When pacifists write newspapers

Chi Trib, page one today, heart-tugging if not -breaking story of Marine who can’t get out of corps to donate a kidney to his desperately ailing father:

"He gave me life," Drish said of his father.

As God’s instrument, some would say.  Never mind.  This is a war story after a pacifist’s heart.

Turning to page one of Metro section, you find another, Wheaton soldier killed in blast 26-year-old died hours after talking with his family.  It’s the horrors of war, never talk of gains against the enemy or heroism for love of country, as you find in work of embedded bloggers, even a cartoonist, today’s Mauldin.

A reader notes [to Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds] that while big-media journalists are thin on the ground in Iraq, the blogosphere has sent so many people that it's worked its way around to cartoonists . . . .

Elsewhere, we have Bill Ardolino, whose “citizen journalism” is on display here, in his “In Iraq Journal” story, “Insh'allah: A Nighttime Raid with the Iraqi Army.”  This is awesome stuff, as any Young Person would say, complete with pix of jubilant Iraqi soldiers after successful mission.  Why don’t we get stuff this good, on the spot, vivid, concrete, from our MainStreamers? 

(One reason is their anti-warrior mindset.  They dread glorifying combat, as they would put it, are deeply suspicious of U.S. intentions and performance, and THEY are calling the shots as to what we read and watch.) 

Later: Sun-Times, more alert than Trib to blogosphere, has story about ex-GI who has a book out based on his blogging soldiers’ comments from and about Iraq.

Smart guy

Today’s by Rick Telander in S-T is quite good.  It’s about how Peyton Manning outsmarted the Bears, thinking all the way, changing plays as he called them, based on how Bears defenders were lined up.  He analyzed what happened on that 2nd-quarter (ck) pass that I could have caught and scored on, so wildly had Bears pass defense lost its way:

'They were in two different defenses on that,'' he said. ''No question. They were in cover-2, and one safety was in man.''

Certain?

''No question.''

Excellent interview and overall column.  Question persists: are Bears smart?  Is Bears management imaginative enough to move them all the way?  Smart enough to get to 2nd-best, which is smarter than all but one.  But can you imagine Rex G. running things the way Manning did?  He’s not that smart, for starters.

Tags: Chicago+Bears, Peyton+Manning, Rick+Telander, Rex+Grossman

Maggie Bowman, producer

Look here for lineup of films set for the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Conference and Festival March 9 - 17 in Austin, Texas,  They include “Election Day,” directed by Katy Chevigny,

a verite examination, following a dozen voters (including an ex-felon, a poll worker, and more) over the course of November 2, 2004 - from dawn until long past midnight. (World Premiere)

of which Maggie Bowman is producer.

An Obama moment

Obama, riding an astonishing wave of glowing publicity for a candidate 21 months from an election, already has a bubble around him that is tighter than the one that surrounded Texas Gov. George W. Bush, who spent long hours of the fledgling days of his candidacy in bull sessions with reporters.

Oh boy.  This is Mike Allen’s perspective in The Politico, where he tells of catching up with Obama, who is running for president, for gosh sakes, after a hotel reception from which reporters were barred:

I introduced myself and said, "Good evening, Senator, may I walk with you?" He replied, "You can walk with me. That doesn’t mean you can ask questions." I chuckled, thinking he was kidding. "But you can certainly walk with me," he added. The Senator then underscored, "I’m sorry. I’m not answering questions."

Even an innocuous “[W]hat [do] you want to accomplish this weekend"? got the brush-off.  No “press avail” this time, said O.  Allen concluded:

[A]s Hillary tries to pierce her bubble, however tentatively, Obama appears to be building one.

The Politico is an apparently hot new online publication whose political editor is former Sun-Timesman Roger Simon.  Allen’s experience and commentary are worth keeping in mind in this Obama instance.

