage represented by that memorial is not an American heritage that I can support.
Removing it was the right thing to do.
Share this:
Don’t blame AI
Since the launch of Chat-GPT, followed by several clones, mimics, improvements, and other artificial intelligence (AI) applications, there’s been a raft of articles and editorials on the subject, some of them going so far as to present doomsday scenarios, predicting that if unchecked AI will take over the world and destroy us. On the less frantic, but no less of a hair-on-fire attitude, are predictions that AI will make certain human workers obsolete, and will retard learning because students will no longer know how to do research or even write their own essays.
Now, there is a certain amount of validity to the latter two opinions. There are likely to be some jobs that are better, more efficiently and cheaply done by AI rather than humans. But I predict that these will be the drudge, number crunching jobs that most humans hate doing anyway, and a computer can crunch numbers faster and more accurately than the smartest human. There will still be, though, a requirement for humans to make the decisions about what to do with those crunched numbers. As for the impact on students, if educators abdicate their responsibility to set clear standards and requirements and monitor their students’ activities, there could be situations where students ‘let the AI do it,’ thus not acquiring research and communication skills of their own. I teach online graduate courses in geopolitics, for example, and I use AI for baseline grading—with extensive manual input from me—which frees me to focus on students having problems, and to have the time to carefully review their written assignments. I forbid my students from using AI to write their essays, and caution them when using AI to do research to verify everything the AI provides them, preferably with at least one or two non-AI sources. Properly used, AI can be an aid in compiling sources for further study, and for establishing outlines of projects.
Because AI, like human researchers, is pulling the information it provides from Internet searches, it can sometimes be wrong, just as a human researcher who doesn’t try to verify what pops up on the screen in a search can be wrong. A good example in the news recently was Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer having to admit that in a court filing he submitted some phony legal cases that had been provided by an AI. You can’t blame the AI for this. Depending on how he worded his search, it provided relevant cases that it found in searching the Internet, but the Internet is like an open shelf, anyone with a computer can put anything on it. If you grab things off the shelf without examining them closely, you—or the AI—just might get the wrong thing.
So, let’s stop blaming the AI for things going wrong. AI is a tool, and like any tool, it can be used or misused. Don’t blame the tool, blame the mechanic.
Share this:
The Phenomenon Of Western Hitmaker Charles Ray
December 14, 2023|Authors, DSP Articles
The year 2023 has been an exceptional one for Western hitmaker Charles Ray. His books have continued to please Western readers around the world, with many of them placing inside the top one hundred bestseller chart and putting smiles on the faces of fans of Old West fiction. His philosophy of using a “rotation” strategy to bring readers three different books each month, continuing his three most successful series, has proven to be a solid strategy and only one that an author of immense concentration, drive and charisma could pull off.
“Texas Ranger J.D. Pettit,” “Jacob Blade: Vigilante,” and “Caleb Johnson: Mountain Man” are all booming brands for Ray, with readers constantly waiting for the next book in the series. The work that Charles puts into these series make them must-read, addictive reading.
Hard work makes for a lot of the Ray success—he’s always working on that next book. Rarely a week goes by without a new Charles Ray adventure, and readers love that consistency. Often we get emails asking about the next Caleb Johnson—his most popular series—and we can always assure the reader that the next adventure is literally just around the corner.
Even with his own busy personal schedule, he manages to keep his readers entertained—and in a business where people’s personal lives often intrude into their writing lives, Charles shines as an example of separating his writing from his business life, never letting either down.
So, what is next for Charles Ray? Well, more of the same, of course. In 2024, he will continue his rotation. As long as the world keeps spinning, we will keep seeing brand new adventures from the very talented Mr. Ray. In fact, there’s one on the way right now—“Rusty Rhodes: Bounty Hunter: The Bone Wars.” You see, as this article was written, he wrote another book!
Share this:
Writers and imposter phenomenon
Many successful and talented people, especially women, minorities, and people from underprivileged backgrounds suffer from a condition called imposter phenomenon. This is a condition where sufferers feel that they are frauds, that their success is not deserved and, at any minute they will be unmasked for the failures that they really are.
