19.9.06

The Esquire Iraq War Archive

The new issue of Esquire showed up yesterday and last night I dug into M.I.A., their story on the only U.S. soldier who's gone missing in Iraq. It is searing and it will stick with me -- the writing is almost invisible, leaving the story instead of the craft to make an impact. Having just read that story and having read a few days ago my friend Broder's complaint about the previous issue of Esquire in our co-blog, I wanted to put together this archive of Esquire's stories from the Iraq War. I'm glad that all of the fashion-spread advertiser hand-jobs fund this impressive body of reporting on the Iraq war but I wish that Esquire was binding these stories together for a special newsstand issue instead of the Big Black Book of 2006, their fashion compendium due in October. (I've purposely tried to leave the 9/11 and War on Terror articles because I think blurring the lines between the two actions is dangerous and already too common. Their 9/11 archive is here.)

What I learned at the Jihad, C.J. Chivers, October 2003
The Enemy, as He Sees Himself, C.J. Chivers, January 2004
Last Letters Home, February 2004
Hired Guns, Tucker Carlson, March 2004
My Life in Baghdad, Tom Kinton, April 2004
A Simple Plan to Save the World (tangential), Jeffrey Sachs, May 2004
Mr, President, Here's How to Make Sense of Our Iraq Strategy, Thomas P. M. Barnett, June 2004
The Iraq Generation, Colby Buzzell, December 2004
The American Dream, Sara Solovitch, January 2005
What We Need To Do, Thomas P. M. Barnett, February 2005
The Making of the Twenty-First Century Soldier (Part 1), Colby Buzzell, March 2005
The Making of the Twenty-First Century Soldier (Part 2), Colby Buzzell, April 2005
Old Man in a Hurry, Thomas P. M. Barnett, July 2005
The Making of the Twenty-First Century Soldier (Part 3), Colby Buzzell, November 2005
The Best Years of Their Lives, Colby Buzzell, March 2006
The Monks of War, Thomas P. M. Barnett, March 2006
What Were They Thinking, Tyler Cabot, March 2006
Ten Numbers On the State of Iraq-War Veterans, Tim Heffernan, March 2006
The Best Bar in Baghdad, Colin Freeman, June 2006
Acts of Conscience, John H. Richardson, August 2006
M.I.A., Brian Mockenhaupt, October 2006

17.9.06

Everything We Believe is Absent or Negative

Steeped in the Calvinist theology of the Puritans and rich in biblical and historical allusion, Moby-Dick is Melville's great American novel, itself an attempt to lasso a white whale, to define what it is about America that so signally distinguishes it from the rest of the world. The answer Melville provides is (roughly speaking) the scorning of limits, of mystery, in favor of belief in our ability to solve the human condition as if it were some mystical Rubik's Cube, through sheer, unadulterated willpower. It is not hard to read Melville's vision of America into the war in Iraq--justified, ultimately, as the first step in a wholesale transformation of Middle Eastern monarchies into terrorist-free, American-friendly democracies--or the hippie dream of peace spreding like ripples across the globe from the feelings of universal goodwill at Woodstock, or the attempt to determine the course of foreign governments and contain godless communism that brought us Vietnam. They are all various ways of taking over the desity of humanity, of ridding the oceans wide of a notorious white whale.
From Staying Up Much Too Late: Edward Hopper's Nighthawks
and the Darkside of the American Psyche by Gordon Theisen

It's one of those passages in a book you go back and reread a couple times. It doesn't matter Gordon Theisen never really links Moby-Dick and Nighthawks; instead he links Moby-Dick to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to Nighthawks. But that's fine. It's a book like Hip: The History, filled with loose connections and long rambles and you don't care if a few of the arguments are just ridiculous because it's fun watching the author reach. Staying Up Much Too Late takes every facet of Edward Hopper's most famous painting and runs with it, from the history of the diner to the commodization of sex. It's a fun excercise that makes a good book -- but I couldn't help but feel that Theisen buries his most interesting argument about the painting three pages from the end: "This is the question that gives Nighthawks its most alluring quality: What would happen if we entered this scene where everything we believe in--capitalism, democracy, progress, productivity, the bountyh of nature--is either absent or turned into a negative?"

11.9.06

Dreams

As Flight 11 hit WTC 1, I was assigned to read some Chekhov stories. Nothing in particular, whichever I wanted. I don't remember going to the library but I must have -- I picked up a collection of lesser-known Chekhov stories somewhere. That night, exhausted by the news and the uncertainty, I opened the book and picked a story probably based on length. "Dreams" tells of two policemen who find a sober "tramp" who claims to not remember his name. They walk together through a thick fog and every time they stop, they appear to be standing not far from where they left. Despite the tamest line of questioning in the history of literature the man folds easily: He's an escaped convict – guilty of being an accomplice to a poisoning as a child – and he's hoping to get shipped off to Siberia for being a vagrant before anyone recognizes him. He explains that the work camps in Siberia are so much easier than the prison he's escaped from, he would prefer to live out his last years there. The policemen don't reveal their intentions; instead they remind the man how weak he is and they tell him how hard life in Siberia can get. They doubt he'll last very long there. And then the three of them continue walking into the fog.