He has found the enemy, and it isn't us

Michael Yon from Iraq:

When I arrived in Mosul a few weeks ago, they were getting about 1 car bomb per week.  Now it’s up to about 1 per day. The fighting is intensifying here, and that’s the bad news. There is some good news, however: Iraqi Security Forces, though taking losses, are thoroughly punishing the enemy here.  Just a few days ago, the enemy launched a large and well-planned attack on a police station.  In late 2004 or 2005, such an attack would have been devastating – and was.  But this time, when the enemy demanded the Iraq Police surrender, the police responded with gunfire. Lots of it. After several hours of fighting, the enemy fled in front of their blood trails.

Yon will be writing more about this.  For now he suggests a new dispatch  “The Hands of God.”  with audio file of a conversation between American soldiers and Iraqi villagers after a homicide bomber attack.  For context he recommends Gates of Fire and Battle for Mosul IV.

Tags: Iraq, Mosul, Iraqi+Security+Forces, Michael+Yon

Confession, first step

My name is Jim and I am a compulsive reader of the daily newspaper. 

I read my ChiTrib.  I find on page one that the not-guilty finding in trial of Bridgeview Hamas supporters is “setback for Bush administration.” (subhead).  I find that a report’s forecast for Iraq is “grim,” according to “sources” who read a “classified intelligence document [that] points to further strife.”  (That’s a Wash Post story, by the way.)  And I find a big Chi Bears story (fancy that), with color pic, and on left a neither gloomy nor anti-Bush story (fancy that) about Chief Justice Roberts pushing for a “more private and less divisive” Supreme Court.  (Does the writer mean “divided”?)

I read my Sun-Times, mostly view it, that is: Great color pic on page one, “We are not terrorists” in big type, “Victory declared for former Chicago grocer as jury rejects major charges in Hamas terror trial” beneath it, a fifth its size at most.  (Page 3 AP story here, but pix are S-T’s)  What, no setback for Bush admin?  Pic is of men praying outside courthouse after grocer was acquitted of racketeering charges.  Mostly viewing it, because this is a TABLOID, brothers and sisters, and I am addicted also to tabloids.  Will anyone help me?

more more more

Pithy question

The Gospels are pithy, why expand them? is Rupert Shortt's objection to Walter Wangerin's Jesus: A Novel (Zondervan) in Times Lit Supplement of 3/17/06. "None . . . is a biography of Jesus, still less a neutral report. . . . The four evangelists all fashioned their sources [sic] with great ingenuity to substantiate prior convictions about Christ's divine mission. Their writing was pithy, as well as skilful. Mark's text, the shortest, omits almost everything considered inessential to the message of salvation."

"Christ himself is all brilliance or defiance" here, says Shortt, TLS religion editor and formerly asst. ed. of The Tablet, the British Catholic weekly. "In brief, the message lacks nuance." If this novel is aimed at non-believers, asks Shortt, the "tautness" of the Gospels themselves are more likely to convince them.

To paraphrase Shortt's argument, if the risen Lazarus can appear to sinners without effect -- Luke 16:19-31: "If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead," Abraham told Dives, the rich man in hell -- why would "adding fat" to the original "well-chiseled body" of Scripture, as Shortt puts it, convince them?

Shortt approaches the Gospels as a work of art, or at least finely honed craft. I applaud this and understand expanding a text, as in Wangerin's book, as spelling out its meaning. An expansion says more than the original, and obviously there's room for that. Wangerin, a prolific writer on such matters, seems excellently qualified to do that. But it's tricky nonetheless.

"Price Gouging" the right thing!

I love these Mises people, who get to the heart of economic nonsense as taken for granted by MSM poo-bahs.

Turnaround?

Amazing Chi Trib story about victory in Iraq battle.  250 enemy dead!  Not a body-count story about our losses nor picture of grief-stricken survivors with story of how loved was the dead soldier.  A war story, that is, not the usual anti-war story.  What happened?!

