Patricia Rosenleaf

Mark Twain once observed: ”A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”  Our American Sage wasn’t wrong on that matter.  A recent example of Twain’s words was the wham-bam, thank you, ma’am destruction of one of Montana’s finest people — a man who had spent thirty-three years in service to  his country and this state.  Not once in the rush to judgment about this man, did someone of note stop to say, “Wait! Let’s look at the facts.”   

The men and women who fought in Viet Nam had an expression: “There’s no use talking about Viet Nam because if you weren’t there, you could never understand; and if you were there, there’s no need to talk about it.”  When I heard that said recently, the thought struck me that what was being said about Viet Nam could also be said about losing one’s life partner.  Only those who have suffered the loss can come close to understanding, Robert Frost’s narrator in “Home Burial says: “The nearest friends can go/ With anyone to death, comes so far short /They might as well not try to go at all.”    

In Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917, author Michael Punke describes a time in Montana when the “Copper Kings,” William Clark and Marcus Daly, reigned supreme through graft, corruption, bribery, and greed.  Even Mark Twain who knew William Clark personally commented about Clark, “by his example he has so excused and so sweetened corruption that in Montana it no longer has an offensive smell.”  As the sordid story of Clark’s purchase of a Senate seat unfolded, however, a group of people did find the smell of his dealings offensive, and they set out to make

    A while back Charles Osgood, the host of SUNDAY MORNING, a television news magazine presented on (of all times) Sunday morning, made some remarks about the United States Postal Service which I found uncalled for.  I wrote him a letter and it reads: