Category Archives: memorials

July 10, 2009, 6:59 pm

Spencer Ackerman is (a) what the world needs now, (b) a new Frank Sinatra, (c) the bane of my existence, or (d) all of the above.

It goes without saying—or should—that Spencer Ackerman is a national treasure. I never comment over there because of one of the folks who does, but Spencer damn near tops my increasingly shorter list of essential morning reads. That said, on those days I don’t have time to read in the mornings, I don’t—because I can’t—read him at all. My brain translates this:

attackerman

Into this:

And I just can’t sleep once I’ve see that.

(This is less of a post and more of a frank admission of admiration. If all his peers had half his tenacity, DeLong could excise one loathsome category from his site.)

(x-posted.)

July 6, 2009, 10:11 am

“He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals.”

By Eric Rauchway

Tomasky has the money quotation from the late, and undeniably complicated, Robert McNamara. (Much more complicated than Henry Kissinger, who supposedly said Bill Clinton “does not possess the strength of character to be a war criminal.”) McNamara was talking about his role in this and that sort of thing, but of course he’s better known for his role in inspiring this sort of thing.

The Miller Center has an online McNamara exhibit which includes his case for a withdrawal from Vietnam in October, 1963.

UPDATED to add, on McNamara’s memoir:

… there is something wrong with a culture in which a McNamara is feted for his “guts” while George McGovern and Gene McCarthy, who opposed McNamara’s mistakes, are regarded as nobodies. In one of the uglier passages of In Retrospect, McNamara sneers at the antiwar protesters who marched on the Pentagon in 1967. If they had been more “disciplined”…

July 1, 2009, 10:02 am

More powerful than memory alone.

By Eric Rauchway

Ars Technica has a post summarizing Kodak’s decision to end sales of Kodachrome after 74 years because, basically, “not enough people are shooting KODACHROME for us to continue offering it.” In 1935 the film offered casual photographers the ability to take snapshots in color—to indulge that “twinge in your heart more powerful than memory alone,” as Don Draper says; it “takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”
(more…)

June 26, 2009, 7:48 am

“The monumental man had monumental flaws.”

By Ari Kelman

Maira Kalman tackles Jefferson and Monticello. The piece doesn’t change my opinion of Jefferson: terrible president, massive hypocrite, astonishing mind. Nor of Kalman*: national treasure. But it’s well worth the time.

* Are we related? Perhaps distantly? I’d like to think so.

June 25, 2009, 5:51 pm

Iranian protesters are still in the process of . . .

By Scott Kaufman

. . . BURNING SHIT DOWN, which must be why neither the Los Angeles Times nor Twitter will load. I admit that watching the social media site come into its own in response to an international crisis makes me wonder whether I ought to be a little less cynical of the political power of new media and the political engagement of the online generati—what?

You have got to be kidding me.

Somewhere in Tehran, an Iranian protester’s desperately punching his jerry-rigged mobile device trying to figure out what the fuck happened to Twitter.

May 5, 2009, 10:17 am

Child abuse.

By Ari Kelman

Ron Paul’s son is named Rand? Apparently. I can’t believe nobody told me this.

April 4, 2009, 12:36 pm

Eyewitness to misery.

By Ari Kelman

Forty-one years ago today, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King, Jr. dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. To memorialize this grim anniversary, LIFE has released a gallery of photographs taken at the Lorraine on April 4, 1968 and the following day. For some reason, the second and ninth pictures (of the Lorraine’s sign and of the contents of Dr. King’s briefcase) hit me the hardest. Perhaps it’s the juxtaposition of that Americana and American history (the images of the blood-soaked balcony and of Dr. King’s friends and colleagues from the SCLC mourning his loss) that’s so affecting. I honestly don’t know.

February 27, 2009, 2:48 pm

“The South designed beautiful flags, but it was on the wrong side of history.”

By Ari Kelman

Of all the things I’ve read about Lincoln recently, this very moving something-or-other is among my favorites. The idea that a person unfamiliar with Lincoln might meet and then find herself falling in love with him warms my heart.

(Thanks to a reader for the link.)

February 11, 2009, 8:07 pm

Um, are you sure that’s a good idea?

By Ari Kelman

If I’m President Obama, I’m steering clear of Ford’s Theater, thank you very much. I mean, supporting arts and culture is one thing, but tempting fate is quite another.

January 29, 2009, 11:28 am