“It takes a big man to do that,” said a retired Richmond business executive.
He was complimenting the author of an e-mail apology I quoted while speaking to a Cedarfield audience a week after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. The message had been sent to John Hall, senior correspondent and columnist for the Media General News Service bureau in Washington.
“Mr. Hall,” the message began, “I recently wrote you regarding the article you wrote about the WTC and Pentagon attacks, condemning it because it linked the terrorist with an engineer and I am an engineer by profession.
“My reaction was knee-jerk and poorly thought out, not to mention my choice of grammar was coarse and emotionally driven. I wish I could write it all off to patriotism . . . but there is no excuse for my personal barrage on you, your article, and your newspaper. After several days of reflection, I realize that your article was not slanted at engineers but simply used the term ‘engineer’ as a basis of comparison.
“…I ask for your forgiveness for acting like an uneducated, emotionally driven doofus.”
The apology was sent by Bob Colwick, an electrical engineer. He resides in Chattanooga, Tenn., not Richmond or another Southeastern locality served by Media General newspapers. The question arose as to where he read Hall’s original column.
On Sept. 13, the Richmond Times-Dispatch had published a Hall column headlined, “An Engineer for terrorism,” in which he described the composition of a terrorist leader.
That person, he wrote, “has shown that he has a director’s flair for the theater, a military commander’s exquisite sense of surprise and timing and above all an engineer’s knowledge of how things are built and how they can be destroyed.”
Hall was stunned to receive a barrage of e-mails – “more than a hundred at last count and still growing,” he said – condemning his use of the word “engineer.” He even heard from engineering professors at universities beyond the Mississippi.
“It’s been a most unsettling and interesting experience,” he said.
He replied to every e-mail with the note published in a subsequent column on this page Sept. 16 and published again with anti-Hall letters printed on the Editorial Page Sept. 21.
In the note, he apologized to “members of this noble profession who took offense.” He explained he used “engineer” as a metaphor and in the dictionary’s generic definition as “a person who carries through an enterprise by skillful or artful contrivance.”
Hall had become the target of a widespread e-mail attack launched by the Virginia Society of Professional Engineers’ executive director, Leigh M. Dicks. “I notified my members” of the column, she said.
That’s how the column came to the attention of Colwick in Chattanooga. He belongs to an international organization of engineers which took the Virginia message and forwarded the call to arms to its members.
Dicks’ e-mail included a hyperlink to the column (available on the T-D Web site) and urged engineers to respond to Hall. “We work hard to protect the term engineer,” she told me last week. “He had written that a terrorist was an engineer.”
The campaign demonstrated once again the interlocking nature of the Internet that can turn a ripple in a brook into a tidal wave in an ocean.
Dicks backed up her campaign with her own letter to the editor published in the T-D. She wrote, “I take great offense at him saying an ‘engineer’ perpetrated the recent tragedy.”
After Hall’s apologetic note in a second column, she sent out another e-mail on Sept. 17 in which she told her members that Hall’s “apology is far from adequate in my opinion. . . . I believe his first article did more damage to your noble profession and his apology doesn’t even come close to undoing it.”
Dicks asked members again to “respond as you see fit to Mr. Hall’s second article.”
Last week, she remained adamant that Hall had wronged the profession, but said she wasn’t aware of a second round of e-mails sent to Hall recanting earlier complaints. More than 30 writers, including Colwick, deplored the Virginia society’s campaign.
A university professor responded to Hall’s apology by agreeing that “engineer” had been properly used. “You have indeed described this person [a terrorist] well.”
A civil engineer in Arkansas wrote, “I did not find offense in the article . . . it was a good piece that made a point that should be considered by all Americans.”
An operations engineer from the same state recalled “that the word ‘engineer’ comes from the medieval Latin word that means ‘contriver.’ . . . Thus your metaphor, in my opinion, was perfect.”
A systems engineer in Reston called for the Virginia society to “cease fire!” He wrote that Hall’s column “was right on the mark. He should be commended for his grace in responding to Ms. Dicks’ farcical crusade.”
Crusade? The White House issued an apology after reporters quoted President Bush saying, “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.”
Bush, the apology said, was using “crusade” in its definition as a broad action in favor of a cause or against an abuse. Readers here and elsewhere, however, insisted on construing the word narrowly. They pointed to its derivation from the Latin “crux” (cross) and those Middle Ages expeditions by Christians trying to take the Holy Land held by Muslims.
Readers complained, as one here wrote, that “crusade” was “one word calculated to unite all Muslims against the United States today” and should never be used in the context employed by Bush.
Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld announced the renaming of its military campaign against terrorism as “Enduring Freedom.” The name replaced “Operation Infinite Justice,” he reportedly said, because Islam considers finality something provided only by Allah.
On the same day, Reuters news service issued a reminder of its long-standing policy against the use of emotive words, including the word “terrorist.” So who bombed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?
Hijackers.
In today’s tense and sensitive times, even words become “acts of war.”
