The last dispatch

You know, it's been a long time coming.

Friends, old Joe Bones has decided to shutter the Hell's Kitchen Dispatch. Why? Well, for one, I've been living in Sleepy Hollow, NY, for over a year and a half now, and whenever I get the urge to post it just feels plain weird doing so on a blog that's named after an area of New York City I haven't lived in for close to 3 years. It's like returning to the past to talk about something that has excited you in the present. Not a good idea. Just ask Bob Dylan.

Another thing, as some of you may have noticed, is, I'm just not posting with any kind of regularity anymore. The blogosphere is a hugh place. If you spend any time reading what's out there, you soon learn that, as a blogger yourself, the key to retaining an audience is really staying on top of your blog and posting every day as events happen. If you don't, chances are whatever it is you wanted to say will have been posted by someone else by the time you get around to writing it yourself.

Combine the two--a blog name that no longer bears any relation to what you're writing about, and a serious case of writer's constipation--and what you get is a blog that next to no one reads. And what we have here is no audience, which translates to no motivation, which translates to one dead blog. Or, in this case, a blog on life support.

Going through the archives, I see some posts that I'm really quite proud of. So I'm going to leave this blog in cyberspace rather than blasting it to the nether region. If you've stumbled on to this address for the first time and are reading these words, by all means feel free to have a look around. The posts dating to my time in New York City (2004 through early 2006) still hold up pretty well. Back then, I had more time to actually think before I wrote. Nowadays, unfortunately, I just don't have that time anymore.

And so with this, the 103rd dispatch, it's good night, Mrs. Masten, wherever you are.

Fighting "The War"

The Ken Burns World War II documentary, "The War," premieres this Sunday on PBS, and I've been trolling the Web, reading reviews from around the country. Given that reviewers of the arts tend to lean liberal, it's interesting to read their take on Burns' epic 7-part series about the US's involvement in the defining conflict of the 20th century.

Newsday, USA Today, and several other newspapers I read online all give it raves. This review, from Charlie McCollum, writing for the San Jose Mercury News, sums up nicely how I expect "The War" will be received by many of us with parents who lived through that ordeal:

My father was an Army officer during World War II. So was my mother, one of the first to enlist in the Women's Army Corps.

But they never spoke much about the war and, in the self-absorbed way of youth, I never asked before they died.

Which may go a long way toward explaining why Ken Burns' "The War" - which dwarfs anything else you will see on television this fall - had such a profound effect on me. This is not the World War II of textbooks, with bloodless words about great leaders, military strategy and global politics. In 15 riveting hours, Burns makes the war personal, capturing the reality of life on battlefronts of Europe and the Pacific and on the home front in four American communities: Sacramento; Mobile, Ala.; Waterbury, Conn.; and Luverne, Minn.

Both the LA Times and the New York Times weigh in with the kind of hip, pseudosophisticated blather that now emanates daily from the pages of those once venerable newspapers. First, there's this review from Robert Lloyd, writing for the LA Times, in which moral equivalence strikes again:

It is strictly a story of the American war, told from the point of view of a not-quite-random sampling of people -- primarily citizens of Waterbury, Conn., Mobile, Ala., Luverne, Minn., and Sacramento -- who fought in it or waited at home for people who fought in it. The British, the Russians, the French (not to mention the Australians, the Greeks, and on and on) come into it only tangentially. Generals appear only in passing, politicians are out of it almost entirely and strategy is only discussed as necessary. This parochial view, in which the enemy is only seen from afar, or up close in a fight, has the added, surely unintended, undesirable effect of making them seem more insidious, more mystically and inexplicably and congenitally evil than we are used to now. (The Japanese are "the Japs" again.)

Ah, yes, I'm sure any sense of Germany, Italy and Japan coming off in Burns' documentary as "mystically and inexplicably and congenitally evil" for their shared responsibility in the deaths of tens of millions was wholly unintended. I mean, after all, the SS loved their children too.

When it comes to postmodern inanity, Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times takes the prize. The teaser to her review, headlined "What So Proudly We Hailed," reads: "Ken Burns’s series on PBS is a 7-night, 15-hour tribute to the greatest generation that ever bought war bonds." That's right, here we have the sacrifices of the World War II generation reduced to a rather tired poke at American consumerism by some smart-ass editor at the Times.

As for the review itself, Stanley writes:

The tone and look of Mr. Burns’s series, which begins Sunday on PBS, is as elegiac and compelling as any of his previous works, but particularly now, as the conflict in Iraq unravels, this degree of insularity — at such length and detail — is disconcerting. Many a “Frontline” documentary has made a convincing case that the Bush administration’s mistakes were compounded by the blinkered thinking of leaders who rushed to war without sufficient support around the world or understanding of the religious and sectarian strains on the ground. Examining a global war from the perspective of only one belligerent is rarely a good idea.

Unless, of course, you're Clint Eastwood, and the "one belligerent" is Japan. Then you've not only seized upon a good idea, you've also created something "utterly original, even radical in its methods and insights."

