I first met Osborne Perry Anderson nearly 17 years ago.  At the time, he had been dead for 128 years.

Not only dead and gone but forgotten, even though he had been the sole survivor of John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry and had written the only insider account of the event that further divided an already polarized nation and arguably sparked the Civil War.  You know, the one that cost 750,000 lives, freed the slaves and set the stage for generations of white backlash marked by Jim Crow laws, hundreds of lynchings, and all forms of racial discrimination in a color-and-race-obsessed nation that long sought to sanitize and hide from its own history.

Eleven years ago, the 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” focused on Al Gore’s attempt to raise public awareness of the dangers posed by global warming. http://imdb.to/2sDOjEU  The film made something of a splash with its stark picture of climate change and its impact on the planet. It captured public attention, for a time. But then came the climate deniers, the yahoos of the new millennium who challenged the experts with, well, demagoguery, “fake news” and emotion. Americans, it seems, have a short attention span and an inconvenient relationship to the truth.

Ghostwriting haunts some ghostwriters who don’t get credit, but the tradeoff for anonymity is payment. It can be as painful to write about your own culture as it is to cross the cultural divide to write about others. If you are an author and want to get rich, buy a lottery ticket.

These were among the insights – and reality checks – served up at the 2017 Books Alive! Washington Writers Conference on April 29 at the College Park Marriott Conference Center. It was our fifth annual, and throughout I’ve been privileged to be the chief organizer and recruiter of panels and speakers for this increasingly high-profile event that attracts aspiring and accomplished authors from the DMV and beyond.

The civil war over the Confederate Civil War soldier whose granite likeness has stood for more than a century outside the Rockville courthouse appears to be over.

Having been sheathed in plywood for two years — either to protect it from vandals or to protect viewers from its offensive sight — the soldier is moving, finally, to a new location at White’s Ferry on the Potomac River. That seems as fitting a place as any, since the cable car ferry, the Jubal A. Early, is named for a Confederate general who came close to capturing the nation’s capital in July 1864.

If this country had not admitted my immigrant grandfather Yitzchok Lempert (later known as Isaac Lampert) in 1904, and my grandmother Rochel Perski Lempart (later, Rose Lampert) three years later with my Aunt Basia (Bessie), I would not exist. Nor, I should add, would my three sons. My mother, Emma Lampert Meyer, was the first American born child of this immigrant family, in 1908, in a tenement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The family back in Volozhin, in what is now Belarus, kept in touch, until the war, when the correspondence abruptly stopped. The entire family, except for one cousin who escaped, was murdered in May 1942, two months before I was born, by the Nazis and their collaborators for the “crime” of being Jewish. God bless America! And God help America — and the new immigrants yearning to be free — in this frightening New World Order that makes “never again” feel like nothing more than a hollow slogan.

Much has been said and written recently about the role and importance of journalism and journalists – and the news media in general – to be truth tellers, to be the recorders and reporters of facts, even or especially when faced with “alternative facts” and demagogic attacks on the “dishonest media.”

So-called “fake news” and outright lies reinforce the prejudices of true believers and have too often gone unchallenged, especially on cable “news” but also in print.

That is beginning to change, thankfully, as even the talking heads who traffic in opinion as well as in facts have begun to call out the cynical purveyors of misinformation–and yes, I am suggesting motivation more than merely “playing loose” with the facts.

In 1962, two competing networks – NBC and CBS – subsidized Germans seeking to tunnel under the Berlin Wall. The West Germans had one goal: to free their compatriots on the other side. The networks wanted something else, a news story. It was blatant pay-to-play, and, in the end, only NBC succeeded, over the objections of the Kennedy White House, more concerned about an international incident than about television ratings. This ethical lapse in journalism is replayed in a new book, The Tunnels, by Greg Smith, which I reviewed in the Washington Independent Review of Books, an online nonprofit website launched six years ago following the demise of the Washington Post’s standalone Book World section. You can read my review at:  http://bit.ly/2gM8AlA