I wrote about the folks still working on evacuating Afghans, on humor, and on secular and religious prayers in a world that often fails to answer either.
"We’ve discovered a new way to defile the uniform. Today, we allow murderers to wear it while being lauded as heroes."
Superb, brutally honest piece from
@elliotackerman
“The machinery...had me killing them.”
This, from Obama’s memoir, is pretty pathetic from a president who, for example, slashed economic assistance to Iraq and then ramped up military involvement while lying about it.
Anyone who wants to seriously grapple with war had better be prepared for far more shocking opinions than are found in this thoughtful essay by a translator and writer living in Israel. Shame on
@GuernicaMag
for pulling it down.
Archived link here:
Margaret Thatcher: “There's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”
Camus: “No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and the emotions shared by all.”
God forbid Biden, who opposed accepting Vietnamese refugees in the 70s, who slow walked changes to Trump’s refugee policies, who ignored pleas to better prepare to help vulnerable Afghans, face pressure regarding this crisis.
Must be a neoconservative plot.
@GravitysRa1nbow
I’d rather be eating hamburgers in America than ruling one of the largest empires in the world, to be honest, so I’ll chalk this up as a Habsburg win.
“One of the many strange things about being an American citizen these days is that there’s a whole lot of killing done in our name that our government deliberately keeps secret.“
I wrote about secrecy and American wars for
@nytopinion
Had Christopher Hitchens devoted his life to the poor, I’m sure he would have handled things so much better than Mother Teresa. Sadly, he had more important things to do, like writing essays about how women aren’t funny and the Global War on Terror was going to be awesome.
“When people like West and Sean Hannity, who has also been one of Lorance’s most vociferous supporters, declare that Lorance is innocent, they are also leveling an insidious accusation at the nine American soldiers whose testimonies helped put him behind bars.”
“The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies of the quick.”
Don Delillo is a lot like Nabakov. A great craftsman of sentences and clever use of words but ultimately there is nothing there
You close the book and none of it sticks with you. A ride at Disney land for people with masters degrees.
Watching the Great British Baking Show contestants trash talking “American” pies like pecan or pumpkin pie and I’m ready to refight the Revolutionary War.
This in an episode that devoted a whole segment to the pleasures of eel pie. Which...is not better than pumpkin.
He also killed children, shot indiscriminately at civilians, in a pathetic and vile attempt to inflate his kill count so as to prove himself a warrior. It repulsed the SEALs under his command.
“For some, killing becomes an addiction, but I consider it a good addiction needed to win wars,” Eddie Gallagher writes in his book, released Monday. “For me, getting into firefights and killing the enemy was the biggest high I ever experienced.”
“It sickened me yesterday to see security personnel—including members of the National Guard—forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president's visit outside St. John's Church.”
-Admiral Mike Mullen
The idea that Eddie Gallagher's SEALs (one of whom went on to DEVGRU) only turned on him because they were cowards who didn't want to kill the enemy is so stupid I have difficulty thinking anyone is actually dumb enough to believe it.
“These kids want to live that way, want to have a good time, have at it,” he said. “I’m happy about it because that is what I fought for, so they can do whatever the hell they want.”
Every single night, Pope Francis says he calls to check in on the priest at the only Catholic Church in Gaza.
"The other day they were happy because they managed to eat some meat. The rest of the time they eat flour, things made of flour," says the pope.
Promotional videos show Chief Gallagher shooting an AR-15. “In closed online forums, several of the SEALs from his old platoon whom he had accused of not being able to meet his high standards noted derisively that the holographic sight on his rifle had been put on backward.”
Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher is capitalizing on his post court-martial notoriety to become a conservative influencer. Come check out some of his products.
“Peace is not made between angels and demons but between human beings, and the real hell of life, as Jean Renoir once noted, is that everybody has their
reasons.”
I wrote about the recent controversy at
@GuernicaMag
for
@TheAtlantic
“While America as a whole chooses to express its love for its military in gooey, substance-free displays, our military waits, perhaps hopelessly, for a coherent national policy that takes the country’s wars seriously.”
I have a new essay in
@TheAtlantic
I am incredibly thrilled and honored to learn I’m the winner of the 2018 George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize for Journalism, Arts & Letters for outstanding work in the category Cultural & Historical Criticism.
As a Catholic writer, this means so much. Now, I gotta work on the speech.
“I’m a veteran, I’m telling you, don’t rip off any signs.”
“I’m not Jewish, he’s not Jewish, I don’t know if he is or not, doesn’t fucking matter.”
My neighborhood.
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.
@MrHWM
Catholicism takes the body very seriously. It is a religion of sights and smells and touch and taste, of communal rituals physically enacted and not a mere intellectualizing in one’s head. So sex and art are the only God substitutes with any weight, and thus any threat.
“On the outside he was the quintessential all-American guy. To the Afghans he spent time with, nothing about him felt foreign. His sense of humor matched ours, his sense of curiosity and adventure matched ours.”
@lithub
An auto exec hired private military contractors to kill his mistress and her boyfriend for $900K, then left them a Google review under his own name:
"They get the job done in an expedited time. Couldn’t imagine using anyone else!!"
@JackMurphyRGR
“If we are really in the midst of a 4th Industrial Revolution there is every reason to expect that the psychological mass manias that accompanied such episodes in the past will recur in some form with their essential character unchanged”
@Jacob__Siegel
“A new soldier sent to Afghanistan tomorrow can’t recall an America at peace. He’s too young. It’s too far gone.”