Bushnak the magnificent

As Gen. David H. Petraeus today gets ready to present to Capitol Hill his initial assessment of the "surge" strategy in Iraq, a just-released New York Times/CBS News poll shows that most Americans trust, by a wide margin, not the President, not the Congress, but military leaders to bring the war "to a successful end."

The poll found that both Congress, whose approval rating now stands at its lowest level since Democrats took control from the Republicans last year, and Mr. Bush enter the debate with little public confidence in their ability to deal with Iraq. Only 5 percent of Americans — a strikingly low number for a sitting president’s handling of such a dominant issue — said they most trusted the Bush administration to resolve the war, the poll found. Asked to choose among the administration, Congress and military commanders, 21 percent said they would most trust Congress and 68 percent expressed most trust in military commanders.

Of course, the New York Times (being the New York Times) looked at these results and immediately smelled a Bush conspiracy:

That is almost certainly why the White House has presented General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker as unbiased professionals, not Bush partisans.

Ah, yes. The President hasn't a clue when it comes to predicting things like how Iraqis would react once their country was liberated from an oppressive regime, or the ferocity of hurricanes, but when it comes to American sentiment with respect to the conduct of a war, why, the man is positively clairvoyant!

Waiting for the other shoe to drop

For anyone who might have been lulled into a false sense of security because the United States hasn't been hit by terrorists again since 9/11, consider these words from retired Vice Admiral John Scott Redd, head of the National Counterterrorism Center, appearing in this week's Newsweek online:

This is a long war. People say, “What is this like?” I say it’s like the cold war in only two respects. Number one, there is a strong ideological content to it. Number two, it is going to be a long war. I’ll be dead before this one is over. We will probably lose a battle or two along the way. We have to prepare for that. Statistically, you can’t bat 1.000 forever, but we haven’t been hit for six years, [which is] no accident.

I will tell you this: We are better prepared today for the war on terror than at any time in our history. We have done an incredible amount of things since 9/11, across the board. Intelligence is better. They are sharing it better. We are taking the terrorists down. We are working with the allies very carefully. We are doing the strategic operational planning, going after every element in the terrorist life cycle. So we have come a long way. But these guys are smart. They are determined. They are patient. So over time we are going to lose a battle or two. We are going to get hit again, you know, but you’ve got to have the stick-to-itiveness or persistence to outlast it.

To paraphrase Dennis Miller, say what you will about George W. Bush, but when it comes to protecting this country under the persistent threat of Islamic mayhem since 9/11, he gets straight A's. And that's saying something.

A Thousand Kisses Deep

I'm spin cycling at the Tarrytown Y today and what should come on my iPod but the positively mesmerizing Leonard Cohen song, "A Thousand Kisses Deep."

And sometimes when the night is slow
The wretched and the meek
We gather up our hearts and go
A thousand kisses deep

As soon as I got home I started searching on the Internet for perhaps a live performance of this song from Mr. Cohen. What I found is something perhaps even better: Here's Leonard Cohen reciting his original poem of the same title, from which he later shaped the lyrics for the song:



And here's Chris Botti, first playing the song's gorgeous melody--cowritten by Sharon Robinson--and then improvising with his band to the haunting minor-key progression. (If you want to hear Cohen sing the song in his own gruff and goose-bump-raising way, pick up his 2001 album, Ten New Songs):

Hurricane Camille is at it again!

It's always a pleasure to read Camille Paglia--she's brash, brainy, provocative and funny as hell.

In her latest Salon column, Hurricane Camille blasts everything from the current presidential race to the war in Iraq to filmmaking now versus the art house (not to be confused with "grindhouse") era. Ultimately I don't agree with everything she says, but her various takes on culture always compel me to reevaluate my own views.

Here's what she has to say about the latest crop of religion bashers making a splash in the media from the elite tiers of the intelligentsia:

Religion as metaphysics or cosmic vision is no longer valued except in the New Age movement, to which I still strongly subscribe, despite its sometimes outlandish excesses. As a professed atheist, I detest the current crop of snide manifestos against religion written by professional cynics, flâneurs and imaginatively crimped and culturally challenged scientists. The narrow mental world they project is very grim indeed -- and fatal to future art.

You can read the whole thing here.

Good news from Mesopotamia

I can't believe my eyes!

Today's New York Times has an op ed about Iraq entitled, "A War We Just Might Win." The coauthors, from the liberal-minded Brookings Institution, have recently returned from 8 days of meetings in Iraq with American and Iraqi civilian and military personnel.

This is what they have to say about the initial impact of "the surge" masterminded by Gen. David Petraeus:

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

And this:

Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services — electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation — to the people. Yet in each place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began — though they remain very high, underscoring how much more still needs to be done.

Thank you, New York Times, for having the guts to print that. Now if only all those other Americans with a festering hatred for George Bush would wake up and see what our magnificent military is beginning to accomplish "over there." If we bring stability to Iraq, the jihadists are doomed to failure and our children just might live in a safer world. Our soldiers are certainly up to and meeting the challenge. The question is, are we?