Time for some serious art about war
I bought a Glenn Miller CD the other day. Impulse purchase. I'd careered off the highway and into the mall to grab a big geopolitical analysis book I suddenly needed and, as I dashed in the store, I ran straight into a new best-of-Miller compilation they had on display. I had a long drive till past midnight ahead of me and it seemed just the thing.
Sunday, May 30, 2004
Recalling a time when setbacks didn't deter us
Memorial Day in my corner of New Hampshire is always the same. A clutch of veterans from the Second World War to the Gulf march round the common, followed by the town band, and the scouts, and the fifth-graders. The band plays ''Anchors Aweigh," ''My Country, 'Tis of Thee,'' ''God Bless America'' and, in an alarming nod to modernity, Ray Stevens' ''Everything Is Beautiful (In Its Own Way)'' (Billboard No. 1, May 1970). One of the town's selectmen gives a short speech, so do a couple of representatives from state organizations, and then the fifth-graders recite the Gettsyburg Address and the Great War's great poetry. There's a brief prayer and a three-gun salute, exciting the dogs and babies. Wreaths are laid. And then the crowd wends slowly up the hill to the Legion hut for ice cream, and a few veterans wonder, as they always do, if anybody understands what they did, and why they did it.
Sunday, May 23, 2004
Don't give Iraqis self-rule all at once
Here's a story no American news organization thought worth covering last week, so you'll just have to take it from me. In the southern Iraqi town of Amara, 20 men from Scotland's Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders came under attack from 100 or so of Muqtada al-Sadr's ''insurgents.'' So they fixed bayonets and charged.
Sunday, May 16, 2004
Now's not the time for Bush to go soft
In his column last week, Robert Novak talked to a big bunch of Beltway insiders about Donald Rumsfeld's future, or his lack thereof. Among my colleague's sources was ''one senior official of a coalition partner,'' who, apropos the Defense secretary, put it this way: ''There must be a neck cut, and there is only one neck of choice.''
Sunday, May 9, 2004
Kerry's just parroting his speechwriters
John Kerry said something amazing the other day. He was talking to the Wall Street Journal and was asked about his many attacks on ''Benedict Arnold CEOs'' -- for example: ''We will repeal every single benefit, every single loophole, every single reward for any Benedict Arnold CEO or corporation that take American jobs overseas and stick you with the bill.'' (Kerry in Virginia, Feb. 10)
Wild about Harry
