And live a thousand years.
Only P.J. O’Rourke could write an hilarious column about his cancer diagnosis:
Why can’t death — if we must have it — be always glorious, as in “The Iliad”? Of course death continues to be so, sometimes, with heroes in Fallouja and Kandahar. But nowadays, death more often comes drooling on the toilet seat in the nursing home, or bleeding under the crushed roof of a teen-driven SUV, or breathless in a deluxe hotel suite filled with empty drug bottles and a minor public figure whose celebrity expiration date has passed.
I have, of all the inglorious things, a malignant hemorrhoid. What color bracelet does one wear for that? And where does one wear it? And what slogan is apropos? Perhaps that slogan can be sewn in needlepoint around the ruffle on a cover for my embarrassing little doughnut buttocks pillow.
Furthermore, I am a logical, sensible, pragmatic Republican, and my diagnosis came just weeks after Teddy Kennedy’s. That he should have cancer of the brain, and I should have cancer of the ass … well, I’ll say a rosary for him and hope he has a laugh at me. After all, what would I do, ask God for a more dignified cancer? Pancreatic? Liver? Lung?
I don’t believe in God, but it he’s there, please bless him.
Of course death continues to be so, sometimes, with heroes in Fallouja and Kandahar.
We should all wish O’Rourke well, but no one should think of wars as great hero factories. In fact, soldiers are no more heroes than, for instance, journalists. It’s not only that war journalists face as much risk of death from hostile fire as soldiers do. It’s also that most countries, no matter how dysfunctional or despotic, have plenty of soldiers. Only thriving democracies have a good supply of journalists.
It is unfortunately true that war is sometimes when you discover real heroes. Since people here generally agree that Paul Newman was one of them, these were some of the man’s own words: “You can take your pick of issues where Republicans are seriously damaging this country. Iraq, global warming, civil liberties. But I resent them most for how they’ve destroyed the American spirit by using xenophobia and fear to hold onto power.”
Leave it to the troll Jim Harris to pee on a great man’s testimonial to his own mortality. I’d like to call him shameless, but that would be a slander on those without shame.
Mr. Simberg,
You don’t understand the nuanced complexity of thread hijacking. If you weren’t such a bitter clinger, you wouldn’t be so resentful of Mr. Harris’ sophistication.
You GO, Jim!
MG
/off sarcasm
No, kidding. Talk about tone deaf.
Leave it to the troll Jim Harris to pee on a great man’s testimonial to his own mortality.
O’Rourke himself is a journalist, and as I said, they are just as great heroes as soldiers. Nothing that I said is any disrespect to the man, it’s only disagreeing with this opinion. Even if the man has cancer, we should be free to disagree with him. This isn’t “thread hijacking” either; the point is completely on topic.
The snark about “bitter clingers” truly is thread hijacking, though.
Well written article. I’ve actually considered that railroad track thing, although not for sexual purposes.
Could we survive, at all, without humor?
Jim, you did hijack the thread.
He was talking about the indignities of sickness and death. Are you?
A rant that solders are pawns of despots and republicans are despots certainly qualifies as both tone deaf and a hijacking.
You should really try to enjoy the article. It really is of outstanding quality.
Another point that I can’t let slide.
Every single American solder is a volunteer defending my life and my country. Every damn one of them is a hero the moment they sign up. For you to say they are not is indescribably vile.
You have the ability to legalistically spin an argument that would impress Satin himself.
Tone deaf doesn’t even come close to describing it.
He was talking about the indignities of sickness and death.
He was also talking about “glorious” death in the war on terror. Which is why I said that soldiers aren’t any more glorious than journalists.
But no one was talking about bitter clingers.
Every single American solder is a volunteer defending my life and my country.
No more so than every American journalist. Including O’Rourke himself by the way.
The bracelet should be appropriately brown with pink triangles (also appropriate), or possibly the other way around (I’ll leave it to the proctologist design committee). I would wear it hidden by clothing.
I hope they can yoink (onomatopoeic) the nasty bit away and Mr. O’Rourke lives happily ever after, possibly with an unusual glass jar trophy on a shelf (to be kept well away from the shelf with whiskey). A golden etiquette (or possibly a plaque if the glass jar is mounted) with curly bits around the legend should be required if so.
As for Teddy Kennedy I think O’Rourke should find comfort in knowing the source of the trouble must beyond doubt be identical. Not so much comfort as to actually tell Mr. Kennedy this though, that would be cruel and could easily involve fists.
And he should continue laughing Death in the face, or as it may be at least snicker behind its back.
soldiers are no more heroes than, for instance, journalists
Name one journalist who threw himself on a grenade to save his comrades.
He was also talking about “glorious” death in the war on terror.
Which you used to miss the point. Like I said, legalistic.
No more so than every American journalist.
Like all the hero’s telling lies about Gov. Palin. Those hero’s?
What definition of “hero” are we using that applies to journalists and not, say, crab fishermen?
There’s huge difference between the heroism displayed by soldiers and that of today’s journalists, at least the ones from the US.
Today’s journalists think that it’s wrong to tip off their country’s soldiers about an ambush. Meanwhile, their country’s soldiers think that it’s wrong to not tip off journalists from allied country about an ambush and will risk their lives to save said journalists.
Soldiers can’t decide to “sit one out” – journalists can.
