This is not my official resume but a narrative summary of my qualifications to write satire and analysis of the world we live in. Which I suppose is everybody’s right and privilege, but they don’t necessarily do so with authority.
Semper Fidelis
I attended the US Naval Academy for two years. I was ranked 20th in the Class of ’78. I was in 15th Company, one of the two US Marine Corps companies. Plebe Year was like 12 months of USMC boot camp, maybe even worse than Navy SEALS training, at least psychologically.
Every day we had to memorize three articles off the front page and three off the sports pages. Any upperclassman could ask what’s going on in the world, and we would then proceed to rattle off the latest news.
I have followed the news carefully ever since then. Even when I was homeless on the streets of Minneapolis one year, living on the street, I would spend time in the public library reading the newspapers.
The Daily Texan
My first big break was as a regular editorial columnist for The Daily Texan, the campus rag, when I was in graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin. “Take an angle and run with it.” At one point, I set up a debate between Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan on campus. They accepted; the Navy ROTC was going to proctor the event. I reserved an auditorium and everything.
Then my editor found out, and I was out of a job. It seems that George W. Bush, running to become president, was the campus favorite. I later put some new columns on a small website, The Pelican’s Briefs, I set up when I was still in grad school. That link sends you to the website, still the original 2002 HTML. (Best viewed on a desktop PC.) This was one subsite of my giant protest site, The Texas X Files.
The Hard Right News
Years later, during the Obama administration, I had a series of news and analysis websites, most notably The Hard Right News. When I finally shut it down circa 2013, there were almost 500 posts and movie reviews. I will put the entire website back online soon, exactly as it was.
All of this political activism – attacking everybody, all sides, everywhere – has its root cause in my dismissal from the University of Texas with extreme malice. I fought so hard – and they fought so hard back – that I ended up with a terrible math phobia.
Having been an engineer all my life, and a semester short of a Ph.D in mathematical physics when I was expelled, I was then unable to even look at math, much less work on my research. Well, I took out my frustration on the world.
Bill H. Clark