The News

Man, I miss Andrew Sullivan.  I’d been reading him since he got rolling in 2001, when the Internet to me was just him and Salon.com (since devolved into deeply unreadable garbage).

Andrew Sullivan was interesting, almost every day.  He changed sides, he was passionate.  He posted disagreements people had with him, admitted he was wrong maybe not every time but plenty.  He was not an idea tip-toer.  He’d say things he knew would draw outrage and was prepared to be a rare dissenter when necessary.

One of the main ideas he had, that gay marriage might be a good idea, went from totally nuts to pretty much accepted reality, just in the time I was reading him.  But he self-identified as conservative, he believed that sometimes very old ideas were still best thinking on a subject.

I could calibrate to him, feel his moods and changes, he became familiar to me.   Sometimes he was frustrating, or overdramatic, or wrong-headed, but he still surprised, kept me engaged.  When something happened I wanted his take.

The Internet’s worse without him.

Not sure there’s an exact connection, maybe there’s none, but lately: I haven’t cared too much about “the news”

I used to love “the news,” presidential elections especially.  This time around though?  It got me thinking about:

My memory of this book is of Sean Penn’s voice from the audiobook, as I drive back and forth to

After I was done with the audiobook, I gave the CDs to Justin Spitzer.  Who knows what happened to after that.  But I did remember Dylan (Sean Penn) saying something like: “I didn’t care about the news.  ‘Mr. Garfield’s been shot down, shot down.’ To me, that was the news.”

The motto of Helytimes is GO BACK TO THE SOURCE, so I did.

As usual, I didn’t have it quite right.

Also got to thinking about Bob Dylan’s friend, Herman Melville.  I (half-mis-)remembered a point he made, almost backhanded, about the news being awful repetitive:

Minus Ishmael, but with the misspelling, could that be on Drudge tomorrow?

Surprised to find how many interesting things I forgot from Chronicles.   For example: been thinking myself lately about Robert E. Lee (mainly I guess because of Ta-Nahesi Coates’ writings on the Civil War).

 Here is a man who fought for a country that kept humans as slaves.  But he was also, in very many ways, indisputably excellent. Even (maybe especially) his enemies were in awe of him.  In a way, maybe that’s his worst crime.

Douglas Southall Freeman studied Lee more than anybody else ever had.  That was while Freeman was also a newspaper editor (The Richmond News Leader) and sought-after advisor to Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall:

Freeman stresses how Lee, and some other generals, were objects of great affection among their men. They were spoken of like they were gods, even years after the war was over. One wonders if this was because of shared risks. One of the best books about the Vietnam War, The Long Gray Line*, notes that in the Civil War, the risk of battle death to a general was twice that of a private. (Whereas in eleven years of fighting in the Vietnam War, only three general officers were killed in action.) The halo effect over Lee is centered on his concern for the lives of his troops, particularly in never ordering them to make unwarranted charges into death traps.

How many World War II generals had grandfathers who fought with Lee?

George S. Patton, Sr.  Patton’s grandfather, who died fighting with Lee.

What are we gonna do with this guy? How many high schools are named after him?:

Here is Bob Dylan’s take:

Dylan!  Nobody else could put it quite the same way.  He’s in his friends’ apartment, on Vestry Street if I read right, reading books. On Al Capone vs. Pretty Boy Floyd:

These people had the greatest apartment library in New York:

Clausewitz.

If Dylan had gone to West Point, I wonder if he would’ve ended up something like James Salter.

Also recommended:

Man.  That one knocked my head off.  Very glad I read it when I did, should read it again.  Part of it is about North Korea.  Not to be confused with: