THIS MODERN WORLD

In the wake of the tragedy in West Virginia, I’d love to see the press take a step back and try to examine how hearsay gets transformed into fact. (Sounds like a good assignment for Judy Miller.)

Looking through the front pages on Newseum, I’m struck with how often the exact same photograph is used to convey opposite meanings. With a simle change of headline, relief turns into frustration and tears of joy become tears of grief.

Also, I can’t let the Boston Herald’s awful (and in retrospect, horribly inappropriate) headline go without comment. Now that we know the twelve miners were killed, does this mean America’s prayers weren’t answered? Just like gambling addicts remember their big wins but not their losses, the fate of the twelve miners has transformed from a faith-inspiring act of God to another horrible tragedy in which it’s impolite to mention religion at all. Cute little sayings like “the Lord works in mysterious ways” are cop-outs for the logical conclusions that many of us draw from experiences like this. If something fantastic and improbable can be used as proof that there’s a benevolent god, doesn’t the reverse point toward the conclusion that a higher power is indifferent at best? If you believe in a god that could have saved these men’s lives (which I don’t, btw), why didn’t he? People are quick to throw around the word “miracle” when something wonderful happens, so what the hell do we call this?

Prediction number six has already come to pass, as Bill O’Reilly threatens to get into people’s lives.

Yes, that would be this Bill O’Reilly.

Athenae, via Atrios:

David, if you don’t have good memories of your work, I suggest you get a new job. If you feel more fulfilled by being at home with your family than by working, I suggest you stay at home with your family. Trust me, the public that survived the death of Mark Twain will survive your loss. I do, however, suggest that once you start using your personal preferences as to work and family and what really matters to advocate for what everybody else should do (and this applies to the woman who Brooks is addressing in his column as well), you pause and look around and decide if it’s really the world outside you see, or the pink and shiny inside of your own colon.

I get a lot of email, and spend a lot of my time attending to the details of my business. Viewed from my perspective, at the center of my own storm, This Modern World is simply the most important and influential political commentary of this time or any other.

The key words here being “center of my own storm.” Step outside that storm and it’s a small alternative comic with a modest readership — hardly a household brand.

The thing is, when you do some sort of creative work in public, it’s easy to get caught up in your own little tempest. It’s easy to magnify a little feedback and a little success into seeming like something more than it is, to believe that everyone else spends as much time thinking about your little contribution to the world as you do.

It’s always worth stepping back and keeping things in perspective, lest you end up making a fool of yourself by writing something like this:

A surprising number of people I knew were paying a great deal of attention. Hardly anyone I talked to in Hollywood did not know “something had happened to Roger Simon, the man who created Moses Wine.”

See, it’s that center-of-the-storm thing. The people Roger Simon The Man Who Created Moses Wine is likely to talk to in the course of a given day are by definition a self-selecting group of people who have the vaguest notion who Roger Simon The Man Who Created Moses Wine is. Step a few inches outside of that storm, and people are far more likely to ask, “Who? The man who created what?” and give you a slightly annoyed look as they brush past you.

Just sayin’.

Via (once again) TBogg, who pays attention to R.S.T.M.W.C.M.W. so I don’t have to.

Tangentially related cartoon here.

At times like this, people say, “He died a hero.” I know this is meant with great sincerity. We appreciate the many condolences we have received and how helpful they have been. But when heard repeatedly, the phrases “he died a hero” or “he died a patriot” or “he died for his country” rub raw.

“People think that if they say that, somehow it makes it okay that he died,” our daughter, Amanda, has said. “He was a hero before he died, not just because he went to Iraq. I was proud of him before, and being a patriot doesn’t make his death okay. I’m glad he got so much respect at his funeral, but that didn’t make it okay either.”

* * *

Listen to the kinds of things that most Americans don’t have to experience: The day Augie’s unit returned from Iraq to Camp Lejeune, we received a box with his notebooks, DVDs and clothes from his locker in Iraq. The day his unit returned home to waiting families, we received the second urn of ashes. This lad of promise, of easy charm and readiness to help, whose highest high was saving someone using CPR as a first aid squad volunteer, came home in one coffin and two urns. We buried him in three places that he loved, a fitting irony, I suppose, but just as rough each time.

I am outraged at what I see as the cause of his death. For nearly three years, the Bush administration has pursued a policy that makes our troops sitting ducks. While Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that our policy is to “clear, hold and build” Iraqi towns, there aren’t enough troops to do that.

In our last conversation, Augie complained that the cost in lives to clear insurgents was “less and less worth it,” because Marines have to keep coming back to clear the same places. Marine commanders in the field say the same thing. Without sufficient troops, they can’t hold the towns. Augie was killed on his fifth mission to clear Haditha.

Entire column here, via TBogg, who notes:

The clock is now ticking on who will be the first of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders to attack Paul Schroeder while at the same time making much ado about how much they “honor” the death of his son.

As if they somehow cared more for him than his own father.

That’s how the little chickenshits work…

… one more thing I want to add to this: when you lose a family member suddenly and senselessly, it tears a hole in your life. Grief becomes a constant hovering presence, through which all sunlight and joy will be filtered for a very long time to come. It’s overwhelming to each person who lives through it — now imagine that multiplied by well over 2,000 American (and coalition) families, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 Iraqi families … and it’s a wonder that the weight of so much needless sorrow does not descend upon us and smother us in our sleep, every one.