Posted on 04/08/2003 8:02:33 AM PDT by mikeb704
As expected by all but the most fervent America haters, our valiant young people are doing their duty in Iraq superbly. Certainly there have been casualties. Those are unavoidable in any war. But a smashing victory is just around the corner and we will be so thankful when most of them come marching home again.
Early on, it was easy to develop an addiction to the cable news channels and their round-the-clock war coverage. At least it was easy for me to fall prey to them.
Then noticeable flaws emerged. In "Breaking News," they’d breathlessly announce the Marines had taken a bridge in some unheard of part of Iraq. Then I’d realize that this breaking news had been reported several hours earlier. On the same station, no less.
Wars traditionally take time to prosecute. With instant communication and embedded reporters and 24-hour coverage, it’s tempting to expect decisive developments and their stories to happen every few minutes. That’s just not the way wars work.
I also grew weary of all the retired field grade officers that had found themselves lush gigs as analysts for TV. It was as though Monster.com had posted positions for bland military retirees with good tailors. Lots of positions.
Maybe it’s because I only made it to E-5 in the service, but there is something mildly annoying about the presumption that anyone who made it to major or above qualifies as an instant expert. I started wondering how many of these authorities had held positions as laundry officers or morale officers or something else that, although necessary, didn’t automatically confer the strategic skills of Dwight Eisenhower. Yet now they are tripping over themselves to get to the screen writer so they can depict the situation on a map and explain it all to us lowly enlisted types.
I’ve been limiting myself to about two hours a day of war coverage. So now there’s more time for reading books.
On Monday, Robert Caro won the Pulitzer Prize for "Master of the Senate," his third volume on Lyndon Johnson. I finally finished it a couple of weeks ago. And finally is the correct adverb. More than a thousand pages, it was a much slower, much less interesting read than Caro’s two earlier books on LBJ.
Perhaps the reason is it covers familiar ground. In many ways, Johnson was your basic skunk. In the presence of anyone powerful, he’d become a sycophantic, and obvious, bootlicker. When he went to the Senate he started calling a senior colleague "Mr. Wisdom." At least to his face. Johnson would kiss Sam Rayburn, the House speaker, on the top of his head and ask him, "How are you tonight, my beloved?"
On the other hand, Lyndon treated anyone below him, especially his employees, like dirt. He’d make secretaries take dictation from him while he went to the bathroom. He’d routinely curse his staffers and controlled them through humiliation.
He voiced rabidly racist views. He was an unfaithful husband and an absentee father.
All of this Caro has written about previously. Consequently, he’s been attacked as a Johnson hater. In this book, however, Caro reveals himself as a big government devotee, just like his subject. And, pointing to Johnson’s achievement in passing the 1957 civil rights act, he appears to have concluded that the skunk didn’t stink that much after all.
I really needed a break after that. Now I’m reading some of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries. Wolfe is a big detective, very big. A seventh of a ton, to be more accurate. He loves food and orchids, distrusts women, and rarely leaves his house. His legwork is done by Archie Goodwin, a wisecracking wise guy who narrates the stories.
Stout’s writing is brilliant. A delicious quote from "Black Orchids":
"After all the ballyhoo in the special Flower Show sections of the Sunday papers, it was a cinch that some member of our household would have to go take a look at those orchids, and as Fritz Brenner couldn't be spared from the kitchen that long, and Theodore Horstmann was too busy in the plant rooms on the roof, and Wolfe himself could have got a job in a physics laboratory as an Immovable Object if the detective business ever played out, it looked as if I would be elected."
Archie and friends are much better companions than Landslide Lyndon. Maybe I can cut the TV news viewing down to an hour a day.
Major came on with EXACTLY the same info we've had since late last night and all this morning. Not a dang thing new.
Cry wolf.
Leni
Don't you wish they'd just CUT IT OUT?
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