“I love shitty crime novels. Yes, I admire the kinds of modern crime novels that feature “good writing” and are favored by my fellow literary types…but I also love books whose lurid covers feature lush paintings of whiskey glasses, loaded guns, and leggy dames”

@flamingpetty gawker.com/culture/me-tra…

Occasionally, someone will point out that Marines like Full Metal Jacket, finance guys like Wall Street, and some men like Fight Club more for the masculine fantasy than the critique, and then some teacher’s pet will sneer, “But that’s a misreading of the theme, you idiots!” No. A work of art is not it’s goddamn theme, or whatever is the obvious and overt intention of the art’s makers.

I blame our education system for this, teaching students to hunt down the theme (and discard the work), treating art like it’s a freaking riddle to be solved.

A note on Nick Xiarhos, which entails talking first about another Marine, Jordan Haerter.

Before Afghanistan, Nick had arrived in Iraq in April of 2008. The morning of April 22, his friend Jordan and a Marine from another unit were guarding the main gate, Nick was on the roof.

https://twitter.com/jimlaporta/status/1432771347017519108

Around 7:45am, a large truck accelerated toward the gate, careening through the protective serpentine. The Iraqi policemen standing post with the two Marines ran. Jordan and the other Marine stood their ground and aimed in on the truck.

“[Wilfred] Owen was against the violence of war, against the massive sacrilegious waste of lives which it involved; he was a natural conscientious objector. And yet, when he actually drilled and led men to death, he was behaving in a way that contravened his personal conscience… …in order to achieve what he saw as a greater goal, namely the awakening of a general conscience. ‘True poets must be truthful.’ ‘All a poet can do today is warn.’ These imperatives could be effectively fulfilled only if the poet who was warning or telling his truth was doing…

A note on Trump’s doubling down on his threat to bomb cultural sites.

These are photos I took of the remains of the al-Nuri Grand Mosque last month on a trip to Iraq with @Refugees . Built in 12th century, the mosque was a symbol of Mosul. It was destroyed by ISIS in 2017. The people we met in Mosul had been through ungodly things. One father, who had returned to the city thanks to the @UNDP restoring his house, described being in the old city during the last months of the battle to retake Mosul from ISIS control:

A story about Susan Rice

I attended an event in DC in May of 2015. By this point, after announcing with great fanfare America’s withdrawal from the war, cutting troops and cutting economic assistance in half, Obama had started quietly reintroducing special operators... ramping up airstrikes, and all the while denying that any of this counted as “boots on the ground.” Some vets started joking that special operators must wear combat slippers.