The Washington Post - USA (2021-11-11)

C4 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11 , 2021

Legislative District should have known

about Durr’s posts long before Election

Day,” Franklin said. “Local news and

information is the oxygen of a function-

ing, self-governed democracy. And our

system is choking from expanding news

deserts and ghost newspapers.... We

have many fewer journalists covering

the very state officials who have a

profound effect on people’s everyday

lives.”

Some of the nonreporting might argu-

ably be laid at Sweeney’s feet, suggests

Wildstein. Reporters often rely on leaks

of damaging information about a candi-

date supplied by an opponent. But in this

instance, it’s unclear whether Sweeney’s

campaign possessed such “opposition

research” or tried to disseminate it dur-

ing the campaign. (Sweeney’s represen-

tatives did not respond to requests for

comment.)

For his part, Durr tacitly admitted his

social media posts could have proved an

embarrassment during the campaign.

After his comments were reported last

week, he deleted his Twitter account and

released a statement. “I’m a passionate

guy and I sometimes say things in the

heat of the moment,” he said. “If I said

things in the past that hurt anybody’s

feelings, I sincerely apologize.”

He added, “I support everybody’s right

to worship in any manner they choose

and to worship the God of their choice. I

support all people and I support every-

body’s rights. That’s what I am here to do,

work for the people and support their

rights.”

[email protected]

won. Though outmanned and out-

gunned, he knew that in the tropics his

most effective allies would be the heat,

the rainy season, mosquitoes and ram-

pant disease. By slowing down the inva-

sion, even to deliberately scuttling war-

ships and abandoning forts, he allowed

the climate enough time to crush his

opponents. And it did. Britain’s soldiers

and sailors died by the hundreds from

yellow fever and scurvy.

Meanwhile, slightly further north,

Georgia’s founder, James Oglethorpe,

and the Spanish governor of Florida,

Conde Manuel de Montiano, were fight-

ing on a separate front. First, Oglethorpe

attempted to seize St. Augustine and

failed. Then Montiano invaded Georgia,

but despite numerical superiority sud-

Adm. Edward Vernon — after whom the

Washington family home, Mount Vernon,

would be named — and the incompetent,

pusillanimous Gen. Thomas Wentworth.

Vernon’s sea power duly secured the Pan-

amanian export hub of Porto Bello (which

would give its name to London’s Portobel-

lo Road), but the irresolute Wentworth

was ignominiously defeated in his half-

hearted attempts to capture Cartagena

(in modern-day Colombia) and Santiago,

Cuba.

In the defense of Cartagena, Britain’s

archenemy was the astonishing Don Blas

de Lezo. During the course of a military

career that began at age 12, this indomita-

ble sea dog had lost a leg, an eye and an

arm, but gained incomparable under-

standing of how battles are fought and

conflict was entirely reprehensible.

In 1713 Britain’s South Sea Company

entered the slave trade, paying Spain a

hefty sum for the right to transport Afri-

can captives to the West Indies. However,

the company quickly realized that vari-

ous provisos in the contract made it

impossible to rake in the riches it had

counted on and without which the inflat-

ed market bubble for its stock would soon

burst. Hoping to forestall that disaster,

the SSC hustled to increase its profit

margin by smuggling European goods to

the Americas. To discourage this illicit

trade, the Spanish retaliated by organiz-

ing offshore patrols for ruthless search-

and-seizure operations. During one of

these, Capt. Robert Jenkins, of the brig

HMS Rebecca, was tortured, then had his

ear sliced off with a saber.

Back in England, this atrocity caused

an uproar of patriotic indignation before

being slowly forgotten. a nd was then

forgotten. A few years later, however,

international politics — involving Hab-

sburg bloodlines, a half-mad, sex-ob-

sessed Spanish king, and a surge of Brit-

ish imperialist fervor — revived the mem-

ory of Jenkins’s severed appendage. Seiz-

ing its chance, the South Sea Company

started beating the war drum, successful-

ly lobbying for a concerted military inter-

vention to wrest control of the West

Indies and even South America from

Spain. Think of all that Mexican gold and

Peruvian silver!

The English were led by the exemplary

denly, shockingly withdrew. What hap-

pened was this: After a soldier defected

with knowledge of how enfeebled the

colonists’ defenses were, Oglethorpe ar-

ranged for a letter, ostensibly intended

for the traitor’s eyes alone, to be inter-

cepted by the Spanish: Keep telling Don

Manuel, it said, that our forces are weak.

Encourage him to attack the fort so that

we can utterly destroy his army. After

immediately hanging the traitor as a

double agent, the deeply confused and

uncertain Montiano retreated to St. Au-

gustine.