 

However, do not be overly alarmed.  Liz Sly and editors managed to keep focus with this lede:

Two U.S. soldiers died Sunday when their helicopter crashed and about 250 insurgents were reported killed . . .

You can't win for losin' sometimes

MICKEY KAUS: "Labor costs--and specifically work rules--are part of what's killing all the unionized auto manufacturers while their non-unionized competitors thrive." Work rules, I think, are more damaging than pay issues because they cost flexibility and make it harder to introduce new technology.

— from the very helpful Instapundit, which most mornings beats your daily newspaper, or at least is more rewarding (except for obits, and local crime, politics, teams).

This retrogressive, feet-dug-in unionism, I fear, is the problem.  What Walter Reuther the Socialist got his arm broken for in 30s picketing v. Big Capital became a millstone around neck of the masses, who profit most from growing productivity.  Life’s a B, ain’t it?

Tags: Mickey+Kaus, Instapundit, labor+unions, Walter+Reuther, United+Auto+Workers

Club news

Was a gathering of newsgatherers last night at Holiday Inn atop Sun-Times on the river — 15th floor, vu is stunning.  Chi Headline Club gave out lifetime achievement honors.  It was a combination of -atti's, liter- and glitter- (we all dressed nice) and newshounds past, present and to come.  The young were adequately represented.

These were clubbable news people honoring their own, as people do.  It was a high-church affair but not solemn high.  It helps when the honorees are people who talk straight and seem to say what they mean.  No cutesy needed apply.

* WGN radio farm-matters announcer for 47 (!) years Orion Samuelson announced himself "a Norwegian, so only halfway there" at 72.

* News writer and editor with three Chi dailies from the '50s, retired since '88, Ed Baumann [correction here:] said it had been his good fortune to spend half his life in the "second oldest profession in the world," adding, "Think what heights I might have attained if my parents had had a girl,” here earlier misinterpreted as a crack at gender-based affirmative action. 

* Fotog Jim Frost of Sun-Times and TV newshen cum Sun-Times columnist Carol Marin looked appreciatively to their families there present.

* Chi Trib Sci writer and Pulitzer prize winner Ron Kotulak I am sure said something while I went to the men's room, where a nice young man said hi to me, which is more than I get at the men's room at Schaller's on Halsted.  And more than I require.

Clarence Page of Chi Trib and syndicated-column and TV talk show fame lately and Trib plus Chi's Channel Two fame back in "jurassic" times, as he put it, set the tone or picked the key -- better flat than sharp on such an occasion -- for the event.  He held up the literate part very well, moving things along briskly:

-- Big affirmative action newsroom-hiring vehicle of the 60s was the urban riot: “Monochromatic" LA times drafted a messenger to go into the zone and see what the brothers were doing, got a byline promoting him to ad salesman.  The entrepreneurial Louis Lomax pitched a black-Muslim story to Dan Rather and got the assignment himself as free-lancer because (alas) Elijah Muhammad would not talk to a white reporter.  (Not sure I'd talk to Dan Rather either, but that's another question.)

-- "We used to be colored," said Page, riffing on the Great American Name Game.  Then Negro, then black -- "I mean black," he said, looking grr-threatening for a second.  Then African-American --he called up his mother when this happened, delighted he was finally up there with other hyphenated people, Irish- and Italian– and the like.  Finally “people of color.”  "Full circle," he exulted.

It just shows to go you: tone conquers all, and humor and common sense.  There's a lesson for us there.

Tags: Headline+Club+of+Chicago, Orion+Samuelson, Ed+Baumann, WGN+radio, Sun-Times, Carol+Marin, Ron+Kotulak, Chicago+Tribune, Clarence+Page, Louis+Lomax, Dan+Rather, people+of+color

Best reason around, given by smartest guy around . . .

"Do you think Hillary Clinton would make a good president?" [Wolf Blitzer asked Dick Cheney]

"No, I don't."

"Why?"

"Because she's a Democrat."

