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Top Billing!COMMAND POST Clint Van Winkle – The Guilt

Powerful. Poignant.

Van Winkle is the author of Soft Spots: A Marine’s Memoir of Combat and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder:

The film focuses on my friend SSgt David Paxson. In 2003, Paxson and I fought at Nasiriyah together-one of the earliest and bloodiest battles of Iraq-and making the film forced us to relive those memories. It was a difficult shoot and took all of us months to recover. Talking about war isn’t easy either.

Paxson and I were 25 when we went to Iraq. One week we were in combat, trying to survive insurgent attacks and the next week we were at home, trying to survive panic attacks. After Iraq, we didn’t see each other much. We spoke, but rarely about our experiences. We didn’t talk about the smell of death, the killing, the loss of friends. Day-to-day life was a struggle, but we pretended like we were okay.

We thought we had experienced the worst life had to offer, but Paxson still had another round of pain coming his way….

The Economist – Our global oligarchs  ( hat tip Jessica Margolin)

The problem is that too many of the people who allegedly claim to understand capitalism best, working in the world of high finance are in reality, too frequently, short-term time horizon, zero-sum oriented, assholes with contempt for the idea that markets, to be free, also need to be free of illicit collusion, regulatory capture and rentier self-dealing.

Pennlive.com – Dick Winters, of ‘Band of Brothers’ fame, dies  ( Hat tip to Starbuck)

Dick Winters, the former World War II commander whose war story was told in the book and miniseries “Band of Brothers,” has died.

Dick Winters led a quiet life on his Fredericksburg farm and in his Hershey home until the book and miniseries “Band of Brothers” threw him into the international spotlight. Since then, the former World War II commander of Easy Company had received hundreds of requests for interviews and appearances all over the world.He stood at the podium with President George W. Bush in Hershey during the presidential campaign in 2007. He accepted the “Four Freedoms” award from Tom Brokaw on behalf of the Army. He was on familiar terms with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, producers of the HBO mini-series, the most expensive television series ever produced.

Winters was always gracious about his new-found celebrity, but never really comfortable with it. He never claimed to be a hero and said that he had nothing to do with the national effort to get him the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military honor. When people asked him if he was a hero, he liked to answer the way his World War II buddy, Mike Ranney, did.

“No,” Ranney said. “But I served in a company of heroes.”

Zero Intelligence Agents –Swallowing the Academic “Red Pill”

….Part of the problem for academics is the mythology of their career is not celebrated to an even reasonably comparable degree as that of the professional athlete. On my first day of graduate school one of my professors said, “Congratulations on being accepted to the program. While most people will not understand it, you have one of the greatest jobs one the planet. People are going to pay you to think, and I think that is pretty cool.”

I think it is pretty cool too, and while at face value that statement no better reflects the reality of graduate school anymore than Summer Catch reflects the realities of the Minor League baseball system, it is an important to remember what an academic career is really about: to be one of the world’s best thinkers, period. The original article attacking academia never considers this point, and rather places doctoral research as any other kind of on-the-job training. The fact is, there are very few people who will successfully navigate their graduate program and be hired as a tenure-track faculty, and even fewer who will go on to be successful academics. It is an environment where a very specific set of goals blended with unique intellectual, interpersonal and labor skills are needed to flourish, not unlike many other highly specialized careers.

Pundita –The ghost

….The true Pakistan is a ghost, a ghost of the British Empire at its most glorious.Westerners can understand, I think, what the most informed Indians already know: that without the help of the ruling families who supported the British enterprise in India the British couldn’t have lasted there as long as they did. The ruling families were the British Raj. So it was a symbiotic relationship, not a parent-child one, a relationship that created a lifestyle of timeless order.

The order was an illusion, just as an unsinkable ship is an illusion, but that was seen only when the British could no longer afford to maintain the illusion. Yet the illusion was so powerful that Pakistan’s rulers didn’t see Partition as abandoning the motherland: they would go on ruling, as they had always done, and the mighty British Empire would continue to remain their protector. The second great European war was a blip, as the first great European war had been; the British would bounce back and everything would continue as before.

When the illusion vanished Pakistan’s ruling families were left with the outward forms, the mannerisms of Pax Britannica: cricket matches, marching bands, a patronizing contempt for Hindus, high tea. That’s what they gave up the motherland for and they know it. That’s why it could take Pakistan’s ruling families another generation before they’re able to let go of a past that is more real to them than anything around them today.

That’s it.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 10th, 2011 at 4:33 am and is filed under recommended reading, recommended viewing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.