Breitbart: Gone but not Forgotten

He was one of a kind, sui generis.

Oxymorons define him: Beautiful freak. Happy warrior. Fearless conservative.*

Though many of his enemies celebrated Andrew Breitbart's death (go here to read the hateful things people wrote after he died), a few of his adversaries grudgingly admired him.  

Piers Morgan, for example, could be heard admitting on his program after Breitbart's death that he "really began to like Breitbart" and that their "chemistry" bad been "getting better." 

And Matt Taibbi, in his Rolling Stone obituary "Death of a Douche" (March 1, 2012) wrote:

I say this in the nicest possible way. I actually kind of liked Andrew Breitbart. Not in the sense that I would ever have wanted to hang out with him, or even be caught within a hundred yards of him without a Haz-Mat suit on, but I respected the shamelessness. Breitbart didn’t do anything by halves, and even his most ardent detractors had to admit that he had a highly developed, if not always funny, sense of humor.

Referring to the sordid Andrew Wiener saga (which the media tried to dismiss as a Breitbart-fabricated smear), Taibbi wrote, "For that one brief, shining moment--still one of the most painful-to-watch YouTube spectacles of all time--... Breitbart could legitimately claim to have the biggest, hairiest balls on earth." A bit crude, but you get the point. 

But yes, Breitbart crashing Weiner's press conference was a thing of beauty. 

That, along with images of Breitbart rollerblading in the midst of hostile protesters, getting right up in their faces, not backing down. He was fearless. 

That's what I admired most about Breitbart, what I personally found so attractive. 

Breitbart's admirers were devastated when he died unexpectedly two years ago today. He was one of the few, if not the only, conservative who seemed to understand the key principle of warfare: know your enemy.  

Breitbart not only knew and understood the Left, he also understood and employed the power of social media. As one of the founders of The Huffington Post and The Drudge Report, he was in the vanguard of a new wave of journalism. The launching of Breitbart.com seemed to be a partial fulfillment of his vision of speaking truth to power. He hated bullies, which is one reason he defended the Tea Party with such passion (oh how I wish he'd been around when the IRS story came to light).

Andrew Breitbart left a gaping hole when he died, and I'm pretty sure he's irreplaceable. Nevertheless, his vision of an empowered "citizen journalist" lives on at the website he founded which continues to expand (recently added: Breitbart London and Breitbart Texas).

And yes, some are trying to pick up his mantle, so to speak. I particularly like Ben Shapiro, seen here pulling a Breitbart and crashing a UCLA Student Association Council Meeting to speak out against the attempt to boycott Israel.

I'm guessing Andrew would have approved. 

 * "fearless conservative" is the phrase Matt Romney used to describe Breitbart. I include it here as an oxymoron as an indictment on most conservatives, including myself, who tend to cower and slink away rather than confront.

A Valentine to my Children

I saw this and was moved. 

Recommended Reading: A Word or Two About Stephen J. Dubner

Just finished reading Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper, by Stephen J. Dubner. Prior to that I read his earlier book called Choosing My Religion: A Memoir of a Family Beyond Belief, a fascinating autobiography of (as Dubner puts it) "three noisy souls." 

I tried to get my dad to read the latter, and I think he gave it the good Boy Scout try but evidently gave up. (I asked him when we got together at Christmas if he'd finished it and he shrugged and said he lost interest. My dad is nothing if not consistent: he just isn't interested in religion, no matter how articulate, honest, funny, or intelligent the writing.)

For the record, "articulate, honest, funny, and intelligent" doesn't even begin to describe Dubner's writing. His pedigree is obviously first-rate (here's a link to his bio), so I'm not sure why my dad would snub him. Dubner could probably write about garbage disposals and still be engaging.

I love the way he writes. He's brutally, painfully, excruciatingly, honest. At times, reading Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper, I felt uncomfortable, embarrassed even, for Dubner. His behavior comes across as stalking to the reader, despite the fact that he insists he's not a stalker. The title of one of his chapters is, in fact, "I am Not a Stalker!" (The gentleman doth protest too much, methinks.) Yet the very point of this book is to examine the cultural phenomenon of hero-worship. If the confessional nature of the book makes the writer--admittedly obsessed if not infatuated with his childhood hero, Pittsburgh Steeler running back Franco Harris--look foolish, so what? Dubner's a journalist. At their best, journalists report objectively on what they see. If they're being fair, if they're doing their job, the reporting can and should be brutal. Why should he be less brutal when he's the subject of his own reporting? 

At the end of my copy of the book, there's a section called P.S. that includes additional essays by the author. Several of these essays are those that were published in the New York Times Magazine having to do with various sports-related topics: John Unitas ("Steel-Town Quarterback"), football stadiums ("Stronger Than Steel: The Demise of Three River Stadium"), and so on. 

Reading these marvelous essays, one understands why Dubner's an award-winning sports writer. He's an amazing stylist. His metaphors are so fresh, so unusual, so fitting, one can only assume he spends hours conjuring them. His attention to detail boggles the mind. He must literally take notes on life. 

My new ambition is to write half as well as Dubner writes: to take personal risks, to be honest, to call it as I see it, to record life as I live it, to see if, perchance, I have anything left to say.

True or False: Black People Should Vote for Black Politicians

Apparently, that's what some (fortunately not all) blacks think.

Here's a woman who happens to disagree. Stacey Dash, an African-American actress, who did vote for Barack Obama in 2008 but who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, has a different idea about how to decide on a candidate: "I chose him [Romney] not by the color of his skin but the content of his character."

There's a thought. Why didn't someone else think of this?  Oh wait.

Some of her black brethren don't agree. Stacey's been the recipient of some pretty nasty tweets by the so-called tolerant left. 

Here's an interesting discussion on the issue, posted on the Huffington Post ("Black People for Obama: African-American Support for Obama Called Prejudice, Blind Loyalty," by Jesse Washington).

And here's a snippet of an interview with Piers Morgan on CNN.

Thoughts After Reading "A Thousand Splendid Suns"

OK, so I cried at the end, I admit. Hosseini finally got to me, a bit shamelessly, but I think Mariam deserved the attention she finally got, albeit belatedly. 

Reading this novel was a really strange experience for me. I found myself getting really annoyed with the author. When I got to the part where Mariam refused to see her father and tore up his letter without reading it, I actually got angry. This was after the scene where Mariam and Rasheed go to all the trouble of walking to a hotel and borrowing a phone to try and call Jalil (Mariam's father) to ask for financial help--to keep the family from starving--it's a big build-up, and you think, finally, maybe at last, these poor wretches will get some help, only to find out that Jalil is dead and gone, and that whole segment where the reader clings to a little hope for some sort of relief was for naught. 

Angry at the author for manipulating me into a false hope? 

I've never read a novel where I actually found myself wanting to pray for the protagonists. Pray for a character in fiction? How bizarre is that? Yet that's how I felt for Mariam and Laila when they were about to run away from Rasheed. You just knew this wasn't going to be easy in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. I walked away from the book, dreaded starting up again. And of course, I was right, it didn't go well for these women. 

Nothing, it seemed, would go right, especially for Mariam. 

Angry at the author because he seemed determined to make life as miserable for these women as he possibly could. Unrelenting sorrow, unrelenting humiliation. Like a cruel, sadistic puppeteer, he never let up. 

But perhaps that was his point. He pulled back the veil that shrouds western eyes from the cruelty of the Taliban, the indignities women especially but men as well experience in these horribly oppressive societies. 

Reading this novel made me so thankful for freedoms I barely think of as freedom: freedom to step outside my door, get in my car, run a quick errand, wear what I want, say what I think, watch and read and write and wear and eat and sleep when and where and what I want. 

Thankful for my beautiful America. 

I did cry at the end, for Mariam, a sad, wretched and, ultimately, heroic woman.