Truth Detector: Drive-By Hysterics Over Cheney Interview.

In fact, I was saying that very thing just the other day . . .

Tags: Hillary+Clinton, Dick+Cheney, Wolf+Blitzer

Sartre smoked

* The cigarette was brushed out of Jean-Paul Sartre's hand for an exhibition in 2005.  Sartre smoked, but not in the commemorative picture years after he died.  He was also one of the great sexual athletes of history.  So was his lifelong love, Simone de Beauvoir, a switch-hitter whose girl friends captured Sartre's fancy now and again.  One of these resisted his advances and near broke his haunted heart, however.  It was not easy being a king of sex, so uneasy lies the head wearing that crown.

— from Jean-Pierre Boule’s review of TETE-A-TETE: The lives and loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, by Hazel Rowley (Chatto and Windus) in TLS 3/17/06

* We hear complaints about senseless acts of violence, but never praise for sensible ones.  Is this wise?

* At Bread Kitchen during Xmas week, “Tum te tum tum” (Drummer Boy) overhead for the thousandth time this season is bad enough.  But what of the woman at the next table picking up on it and humming along lightly?

* Comedian Shelley Berman had a shtick where he spoke of dropping ashes in his lap while driving.  Parked at a light on a busy street, he brushed furiously at his lap, looked up and there was an elderly female bus passenger looking at him censoriously.  Likewise, I looked down while on a Bread K stool and saw that my belt was undone and my fly was unzipped.  Oh boy.

* Old joke, but in view of recent highly publicized developments, is it time to revive "Crook County" as replacement name?  No?  Whatever.

Tags: Jean-Paul+Sartre, Hazel+Rowley, Drummer+Boy, Shelley+Berman

Lit'ry matters

* U.S. southern novelist Walker Percy was a medical doctor.

* Longfellow is the most put to music of English-language poets.

(Items from Times [of London] Literary Supplement, hereafter TLS)

* The idiosyncrasy of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry may be explained by the “constraint” of Jesuit life.  Toeing the line in all else, he broke out in his verse.  (You could say he sprang out with his rhythm.)  Indeed, the tension he experienced — conflict between vocation and creativity — may have been productive.  (Simon Humphries, “A Eunuch for God,” TLS 12/22&29/06)

* In Honor: a History (Encounter), James Bowman (no relation) displays “a propensity to be judgemental and didactic.”  (Ditto Harvey C. Mansfield in Manliness [Yale].)  Thus reviewer George Feaver, retired poly sci prof at U. of British Columbia and this year at UT-Austin, who was left with “nagging suspicions” about Bowman’s judgment of U.S. military decisions, having read to the end of his “dense, discursive account of the alleged ‘decline and fall’ of Western honour.”

In this and other matters, Bowman offers a “gloomy reading” of history, “overly selective” in Feaver’s view, as in its ignoring the civil rights revolution of the ‘60s and “real-life heroes” such as Martin Luther King and the New York firefighters on 9/11.  Feaver closes with commendation of both books, “despite their shortcomings [for reminding us] of the importance of remembering the past, and standing up for beliefs central to the achievement of our civilization.” (“Limp Responses,” TLS 12/22&29/06)

* Reviewing Patrick Wyse Jackson’s The Chronologer’s Quest: The Search for the Age of the Earth (Cambridge), John North says J. has “useful things to say,” albeit with “a weakness for discursive irrelevance.” 

Whether J. displayed this weakness or not, I do not know, nor do I know if other reviewers’ comments are well-aimed, but I do find that phrase helpful.  May writing teachers and editors everywhere hold discursive irrelevance to be a weakness not a strength. (TLS 1/12/07)

Tags: Walker+Percy, Longfellow, Gerard+Manley+Hopkins, James+Bowman, Honor, writing+teachers

Movie, No-Child

Hot tip: See the movie Station Agent as soon as possible.  It's on DVD.  A dwarf stars or co-stars with a grief-stricken 40-something soulful good looker and a 20-something handsome bloke with a hot dog stand.  Dwarf lives in abandoned station, he and the good looker find relief from their troubles with help of the handsome bloke.  How do you expose the sorrows of afflicted people without maudlin display?  See this movie to find out.  Beats Sun Also Rises (novel) or at least matches it.

