I didn't get much sleep last night
thinking about underwear
Have you ever stopped to consider
underwear in the abstract
When you really dig into it
some shocking problems are raised
- "Underwear" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

My first car, a VW bug, cost me $350. Its most holy mission was the time I was sent to the Peoria airport to fetch an important American poet. That poet was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, author of the wonderful poem quoted in part above.

Who makes the news?

Your first instinct might be: nobody. News is what happens. But the more I look at the world around me, the more I realize that there's a message in what shows up on TV, the radio, or the newspaper. And where there's a message, there's a messenger.

Stories don't just pop up out of nowhere. Somebody crafts them. Somebody makes judgments about what's important.

So what's been important the past decade?

This week happens to be both National Library Week and National Holocaust Awareness Week. At first blush, there wouldn't appear to be much in common between them.

But I have a picture from May 10, 1933. A "brown shirt" (Nazi) is throwing an armful of "un-German" books onto a bonfire. The place: Berlin.

In January of the same year, Adolf Hitler had been named Chancellor of Germany, the most powerful position in the government. The aging President Hindenburg hoped Hitler would lead the nation out of its grave political and economic crisis.