From "Divorce That Book":
Why subject yourself to an irksome book when so many sublime ones are available? Nevertheless, every reader recognizes the threshold my correspondent has yet to cross: the moment when you decide that you don't have to finish every book you start.
From "I Am the Uncool Hunter":
Three years ago I started seeing lofts as the contemporary answer to the ranch house. It seemed that the popularity of the ranch house in the 1950s and ‘60s suggested a nostalgia for a lost lifestyle, a longing for the atavistic cowboy. The loft is also about nostalgia: it is a monument to the disappearance of industry. As factories migrate to Mexico or China, the factory worker becomes a romantic figure from a bygone era just like the cowboy.
From "Joy! Rapture! I've Got a Brain!":
We write because we want to belong, because we seek admittance into an academic community. I can see as much in the first article I ever placed, which begins with an implicit case for belonging. In the opening sentence I profess: "We usually are drawn, as literary critics and historians, to the point where language snaps." The article then goes on to explain where language snaps in The Journals of Lewis and Clark (exaggerating the case, I now think), but that's not my point. What mattered in the sentence was the pronoun, the "we," tellingly deployed before its antecedent. I was fresh out of graduate school, I had credentials, and yes, I wanted a job, but just as strongly, I wanted full participation in scholarly life.
From "The Misunderestimated Man":
Curiously, this late arrival at adulthood did not involve Bush becoming in any way thoughtful. Having chosen stupidity as rebellion, he stuck with it out of conformity. The promise-keeper, reformed-alkie path he chose not only drastically curtailed personal choices he no longer wanted, it also supplied an all-encompassing order, offered guidance on policy, and prevented the need for much actual information. Bush's old answer to hard questions was, "I don't know and, who cares." His new answer was, "Wait a second while I check with Jesus."
From "Devoted Fans, Fading Glory for Duckpin":
A game founded a century ago in the working-class warrens of Baltimore, duckpin bowling is on the culturally endangered list. The factories have died, the blue-collar tenements have gone yuppie upscale and tenpin bowling rules. You can search the country and find some 75 duckpin alleys left, virtually all on the East Coast and far fewer than the 300 that were open when the game's popularity was at its peak at mid-century.
From "Stop the Occupation, Start the Rebuilding":
The debate in the weeks ahead will center on "bad apples" vs. the great majority of American servicemen and women who wouldn't do such things (which is undoubtedly true), whether the punishment goes high enough in the chain of command, whether the so-called "private contractors" (let's just call them paid mercenaries) are accountable enough, and whether the pictures of a British soldier urinating on an Iraqi prisoner in the Daily Mirror are authentic or not. But as important as all those questions are, they mostly miss the point.
Such abuse and atrocities are the consequence of war, and especially military occupation. They always have been, and they will continue to be. In Vietnam, a brutal American war and occupation created bloody insurrection. Viet Cong fighters did terrible things to American soldiers, and, in turn, the soldiers did terrible things to Vietnamese civilians. It is simply the cycle of violence.
From an editorial in The Army Times:
On the battlefield, Myers’ and Rumsfeld’s errors would be called a lack of situational awareness — a failure that amounts to professional negligence. . . . This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential — even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war.
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