============

In Sun-Times we find a good word for No Child Left Behind in story about on-line parental notification.  (Child, we have your parents' email address, so don't try anything and shape up.) 

 

No-Child has been "a key driver" of education software systems, says an analyst — the writer using a familiar barely-English term — emphasizing as it does data, reporting, and accountability.  This barely-English slip aside, it's a very good story by Sandra Guy. (WHICH I COULD FIND ONLY BY USING GOOGLE, BY THE WAY, NOT THE VERY BAD, VERY CLUTTERED, SUN-TIMES SITE, FOR WHICH THE BUSINESS HEIRS OF CONRAD BLACK SHOULD ASK THEIR MONEY BACK.)

 

She got a good quote for closer from a Naperville schools staffer speaking in favor of new systems: "You spend more time weighing the hog [testing students] instead of feeding it [teaching them] if you don't have the technology."

 

(NEITHER COULD I FIND STAFF EMAIL ADDRESSES, SUCH AS ARE READILY FOUND ON CHI TRIB SITE.)

 

Later: I found them out.  You search the writer, go to his or her bio page (a nice touch), and on the side is email link.  For Sandra Guy, for instance, go here.  There.

Reverse Spin: Obama on wrong side of history

This gent says O'Bama [my quirky spelling: I can do it, it's my blog and no stinking editor is going to correct it] has talking points down cold but nothing else.  I agree with him and feel the bi-racial, Hawaii-raised, Harvard-alum, offspring-of-Ph.D. community can do better.  We will have to hunker down and wait.

One Jimmy bought, sold, delivered

Egad, did I read in this morning's Chi Trib or Sun-Times about Jimmy Carter, author of heavy anti-Israel book, being on the take (big-time, to use a once going phrase of choice) from A-rabs and Muslims?  For a long time, even to saving his peanut farm in '76?  As at Belmont Club?

 

Let me check before I say it’s so.  (Checking, wait.)  Nope, it ain't in either paper, or it escaped the long arm of Google, which has nothing on the subject in either paper.

 

Nor is anthing from either paper among the blogs, again says Google.  

 

Oh well, just another case of what interests mainstream editors.  Ho-ho-ho-hum.

 

OR: It’s the usual lag between mainstream and digital coverage.  Ho-ho-ho-hum 2.

 

It is not easy teaching the old dog something new.

Obama drugged, Jesus risen, Hitler studies, Irving's Dresden, Foie gras in Chi, Macy's, Revolutionary stew

* Barack O's drug use is less the issue here -- vs. various scandals or non-scandals that have bothered campaigns for many decades -- but his being author of self-revelatory book with literary value (ck: have to read the copy of Tales from Father that I got for my birthday).  this is the new thing he brings. 
See: "Past drug use may test Obama" at http://www.suntimes.com/news/sweet/197111,CST-NWS-sweet04.article

 

* Two Jesuits on bodily resurrection of Jesus, some time past:
1. Don't play logic game, said one, a theologian and university chair-holder, when I put it to him, did J. rise bodily or didn't he?  (He's not with Aquinas et al., who put logic up there with the best of mental exercises.)
2. Doesn't matter to me, said another, a publisher of spiritual books.  (He's not with the fanatical Paul, who said we are the most miserable of people if J. did not rise.) 
See: tenacious if quirky memory of James H. Bowman, ex-SJ.

 

* Hitler studies?  Whence came he philosophically?  Try Mark Dery's Shovelware, 8/7/05 http://www.markdery.com/archives/blog/dept_of_hitler_studies/ and find extremely wry commentary on swastika as brand, etc., all based on absolute-evil concept, with references to the devil, yes.  Not much help here.