Hmm – I may have insulted crab fishermen. Some journalists have a risky profession, but their risk is for “the story”, not for their fellows. Crab fishermen will put themselves in harms way to save others.
Rand,
Jim Harris cannot steal the heroism from the troops with his idiot blatherings. Nor can O’Rourke create it. Heroism is built on the deeds of the troops, from that culture and spreads out to the civilian world.
Congressional Medals of Honor, don’t come from Main Street U.S.A., they come FROM inside the world of the troops.
Once again Jim commits a number of fallacies. He purposely limits the facts to try and construct a shaky proposition to support his ignorant conclusions.
Soldiers do far more than continually deal out ‘glorious’ death. They give water and food to those in need. They give candy to kids and then build them a school to grow and learn in. They build democracies so that despotism and thugocracy can be dealt with.
While journalists certainly function as the watch dog of a well intended republic. They just as easily can be enlisted by information ministries to brain wash and delude. In fact, I would say that the mental oppression by a dictator is more damaging then the physical component.
What it comes down to is that the pen is mightier than the sword. A lot of people here just don’t understand that.
Soldiers fight wars. Journalists — and here I mean all kinds of journalists, not just those in some preconceived “mainstream” — let the people decide which wars to fight and why. That is much more important than just being willing to fight. History is full of countries that fought the wrong war. In every last case, they either blamed independent journalists, or they repressed them so that there were none to blame.
I suspect that if the US itself wasn’t fighting the wrong war right now, folks here would have no trouble understanding the point. When Argentina invaded the Falklands, there were Argentine journalists who warned what could and did go wrong. They were targeted by right-wing groups for their lack of patriotism. In that example, anyone here would say, duh, the Argentine people should listen to independent journalists and not the government. But the thinking is that the US is the big exception in all things, the one country where a wartime government is more noble than the press.
I note that Harris has gone from a general “journalists are heroes” to an instance where a couple of journalists were heroes. And, note that he doesn’t bother to mention journalists who have been killed by his fellow lefties, thus demonstrating that tribal loyalty is one of his most important priorities.
While there have been heroic journalists, there’s no reason to believe that OUR journalists are heroic. And, their existence no more proves that “journalists” are heroes as a group than the existence of heroic janitors proves that janitors as a group are heroes.
BTW – SOME journalists “let the people decide which wars to fight and why”. The ones that we have are trying to elect Obama. They’re actually fighting, except that they don’t have anything to lose.
I note that Harris has gone from a general “journalists are heroes” to an instance where a couple of journalists were heroes. And, note that he doesn’t bother to mention journalists who have been killed by his fellow lefties, thus demonstrating that tribal loyalty is one of his most important priorities.
You’re making partisan hash of a universal point. I’m not a “leftie”, and even if I were Argentine journalists and “lefties” would not be my “fellows”. After all, who mopped the floor with the Argentine military after they foolishly threw down the gauntlet in the Falklands? Margaret Thatcher! Is she also a fellow “leftie” because “fellow lefties” warned Argentina not to do it? In this case Thatcher was absolutely right, by the way.
Argentina was just an example. They shoot journalists in Russia, they imprison them in China, they intimidate them in Venezuela. They murdered Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. Are these journalists “lefties” or “righties”? I don’t know and I don’t care; the American political spectrum is at that point inapplicable and moot. What is clear is that all of these journalists, wherever they may go, are heroes chasing after the truth. To varying degrees of course — there are good and bad apples in every bunch — but their profession is at least as noble as soldiering.
What is crazy is to then say, okay, maybe these other journalists are heroes; but not our journalists, not American journalists. That amazing disconnect is a mix of taking journalists for granted and resenting them for doing their jobs. Of course the usual pretext is to point to their failings and say that that’s why they suck, but it’s clear that the real resentment comes from their best work.
The deeper issue is taking them for granted. What really makes America a great place to live? Would you rather live in China, which has lots of soldiers but a small private press; or in Japan, which is the other way around?
Again, P. J. O’Rourke is one of those darned journalists. I hope that he gets better, and I salute him more for his career than for his too-deferential concept of glory.
Jim Harris had no more intention of talking about P.J. O’Rourke when he brought up the subject of heroes than O’Rourke had of talking about Jim Harris when he brought up the subject of malignant hemorrhoids.
Jim Harris had no more intention of talking about P.J. O’Rourke when he brought up the subject of heroes than O’Rourke had of talking about Jim Harris when he brought up the subject of malignant hemorrhoids.
Hey, I think you’ve come up with a new name for the troll Harris. Instead of JH, he’ll be MH…
> What is crazy is to then say, okay, maybe these other journalists are heroes; but not our journalists, not American journalists.
Why is it crazy to point out that journalists are not uniformly heroic? Surely the society reporters don’t face the same dangers as folks who interview Raiders fans.
The biggest risk that American journalists face from their govt is that Democrats won’t hire them all.
And then there’s the matter of their values. They’ve already stated that it’s unethical to tip off American soldiers, American soldiers who they expect to save them if something happens.
Some journalists go into risky situations, but so do cabbies and crab fishermen. Note that all three, unlike soldiers, get to say “no”.
However, crab fishermen will rescue one another.
When’s the last time a journalist jumped on anything more dangerous than a drink to save someone else?
Meanwhile, we don’t even keep track of the soldiers who jump on grenades to save their fellow man.