@MattGallagher0
on
@cjchivers
The Fighters
As an American Catholic, the past couple decades have been rough, but it’s so inspiring to have leaders who look on the wreckage and think: You know what the Church needs? More partisan politics.
My wife got me a MISSIONARIES cake to celebrate my book launch (made by my oldest son’s former nursery teacher, the incredibly talented ). It was a delicious pumpkin spice cake.
“What we were afraid of is that, eighteen months from now, you’ve got candidate Greitens, former Navy seal, running for President.”
I wrote about Eric Greitens for the
@NewYorker
Given that David Sacks doesn’t believe in ISIS-K because they didn’t have much presence on google trends before 2021, I must admit to having a perverse fascination with how he’ll churn the latest, horrific news into a set of talking points.
.
@canongatebooks
is publishing an "astonishing" debut novel of “extraordinary suspense” from award-winning writer and US Marine Corps veteran
@PhilKlay
—more about Missionaries here:
Had two arguments with friends over Israel’s war in Gaza, and I thought I’d walk through my understanding of the argument for Israel, and why I reject it.
…allies behind on the battlefield because they’re foreigners and they look different, even though they’ve done more for this country than most Americans — if that’s the case, then we really need to do a gut check about whether we really are the people we say we are.”
Given that Iraq has gone through recurring extremes of horror (civil war, ethnic cleansing, mass rape, slavery, genocide), if you accept the “but hey, we got rid of Saddam so it was ultimately a good thing” argument, then there’s really no level of suffering you won’t wave away.
As 2020 comes to a close, I wanted to share my annual lists of favorites. I’ll start by sharing my favorite books this year, deliberately omitting what I think is a pretty good book – A Promised Land – by a certain 44th president. I hope you enjoy reading these as much as I did.
I generally find this sort of lame contempt directed at Americans pathetic. It seems even more so as every civilian health care worker I know is doing work that exposes them to risk.
Dear vets. It’s OK Americans are about to be inspired by the courage of people other than you.
@thomaschattwill
I once heard Margaret Atwood say “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”
“It’s about courage and cowardice,” says Travis Weiner, a two-tour Army infantry veteran whose interpreter was killed in Iraq years after he’d applied for a visa. “If people’s emotions about immigration are such that they are willing to tolerate literally leaving our wartime…
Unfortunately, it’s unsurprising to see
@mchooyah
voicing contempt for America while fantasizing about cops shooting US citizens.
A patriotism that thrills to sentiments like this is such a weak, cruel, ugly thing. No true love of country at all.
“If I have authority to speak about our military policy it’s because I’m a citizen responsible for participating in self-governance, not because I belonged to a warrior caste.“
A bunch of writers deciding we no longer need to read the classics of war literature (Graves, Heller, Hemingway,
"I'd rather not get a drink with a person who's taking his cues from Vonnegut") is just a bit too perfect an encapsulation of the times.
Look what arrived on my birthday!
My four year old was very excited to see his name in the dedication too, and asked me to read it to him as a bedtime story...
“In postwar America only certain versions of self-sacrifice began to count.”
I wrote an essay about immigration, war, and what it means to be an American.
@nytopinion
Amazing to see MISSIONARIES on the cover of the book review.
Grateful to Juan Gabriel Vásquez for the deep engagement with my book, and to the folks at
@nytimesbooks
for giving this space to a book about war in the 21st century.
“All of us have served and have gone to great pains, risked our life, risked the lives of our comrades to uphold the values of this country...And the idea that none of that matters at the end of the day is a slap in the face to all of us”
@elliotackerman
Vatican photographer must have been disappointed when Pope Francis and Martin Scorsese jumped in and photobombed this sweet shot he was trying to take of me.
Zadie Smith doesn’t think politics should be separate from our evaluations of art, and she says this quite explicitly. She just objects when it’s thin, reductive, boring, or when the political objection is itself politically objectionable, as she felt in the Emmett Till painting
Anti-anti-Putin talking points are getting progressively sillier
Step 1: NATO
Step 2: Zelenskyy’s trying to start World War III.
Step 3: Biolabs?
Step 4: The Kinzhal! It’s hypersonic! Hyper! Sonic!
Step 5: [Alec Guinness voice] Those are not the war aims Putin was looking for.
For authors still wondering if your voices matter, $75,000 will now be donated to the
@ThePCRF
because of the dogged work of
@wawog_now
and the moral courage of dozens of writers of conscience who spoke out in solidarity with the people of Gaza.
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.
“There’s always been something a little pathetic with how Eric Greitens publicizes himself.”
I wrote about Eric Greitens, Dan Crenshaw, and the trend of political ads fantasizing about violence toward fellow Americans.
“I wish I could turn a blind eye but the messages I am getting are so utterly desperate and harrowing, but I know soon I will have to just tell people there is nothing more I can do.”
I wrote about Afghanistan and 9/11 for
@NewYorker
John “It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished” Adams probably would not be a fan of this particularly dumb form of demagoguery
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) literally says Ketanji Brown Jackson might have defended Nazis at Nuremberg:
"The last Judge Jackson left the Supreme Court to go to Nuremberg and prosecute the case against the Nazis. This Judge Jackson might have gone there to defend them."
“People in the national-security community sometimes refer to these sorts of raids as “mowing the grass,” which brings to mind the old infantryman’s riddle, “What makes the grass grow?” The answer: blood.”
I have a new essay in the Atlantic.
“Who is Hieronymus Bosch? Who is Hugo van der Goes? Who is Hans Memling? Inform us of their addresses”
Interrogation of Czech artist Oldřich Kulhánek in 1971