Testimony

...Phil Haslanger (Phil Haslanger is an associate editor of The'Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin...

...There's the night in the city jail...

...He is not afraid to draw on his own experiences or to immerse himself in tjie world he writes about...

...McCarthy, who now writes a twice-weekly column for The Post that is syndicated to about sixty papers, cares deeply about his subjects...

...Those columns eventually were gathered together in a book, Inner Companions...

...This is a book that is easy to take in small bites...

...Why bother to be a writer unless you can engage your soul and emotions—and not only your head—with the best of the ideas, events, or persons you are writing about...

...He goes to bat for Joann Newak, the twenty-five-year-old Air Force lieutenant sentenced to six years in a military jail because during off-duty hours in her off-base apartment, she smoked marijuana and had an affair with a woman...

...With three columns, McCarthy created enough pressure so the Air Force released her after fourteen months of the six-year sentence...

...Young Jimmy didn't have to listen to the speeches to learn the differences between these groups...

...Instead of disappearing into the anonymity of the editorial page, McCarthy began writing an occasional column that explored the lives and ideas of philosophers, poets, activists, and saints...

...If there are no free lunches, good God, there are definitely no free desserts...

...In his new book, Involvements, McCarthy, a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board, breaks the journalistic mold again...

...he asked to be arrested so he could have a warm place to sleep...

...As he says in the preface, "Writing, even daily journalism, can on good days be for a lucky few a way of proclaiming that the beauty we hunger for—justice in people's lives, a chance to love and be loved—is findable, and can be jotted down in a reporter's notebook and brought back to the typewriter to be shared with others...

...Instead of attending journalism school and learning how to stand on the sidelines, he spent five years in a Trappist monastery reading 200 books a year and tending the cows...

...There is the religious mission that offers five hours of Jesus before offering a cot...

...Even at their banquets," McCarthy observes, "the right wing opposes handouts...

...I suggested to one kid wearing a gorilla mask that if he wasn't up to eating raw okra, despite his costume, he should boil it for ten minutes," McCarthy recalls...

...Whether McCarthy is introducing you to some of his mentors or reestablishing the legitimacy of liberalism in the era of the conservative, he never shies away from the risk of involving himself in his subject, yet he avoids the trap of appearing more important than what he writes about...

...Sometimes it is in the spotlight...

...McCarthy, a vegetarian, obviously delights in recounting his Hallowe'en tradition of giving out vegetables instead of candy...

...He takes his readers with him into the classroom where he teaches high school students about nonviolence and pacifism...

...At the ADA banquet, the waiter gave him an extra strawberry sundae...

...Instead of starting on a small paper and working his way up the journalistic ladder, he free-lanced for a bit, wrote speeches for Sargent Shriver at the Office of Economic Opportunity, and then joined The Washington Post as an editorial writer...

...In 1978, McCarthy took his son Jimmy, then eleven, to two political dinners—one sponsored by the American Conservative Union, the other by Americans for Democratic Action...

...When he asked for a second dessert at the ACU banquet, he was turned down...

...The stories Colman McCarthy shares in this book are testimony to the value of getting involved...

...McCarthy asks...

...In some of the sixty-six essays in his book, McCarthy gets involved not only to enlighten but to help...

...He takes his readers to regular meetings of cancer patients, struggling as much to conquer the fear of cancer as to conquer its physical reality...

...The title itself clashes with the notion of antiseptic journalism...

...McCarthy takes his readers with him onto the streets of Chicago for three days as he lives among the homeless, not as an observer but as one of them...

...That kind of wry humor catches the reader throughout the book...

...Some of the best essays in this collection are those involving McCarthy's children...

...There's the five-mile walk through the January cold to the Catholic Worker house, only to find it filled...