Military tactics, financial shenani-

gans, political infighting, even an expedi-

tion into the Pacific — all these are

splendidly described and orchestrated by

Gaudi. He further salts an already excit-

ing narrative with lurid gossip about the

Spanish court, quotations from many

secondary sources, including Charles

Mackay’s classic “Extraordinary Popular

Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,”

and detailed, You-Are-There accounts of

land and sea battles. While Gaudi doesn’t

hide his contempt for the popinjays and

idiots who wasted the lives of good men,

he is unstinting in his admiration for

heroism and self-sacrifice.

In short, “The War of Jenkins’ Ear” is a

superb example of what the French call

haute vulgarisation, that is, a serious

nonfiction work designed to be read for

pleasure. In this case, however, that plea-

sure has been slightly marred by inatten-

tive proofreading, resulting in some

dropped words, a few missing quotation

marks and various other minor blemish-

es. Such annoyances have grown all too

common in the age of computerized pub-

lishing. Still, Gaudi writes so vividly that

even these are just minor bumps in a

thrilling ride.

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Michael Dirda r eviews books for Style every

Thursday.

BY MICHAEL DIRDA

When I was a boy, my father — not a
reader himself — would sometimes pay a
dollar or two for an odd boxful of books
from a yard sale. With these, he gradually
filled up the shelves he’d built “to give a
little class” to our dining room. I can still
close my eyes and see Samuel Shellabarg-
er’s “Captain From Castile,” Alan Har-
rington’s “The Revelations of Dr.
Modesto,” Ivy Compton-Burnett’s “A Fa-
ther and His Fate,” and even a first Ameri-
can edition of “Lord of the Flies,” the very
copy I would use when we studied Wil-
liam Golding’s classic in my 10th-grade
English class. There, too, toward the left
on a middle shelf, stood a historical novel
by Odell and Willard Shepard titled “Jen-
kins’ Ear.” I never read it.
No doubt the memory of that strangely
titled book sparked me to pick up Robert
Gaudi’s “The War of Jenkins’ Ear.” But
that wasn’t the only reason. I had been
utterly enthralled by this lively writer’s
previous work of military history, “Afri-
can Kaiser,” an account of German opera-
tions in Africa during World War I. For his
latest, Gaudi goes further back in time to
what his subtitle calls “The Forgotten
Struggle for North and South America,
1739-1742,” a conflict between Spain and
Britain fought largely in the West Indies,
Panama, Florida and Georgia. Fans of
Rafael Sabatini’s “Captain Blood” or Pat-
rick O’Brian’s slightly later Aubrey-Matu-
rin nautical adventures should take spe-
cial note.
The War of Jenkins’ Ear, as Thomas
Carlyle dubbed it, consisted of more than
maritime derring-do. It steadily escalated
to include mercenary land troops, 4,000
American colonists (including Lawrence
Washington, the beloved older half broth-
er of George), warriors and scouts from
the Creek Nation, formerly enslaved peo-
ple and even a few pirates.
As so often in history, the cause of the

BOOK WORLD

A farewell to ears: Oft-forgotten 1700s w ar gets a lively retelling

THE WAR OF

JENKINS’ EAR

The Forgotten

Struggle for North

and South America:

1739-1742

By Robert Gaudi

Pegasus. 408 pp.

$29.95

JOSIE COOPER

Robert Gaudi’s “ War of Jenkins’ Ear” is a ripping tale of greed, folly and heroism.

cal coverage. Hundreds of newspapers

have folded during the past two decades

amid technological and economic tur-

moil — mostly small weeklies that fo-

cused on local issues. They have left

behind “ghost” newspapers that try to

report on broad territories with hol-

lowed-out staffs or news deserts where

there is no local reporting at all.

The southern New Jersey region once

had four daily newspapers. But in 2012,

Advance Publications merged three that

it owned — the Gloucester County Times,

Today’s Sunbeam in Salem County and

the News of Cumberland County — into a

single paper, the South Jersey Times.

Salem, Gloucester and Cumberland

counties form the heart of the district

won by Durr.

The Times’s major competitors in-

clude the Courier Post in Cherry Hill and

its sister paper, the Daily Journal in

Vineland, both owned by Gannett Co.,

the nation’s largest newspaper owner

and a vigorous cost cutter. The Philadel-

phia Inquirer is the region’s leading

metropolitan paper.

The reporting staffs of the surviving

local newspapers “have been decimated”

and “barely cover local news anymore,”

said David Wildstein, who runs the New

Jersey Globe, a digital news site focused

on state issues and politics. “It’s a shame.”

