The NYT has a piece that touches on the question of what Gen. Pervez Musharraf means to the United States. It’s an important question – far more important than the two page treatment it gets there. I do fear that it will become a political question in the US before the US even understands the question.
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Jack Landers wonders what happened to public admiration of courage, valor, and honor:
Right this second, without resorting to Google, can you name a single decorated American war hero from the war in Iraq? It’s not as if there aren’t soliders and Marines over there doing extraordinarily heroic things in battle every day. It’s that nobody cares enough to tell their stories anymore. Not the Bush administration, not the media, not the general public. This is not a problem coming from the right wing or the left wing. It’s everybody.
Personally, I think it’s some combination of the cleaving of society (those who see nothing but brave soldiers, and those who see nothing but the immediate aftermath (a vast oversimplification, admittedly)) and a general loss of the concept of hero. In a way, we’ve seen almost every mythologized hero (George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr.) deconstructed to show his human failings. So why make more? Until modern mass media can bring itself to grasp the concept of a uman hero, instead of a mythical one, I don’t think we’ll be seeing coverage of heroes any time soon.
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Harper’s John MacArthur poses the question we Americans who support withdrawal from Iraq should all be considering: who gets left behind? And speaking of Harper’s, I reread this amazing Jonathan Lethem essay on plagiarism this morning. I won’t pretend to recognize all of the literary references it in, but that’s one of the points. It’s not a work aimed at a popular audience (something I am always appreciative of), but it’s absolutely worth a read:
A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense. In this regard, few of us question the contemporary construction of copyright. It is taken as a law, both in the sense of a universally recognizable moral absolute, like the law against murder, and as naturally inherent in our world, like the law of gravity. In fact, it is neither. Rather, copyright is an ongoing social negotiation, tenuously forged, endlessly revised, and imperfect in its every incarnation.
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And in service of jarring our perspective a bit: I was going to post a link to Slate’s photo series on bored couples, and extol its capture of the ordinary. And then I came across this photo by James Natchwey, who helps reminds us that our ordinary isn’t always.
