Following Lex’s advice, I e-mailed Michael Yon about an answer to our Oliver’s question on my previous post. Irene Pinsonneault responded that the best example was in Yon’s two-part dispatch:
Month: July 2007
What We Love
As it turns out, John Barnes had some of it right – he applied the ethos and culture of MFA schools to the Scott Thomas columns. We can find on military blogs (and here) more substantive critiques of the specifics, while keeping in mind that soldiers, being human, can be assholes and that war is not the most positive experience. Still and all, the truth is important and much looks like these were, at best, tales embellished beyond recognition. The narrator seems quite confused about guns, Bradleys and life. TNR’s firing of the “whistleblower” is also not particularly attractive. It’s hard to take the youthful editor seriously.
Cimrman’s Place in the Collective Dream
Our culture comes to us through food and language. Food is sensual – pleasure and necessity; we remember the love with which a grandmother put a piece of pie in front of us, the thought of the groaning holiday table. And if food reinforces the sensual memories of our families, language allows us to see through a culture’s eyes, words filled with history and nuance, words coming from old derivations that are microcosms of our linguistic (and cultural) history. But for this time, let’s ignore those two and move on to the broader culture – music, art, movies, novels – that America both creates and synthesizes. Great art speaks to all of us, but each speaks to each of us. Some art doesn’t travel well; some artifacts move people of one culture far more than they do those of another – an incongruence between us, perhaps, in what we find “congruent” with reality. We pass our culture on to our children in off-hand remarks, the way we frame debates, the jokes we retell. We don’t do this consciously, but that culture saturates our conversations.
US Prosecutorial Reform
Mark Steyn, reflecting on the brutal prosecution of Conrad Black, makes excellent suggestions: