Andrew Breitbart is dead

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Conservative bully and agitator Andrew Breitbart, as you surely know by now, died earlier today "unexpectedly from natural causes."

He was 43.

However much I loathed the man, and I certainly loathed him a great deal, I do not wish here to speak ill of the dead. He was what he was, to the detriment of civil discourse, to the diminishing of conservatism, and to the worsening of American democracy.

And let us not forget that he himself did speak ill of the dead, just as he spoke ill generally. What goes around, comes around.

Still, there is sadness in death, including in Breitbart's, and one feels for his loved ones. They are not to blame for who and what he was.

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One may not wish to speak ill of the dead, but honesty demands it sometimes. This is so very true in this case. As David Frum wrote:

And this is where it becomes difficult to honor the Roman injunction to speak no ill of the dead. It's difficult for me to assess Breitbart's impact upon American media and American politics as anything other than poisonous. When one of the leading media figures of the day achieves his success by his giddy disdain for truth and fairness -- when one of our leading political figures offers to his admirers a politics inflamed by rage and devoid of ideas -- how to withhold a profoundly negative judgment on his life and career?

How indeed.

Davy Jones (1945-2012)

By Richard K. Barry 

Davy Jones, one of The Monkees, died today at the age of 66.

Whitney Houston (1963-2012)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The coverage of Whitney Houston's death is already annoying me immensely.

People die all the time. And we don't give a shit.

There are countless people in our rich, "civilized" societies living on the streets, hopeless and helpless -- children, too. The homeless and the hungry are everywhere, struggling just to get by from day to day. And we don't give a shit.

Millions upon millions of people around the world, people without a voice, are struggling, too, suffering in degrading, dehumanizing poverty. And we don't give a shit.

A drone strike in Pakistan kills civilians. And we don't give a shit.

And yet a celebrity dies, a celebrity who really hasn't been of much interest to anyone in years, a celebrity with a history of drug abuse and a self-destroying lifestyle, and the world stops. Or, at least, the media do. It's all about Whitney, you see. She, it seems, was important enough, worthy enough, for us to give a shit, or at least to be told to give a shit.

Sorry, am I being too negative? This isn't really about Whitney Houston, this is about the media, and about how we as a society worship celebrities and prioritize the wrong things.

Whitney herself was a beautiful, talented woman. I fell in love with her in the '80s, the way teenagers fall in love with singers or actors. That was when she burst upon the scene and at a young age become one of the biggest stars in the world. I was living in Germany at the time, but it hardly mattered. She was famous everywhere. Her first two albums, Whitney Houston (1985) and Whitney (1987), were two of the albums I listened to most during those years. She was pretty amazing, I thought, and I had a huge crush on her. The second concert I ever went to was a Whitney concert in Frankfurt. It was fantastic.

And then we moved to the U.S., to Mendham, New Jersey, where she just happened to live as well. No, I never met her, but I thought it was pretty cool to be living in the same town as Whitney Houston.

It didn't last much longer. I grew up and away from her music. By the time I'm Your Baby Tonight came out, in 1990, I didn't really care anymore. She still had that amazing voice, but I'd moved on. My Whitney period was over -- two albums, a few years, you know how it goes. I was in college when The Bodyguard came out in 1992. I saw it, as I saw as many movies as I could back then, but found it ridiculously silly -- not that it mattered. And then, of course, her life seemed to collapse, not least because of her idiot of a husband. She sprung up now and then, but not for long and only to remind us of the talent that was still there and of the promise that once had been. She was never really "Whitney" anymore.

And so while her death seemed so sudden, a shock, it really wasn't. Not that I know what caused it, but we all had similar thoughts, I'm sure.

There's nothing wrong, I think, with being saddened by her death, nor with looking back now at the positive parts of her life, at all that she accomplished, on the music that was so much a part of our lives -- way back when.

No, what bothers me is the intense wall-to-wall coverage, the self-aggrandizing media-ization of her death as an event requiring our attention, as so much more significant than anything else going on in the world. I understand that a famous person's death will attract more media attention than any other death, because a famous person's death is a story, but there is such disproportion in the way it is covered, not to mention in the way so many people react to it, as if a celebrity's death is an occasion for some required outpouring of collective grief, as well as of the individual expression of grief that supposedly binds us all together in the group-think the media encourage. It's like we're being told that if we don't profess our grief we're not part of the collective, not part of society, not even fully human.

This is all nonsense, of course. As far as I'm concerned, react to Whitney's death any way you want. Don't buy into the group-think. Don't get sucked into the media's coverage of her death as a not-to-be-missed event. And don't forget that there's a lot going on that isn't getting anywhere near such coverage, if any at all.

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Again, this is not to take away from Whitney's death itself, which, yes, is sad, just as all death is sad in one way or another.

But let's turn from the negative to the positive. Here's perhaps my favourite of her songs, One Moment in Time, which she recorded for the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul and later performed at the Grammys on February 22, 1989.

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Christopher Hitchens, one of the truly great (and greatly aggravating) polemicists of our time, died on Thursday at the age of 62.

I admired him and loathed him, and perhaps for no other major political commentator did I have such mixed feelings. When he wrote about the lies of organized religion and the crimes of Henry Kissinger and others, I applauded. When he promoted American militarism, including in Iraq, I recoiled in rage and disgust. Suffice it to say, he left his mark -- always engaging, always leaving me thinking. And he will be missed.

There are many things you can read on Hitch, obituaries and remembrances, at major media sites and around the blogosphere, but I recommend these posts at Driftglass (on the left) and Outside the Beltway (on the right), as well as these pieces by David Frum and Graydon Carter, and this one by David Corn.

For Hitch's greatest hits at Slate, where he was a columnist (and where I read him most often), see here.

And a must-read is this "in memoriam" by his brother Peter.

Hitch was productive almost right up to the very end, writing with his usual provocation. I remember a column he wrote less than a month ago for Slate -- on November 21, his second-to-last column there (the last coming a week later) -- on the ridiculous conservative belief in American exceptionalism. As usual, it was gorgeously written. And it ended with this:

The ancients taught us to fear "hubris," and the Bible teaches the sin of pride. I am always amazed that American conservatives are not more suspicious of self-proclaimed historical uniqueness. But proclaim it they do, as if trying to reassure themselves against the blasts of what looks like a very bad season.

And as if trying to reassure themselves that the American Empire isn't in fact collapsing, that America's time as global hegemon isn't in fact over. I often disagreed with him, often vehemently, but he was so very right about so very many things. (Go back and check out his "Fighting Words" columns at Slate, even just the ones from this year. You'd never know he was sick. In many of them, he was simply on fire.)

Allow me to close with this clip of Hitchens very casually (and very easily) taking down Ayn Rand and the cult of selfishness (which Driftglass also posts -- it's a classic). (There are many other clips of Hitch at YouTube. Go have a look. Enjoy.) Like him or not, the man had a sharp and deeply penetrating mind. Simply, he was one of the essential social, political, and literary commentators of our time.

The good boss: Harry Morgan, Col. Sherman Potter of M*A*S*H, dies at 96

By Richard K. Barry

Harry Morgan died Wednesday morning. He was 96 years old. Many would remember him as Colonel Potter from the long-running television series M*A*S*H.  Of course, there were many other roles for Morgan, including Officer Bill Gannon, partner to Sgt. Joe Friday, on the updated Dragnet series that aired from 1967 to 1970.

And then, as the obit in The New York Times put it:

In more than 100 movies, Mr. Morgan played Western bad guys, characters names Rocky and Shorty, loyal sidekicks, judges, sheriffs, soldiers, thugs and police chiefs. 

But to a generation or two, starting in 1975 and running to 1983, and then in reruns forever after, he was Colonel Sherman Potter, commander of the 4077 Mobile Army Surgical Hospital unit in Korea.

It's a very corny thing, I know, but there are certain television shows that feel like they are a part of our lives. Watching Bonanza on Sunday nights at my grandparent's house in the 60s when I almost inevitably fell asleep lying on the floor in front of the television; the entire family gathering together to watch All in the Family in the early '70s; and M*A*S*H seemed to be around for all sorts of life's changes.

Given that it premiered on September 17, 1972 and ended on February 28, 1983, it was there from the beginning of my high school years to my mid-20s -- a fairly good stretch of time.

As circumstances would have it, though, the most significant experience watching the show that I recall is gathering with half my college dorm every day at 4:00 p.m. to catch reruns in the late '70s. That this stands out as a significant memory from my undergraduate days might make you think I wasted some time at Oswego State University, and you wouldn't be wrong, but there it is.

After a while shows like this are comfort food, you watch them because they are familiar and we gravitate towards the familiar. Colonel Potter was always a cool character, though. Serious, because somebody had to make sure the important things got done. But he wasn't an asshole. Maybe we hoped that, in our final days of university, before having to get a job, it was possible we might have a boss who was serious enough to make sure things got done but who could also be cool about it.

That was Colonel Sherman Potter.

I suppose a lot of people will post the clip from the final episode of M*A*S*H in which the Colonel rides his horse off into the sunset. And so will I. 

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)