Yeah, Michael Kelly was one of my intellectual heroes after 9/11. I don't know any other writer who hit so many "home runs" in his columns, arguing for moral clarity, not moral relativism. I was really sad when he was killed in Iraq.
IIRC, Kelly was killed in an accident, an overturned car, I believe.
Yep, you wouldn't believe the number of folks who've written to ask me how I could possibly be so dumb as to believe anything John Kerry says! LOL!
Anyway, here's an elegiac tribute I wrote to Mike Kelly after he was killed in Iraq on April 3, 2003. His wife and mother both wrote to thank me.
April 10, 2003
I Believe: In Remembrance of Michael Kelly Karen Pittman
I am no one. I have nothing whatsoever to do with wars, with cataclysms, with apocalypse. I have never tread on desert soil, never traveled with the1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, never witnessed the massive American army rumbling. I have never watched an old man fall to his misshapen end. Yet the passing of Michael Kelly profoundly moves me.
In his last column posted from Iraq on April 3, 2003, the same day he was killed in a Humvee accident, the syndicated Washington Post columnist, editor-at-large of The Atlantic Monthly, and veteran correspondent of two Gulf Wars contemplated the jarring anonymity of death. Having come upon the twisted carcass of an old man, an Iraqi irregular, he clashed head-on with the meaninglessness of life in the dead dustbowl that is the desert. The corpse, with his blood-matted gray hair . . . was lying on his back, near the rapidly charring hull of one of Saddam Husseins many makeshift tanks, a trucks burning skeleton.
Clearly, smoke wasnt the only thing getting in Michael Kellys eyes . . . and the chalky odor that I imagine must have calcified his nostrils would in the end turn out to be just the ordinary, dry, nihilistic stink of deathnot only the obvious death of the sad, sacked straggler he noted, but his own top secret one, lying in wait to ambush him just around the bend. I find his preternatural lingering over that lone soldiers blood-smeared remains poignantly prescient. Not long after filing this terminal report, Kelly literally took a wrong turnand wound up similarly undone in a Baghdad canal.
His journalistic reputation he sealed when things were livelier, way back in 1998, in a more cynical yet complacent timea time when the national psyche was obsessed with nothing more urgent than an incumbent presidents sex drive (which was urgentand obsessivein the extreme) and whether or not the wild stock-market acceleration of the nineties would ultimately shape up to be a prickly bubble blown in a collective pique of irrational exuberance. Indeed, this was an era when Money only was Holyand when, according to the administrations (anything-but-) divine materialistic scheme, a secular trinity emerged, whereby Alan Greenspan was the all-knowing God; Bill Clinton a secondary, unfairly-crucified, admittedly flawed Christ-figure; and Ken Starr the oft-blasphemed Paraclete of Conscience.
Into this swollen blasmosphere (blasphemous atmosphere) Michael Kelly injected his ironic wit and savage moral grace. With one tiny but hugely influential column called I Believe, Kelly showed us the absurdity of the Clintonian creed. This he achieved by cleverly taking the president at his (literal) word. He wrote, in a plain-spoken style (which, oddly enough, anticipated George W. Bushs) drenching with sarcasm, I believe the president. I have always believed him. I believed him when he said he had never been drafted in the Vietnam War and I believed him when he said he had forgotten to mention that he had been drafted in the Vietnam War. I believed him when he said he hadnt had sex with Gennifer Flowers and I believe him now, when he reportedly says he did.
In I Believe, Michael rehabilitated us with his simple but powerful gospel, impossible to refute. I believe the president has lived up to his promise to preside over the most ethical administration in American history. . . . I believe that The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, U.S. News & World Report, ABC, CBS, CNN, PBS and NPR are all part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. Especially NPR.
Kellys writing hand was double-jointed; depending on the mood and the occasion, he could flex it in one of two opposing directions, by doing either the artful tango of poetry or the Funky Chicken of straight-talk. He could shuck-and-jive with the best of them. Despite his elastic intelligence, however, he never allowed the curve of his polemic to arch too far over our heads. Even when straining for lyrical effect, he deliberately kept his rhetoric within reach. The same man who tartly and ironically labeled Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Monica Lewinsky cheap tramp[s] also told us of the Spartan aesthetic of war. Listen to the loveliness of this line, one of his last: The tanks and Bradleys and Humvees [one of whichagain ironicallywould transport Michael Kelly to his death] and bulldozers and rocket launchers, and all the rest of the massive stuff that makes up the American army on the march, rumbled past him, pushing on. It has a clean, spare, existential beauty.
Michael Kelly understood the army would march on without him, much as the Iraqi army marched on without that ragtag old soldier. He understood, too, that for as long as human history is writ, wars and rumors of wars will rumble on, pushing past antediluvian warriors upended in the desert, past the primed young reporters paused to gawk at them, and past marvelous Humvees absurdly drowned. War knows an inhuman, piston-like propulsion all its own.
In an April 5 tribute to his cut-down colleague, The Washington Posts Ken Ringle beautifully mourned the character of the man whose written voice made us shiver: In a professional universe too often peopled by shark-minded careerists with too many credentials and too little humanity, he was in many ways a kind of throwback to his father's generation of Irish-Catholic blue-collar newspapering. He delighted in journalism not for any illusion of status, but for the joy of language, the adventure of experiences and the chance to prod people into thinking.
Amen, Ken. Thank God for Michael Kelly. Because of him, and others like him, ours is a less disillusioned, narcissistic age. I, like Michael Kellylike Ken Ringle, like the countless people proselytized by Kellys pure prosebelieve.
I believe in the man in the trenches, in the reporter who scraps for the story. I believe in the truthful journalist who believes in the truth. I believe in the foot soldier who believes in his cause, who toils in truth's trenches, and who is willing to die for what he believes. I believe in Michael Kelly.
Though I am no one, I offer my small, faraway sorrow. I offer my gratitude. I offer my prayers for all who have fallenfor those whose shimmering bylines we have known, like Michael Kellys . . . and for those whose names will go untold, who have silently died, in a world made loud with grief.▪
Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and published poet whose work also appears on Wednesdays at www.amsiriano.com and www.amgoodnews.com, and weekly at www.therant.us. She has also written commentary for The Washington Dispatch and The Common Conservative. Several of her editorials have been recognized by Townhall and added to its archives. Her article "Goodbye, Natalie: Dixie Chick Eats Crow" won Opinion Editorial's Best of 2003 Award, and further earned the distinction of being the most popular (most widely-read) op-ed in the web site's history. Frequently ranking among the weekly Quill Pen Ten, her rants typically generate considerable attention and no small amount of controversy. Her style is as acerbic as it is witty. Occasionally resplendent, often raucous, always refreshing, her no-holds-barred, tell-it-like-is commentary not only informs -- it entertains. She's the Lay's Potato Chip of political punditry: You can't read just one!
tpittman7@comcast.net
FYI: Anyone interested will find my entire archive at OpEds.com: http://www.opinioneditorials.com/writer.php?id=kpittman.
Thanks, all!
Karen Pittman khp0129