 

Or Don DeLillo's novel White Noise http://www.amazon.com/White-Noise-Contemporary-American-Fiction/dp/0140077022 whose main character announces himself on p. 4: "... I am chairman of the department of Hitler studies at the College- on-the-Hill. I invented Hitler studies in North America in March of 1968. ..."  Nor here: it's a riff on evil again.  We know he was evil.  We wonder how he got that way, something beyond unhappy childhood and the rest.  Anybody?

 

* Holocaust-denier and currently jailed David Irving's The Destruction of Dresden gave Kurt V. Jr. the data for his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five, as the # of dead, 135G in bombing of D. vs. # of dead, 71G-plus, in b. of Hiroshima.  (Item from N.B. column by J.C. in Times Lit Supplement, 3/17/06)

 

* Sell no, give yes: That's foie gras in Chicago, where inspectors gave up on imposition of fine because ordinance applies only to what's sold, not to what's given away, as f.g. with other dishes at Bin 36 restaurant.  But nobody said it was easy being a legislative meddler: Alderman Joe Moore (sponsor of ordinance), tear down that law!  Or at least fix it, for gosh sakes, to cover shameless defiers of same on technicality and at same time defilers of animal rights!  [Ald. Joe sees no need for fixing it, by the way.] 
See: "Their goose isn't cooked" at http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/195054,CST-NWS-foie03.article

 

* Heard in nursery: "Mommy, Mommy, please take me to see Santa Claus at Macy's iconic State Street location?" 

See: Chi Trib cutline 1/3/07, p. 1 top left under pic of new store manager, who may be a mommy herself but definitely has the capacity to be one biologically speaking. 
See: "Macy's learning what's in a name" at http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0701030050jan03,1,3348903.story?coll=chi-news-hed

 

* Meanwhile, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez appears in ads for Mexican restaurant saying, "Long live socialist revolution."  "People took offense," says manager.  It's Las Palmas, 1835 W. North Ave.  The ad's designer said there's an "abstract but real" connection between ads and Las Palmas.  The ad is part of "a melting pot of ideas."  A pot of stew, perhaps?  That's it!  Las P. should offer revolutionary stew, a mish-mash of goulash.  They can serve it on a silver platter, with abstract but real silver soup spoons inscribed with the provocative but intellectually tasty question, "Were you born with one of these in your mouth?"  The implication would be that now you pay for the sins of your parents and grandparents. 
See: "Eatery's ads turning stomachs" at http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/195085,CST-NWS-palmas03.article

Beware what they imply

This ain’t from a Chicago newspaper, and it’s a longer excerpt than I usually fall prey to, but it’s quite good about the importance of party affiliation as way to cut through “superficial campaign positioning” when judging national security issues, and it’s beautiful in identifying B. Obama as our decade’s Jimmy Carter:

Hillary has been posing as a foreign policy moderate for some time now.  Obama is apparently as left as left can be, yet he covers this stance with soothing moderate rhetoric.  In a way, Obama is the new Carter.  Carter won, despite his relative obscurity and inexperience, because he was the breath of fresh air needed by a country exhausted by Watergate.  Carter’s religious convictions and seeming moderation were emotional balm for a traumatized nation.  It never occurred to anyone that Carter’s foreign policy might make the first serious break from America’s Cold War toughness.  Best keep all this in mind when listening to Clinton and Obama.  They’ll jump through campaign hoops to prove their toughness.  But in the end, we’ll get a Jimmy Carter foreign policy from either one of them.

Thus Stanley Kurtz in “NRO Corner.”

Columnist on wry

Neil Steinberg’s wife heard him on the radio.

"You sounded good -- very cheerful," she said.

"I was just feigning cheerfulness," I admitted.

"Well, feign it when you get home, too," she said.

It works for me, she said.