Roxanna Brown Views
Often when I write a story I am in a quandary about how to end it. If it’s a biography and the person I am writing about is relatively young and has a long way to go, it becomes even more difficult. This was my problem with Roxanna Brown. I had written a book titled At Home in Asia, Expatriates in Southeast Asia and their Stories. After ten years the book is still selling well so I decided to do Volume II. And when I asked Roxanna if I could include her, she accepted.
“Roxanna Brown arrived in Seattle without a clue as to what was going on and was blindsided by an overzealous prosecutor,” said a friend of hers. Asked why an amputee in ill health would be considered a flight risk, Emily Langlie, a spokesperson for the US Attorney in Seattle, said, “Because of her dual citizenship, there was concern about her remaining in the jurisdiction of the US District Court.”
Officials can simply stonewall reporters, or organize facts in ways that suit them best. And no one seems to care. Millions watch some guy do a goofy dance on the Web, and he ends up on front pages. Fred Brown's three soul-searing videos totaled a few thousand hits. As an American abroad, the picture I see from a distance is of a frightened, apathetic nation that is ceding the fundamentals of what made it great. But this is also personal. I have known Roxanna since she first came to Singapore in the 1970s to study Asian ceramics in between trips to cover the Vietnam War.
As any Law and Order junkie knows, prosecutors call themselves the People. That is all of us, Roxanna Brown included. If we forget that, our very humanity is lost. -- Mort Rosenblum is editor of the quarterly, Dispatches, and author of Escaping Plato's Cave: How America's Blindness to the Rest of the World Threatens our Survival.
Roxanna Brown Images