O ne of the media’s basic functions is to
serve as a watchdog, particularly in
scrutinizing candidates for public office.
But in Durr’s case, the watchdogs f ailed
to bark for years.
His incendiary posts date back to at
least 2017, when he called U.S. Sen.
Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) a “pedophile”
— o ne of two times he did so, according to
NJ.com. According to Nexis, however,
Durr’s online history got no media cover-
age when he ran unsuccessfully for a
state Assembly seat in 2017 nor when he
ran and lost again two years later.
Political observers in New Jersey say
the inattention this time around partially
reflected low expectations for Durr’s can-
didacy against Sweeney, a six-time in-
cumbent who is president of the state
Senate. “This race wasn’t just off the
media’s radar, it was off everyone’s radar,”
said Brigid Harrison, a professor of polit-
ical science and law at Montclair State.
“No one even considered that [Durr] was
a real threat, and that includes me.”
But the lack of media scrutiny may tell
a larger tale about the state of local news
reporting.
Years of cutbacks and consolidation
among news organizations have left
many communities without vigorous lo-

DURR FROM C1

Candidate wins race as media

misses his social media slurs

delphia and Wilmington, Del., reach

parts of the third district as well, but

regional TV stations rarely cover local

politics, especially those in a nearby

state.

The nonreporting is a “sad illustra-

tion” of a larger crisis in the news media,

said Tim Franklin, the former editor of

the Baltimore Sun and Orlando Sentinel

who now heads a local-news initiative at

Northwestern University’s Medill School

of Journalism.

“The voters in South Jersey’s 3rd

Collectively, the South Jersey Times,

Courier Post and Daily Journal list a total

of 13 news reporters on their mastheads,

covering a four-county region that has a

population of just over 1 million. Editors

of the papers didn’t reply to multiple

requests for comment.

Harrison said the broader news eco-

system is similarly grim. She estimates

that the number of reporters covering the

New Jersey State House in Trenton has

fallen by about 75 percent over the past

two decades. TV stations in nearby Phila-

ELLIE RUSHING/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Edward Durr had written posts calling the founder of Islam and Sen. Robert

Menendez (D-N.J.) pedophiles and accusing “#illegalAliens” of spreading disease.

“Grandma, we both know the history

between dad and his sisters. But I

would really like you to be there.

Having you in my life has always been

important to me, and this would mean

a lot to me.”

Note that Miss Manners chooses her

tenses carefully as she intends to

flatter grandma — while gently

suggesting that your own feelings

about her may not be entirely

immutable.

New Miss Manners columns are posted

Monday through Saturday on

washingtonpost.com/advice. You can send

questions to Miss Manners at her website,

missmanners.com. You can also follow her

@RealMissManners.

© 2 021, by Judith Martin

free to choose with whom I associate,

which includes choosing who I invite to

my wedding. I didn’t want to invite

these two aunts anyway, so I didn’t.

The complication is my grandma.

She has always been more than willing

to overlook her daughters’

mistreatment of my dad, and she feels

that I am being terribly unfair in not

inviting them. This is how I expected

her to feel.

What I did not expect was for her to

tell me she probably won’t come

because of it. This is heartbreaking to

me, because I love my grandma and

really want her there for my wedding

day. Is there anything that I (or my

fiance) can do to help my grandma put

her feelings about this aside for long

enough to attend my wedding?

correspondence.

As for using, or not using, a separate

pronoun line, Miss Manners is in the

etiquette, not the morals, business. But

she observes that the world is a better

place when people do the right thing

for the wrong reasons than when they

do the wrong thing for the right

reasons.

Dear Miss Manners: My dad and his

sisters, who grew up in the midst of a

messy and traumatic divorce, have

never gotten along. After a serious

inheritance argument, which took place

during my teen years, my parents

decided to more or less cut contact with

my aunts.

Now that I am an adult, my parents

have made sure I understand that I am

However, I am somewhat

uncomfortable doing so. I feel like I am

using an important issue affecting

many vulnerable people and co-opting

it to solve my stupid personal issue. My

questions are:

1. How do I indicate my name and/or
   gender in a way that is not obnoxious,
   and that will minimize incidents where
   people call me by the wrong name or
   wrong gender (either by email or in
   person)?


2. Is it morally acceptable for me to
   list my preferred pronouns in my email
   or signature lines? And if it’s not going
   to be effective, should I even try?

The simplest solution seems to Miss

Manners to be to use “Ms.” or “Mrs.” in

parentheses before your name in your

Dear Miss Manners:
I am a 51-year-old
cisgender woman with a
unique name that is
easily and consistently
confused with a male
name. This has resulted
in countless incidents,
from minor
inconveniences to
combative confrontations. I am a CEO,
and people usually get very
uncomfortable when they realize that
they have “misgendered” me.
I have noticed that a lot of people
have started to include their chosen
pronouns in their email signature lines
or other correspondence. I thought this
might be an easy and painless way to
“announce” my gender.

What’s in a name? Confusion from others for this female executive.

Miss
Manners

JUDITH
MARTIN,
NICHOLAS
MARTIN AND
JACOBINA
MARTIN

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