Writers often suffer from this condition regardless of their gender, ethnicity, or socio-economic background. It hits really hard writers who have achieved early publication but then hit a patch of rejection slip after rejection slip before again achieving publication on a regular basis, and sometimes even a degree of notoriety.
While I’ve never been on the New York Times or USA Today bestsellers’ list, and probably never will be, I’ve established myself as a fairly consistent writer with a long backlist of books and a sizeable steady readership. But I’ve also suffered imposter phenomenon. Took me a while to get over it too.
Let me tell you how I did it.
My first work of fiction was published when I was 12 or 13. My high school English teacher talked me into entering a national Sunday school magazine short story contest and I won. My very first byline, and in a national publication no less. I was hooked on writing. But my next publication didn’t come until I was 18, and I got a poem published in a newspaper, the European edition of Stars and Stripes. I also had the occasional newspaper article published, and every now and then a travel or historical article published in a magazine, including some well-known national publications.
Despite all this, I was reluctant to call myself a writer. Whoever heard of a poor Black kid from a one-horse town in East Texas being a writer? In addition, I was getting enough rejection slips for my efforts at fiction to cover a wall.
This went on for years until I finally decided to hell with it, and I ventured into independent publishing and put out a mystery novel. That first book sold all of ten copies, but it sold, so I kept going. I expanded to historical fiction and did a few on the famed Buffalo Soldiers of the Ninth US Cavalry. Those sold better. One volume sold 800 copies the first weekend after I published it.
I was still reluctant to call myself a writer.
While doing research for my Buffalo Soldier stories, I came across references to Bass Reeves, an African American former slave who was hired as a deputy US marshal in 1875. After doing some research, I wrote a fictionalized account of his life, Frontier Justice: Bass Reeves, Deputy US Marshal. This was a few years before the rest of the world discovered this fascinating character, and the book sold well—still does after more than 10 years.
At this point, believe it or not, I’m still not calling myself a writer, fearing that someone will point out that I’m really no such thing, and the sales I’m getting are just flukes.
All this, mind you, while some of my acquaintances are calling me a writer, and I’m even hired to do a summer writing workshop for college seniors in an international relations program. I’d also by this time been interviewed at least four times by online bloggers who did interviews with writers—hint, hint.
When I was approached by a western publisher who heard one of the interviews and asked if I’d consider writing for his firm, I began to wonder if maybe I should start calling myself a writer. When a second publisher approached me with a better offer, I finally had the nerve to say ‘writer’ when someone asked me what I did. I even had calling cards made up with ‘Author’ under my name, and set up an author’s website, https://www.charlesray-author.com. To leave no doubt in peoples’ minds, I also added a couple of sentences to my CV, indicating that since retiring from government service, I’d turned to writing among other interests.
Imposter phenomenon wasn’t cured overnight. I was still reluctant to call myself a writer even after giving people my business card. Then, at a lunch one day where the speaker was introduced as someone who had three published books, and one of my table mates scoffed and said to our other companions, “What’s the big deal? Charlie here has more than fifty published books,” I realized that my fear of being exposed as a fraud was invalid. Other people thought of me as a writer, and not a bad one at that, according to my friend that day, so why couldn’t I do the same?
Well, since that day, that’s exactly what I’ve done. And, you know what, I’ve never felt better about myself.
Share this:
Visiting Central Illinois
Oct. 24 – 27, 2023, I visited Peoria and Springfield, Illinois to speak to their World Affairs Councils on ‘Blueprint for a Modern American Diplomatic Service. I also met with several groups of college and high school students to talk about careers in foreign affairs and had a chance to see some of the famous sites in the area.
The two photos at the bottom are me with a Park Service guide in front of Abraham Lincoln’s home in Springfield on the left and a statue of Lydia Moss Bradley in front of Bradley University, the co-educational school she founded in the 1800s.
