A Brief, Polite Throat-Clearing (Ahem) on the Subject of the Recently Departed Charlie Wilson

We liked Charlie Wilson as much as the next Texan, probably for most of the same reasons. It’s unlikely that a rough-hewn sort such as Wilson, who would have had difficulty finding himself a sponsor for a deaconship in the First Baptist Church, could get elected to high public office in Texas these days, although Wilson, once in, was the sort of Democrat who could have been re-elected in perpetuity, health permitting. Wilson did a lot for veterans but the greatest thing he did was helping to create the Big Thicket National Preserve (a project, of course, that required, and requires, many other hands). There was no Tom Hanks movie on that effort, nor will there be.

There is, however, one item on Wilson’s CV that gives us pause, and that is the matter for which he will be best-remembered, thanks to the Hanks movie and the George Crile book on which it was based. For some reason, a congressman’s engineering of a covert CIA-backed war with taxpayer dollars and without public sanction is considered a grand, praiseworthy endeavor, blindly celebrated, or so it would seem, in most of the obituaries we saw in the Texas media. (Here’s an otherwise very good and highly literate one from Channel 13’s Ted Oberg, in which the “charm” of Houston socialite Joanne Herring and Wilson’s ability “to secretly appropriate $500 million in U.S. tax dollars” are credited with having helped the Afghan rebels send the Soviets packing. The New York Times story on Wilson’s passing set the figure for U.S. support at “$750 million a year” throughout the 1980s.) This is the sort of notion that offends the proud isolationist in us and makes the little William Jennings Bryan inside (you’ve got one, too, although maybe you haven’t gotten in touch with him) want to roll up his sleeves, take to a lectern and began declaiming in an overwrought, Frederic March-like lather. True, this particular intervention did not require the expenditure of American blood, only tax dollars, and we suppose upending the Soviets to inadvertently pave the way for the Taliban might have seemed like the right thing to do, at least for a while, even though things didn’t work out so well for us taxpayers on down the road.

We did not read the well-regarded book on which the movie was based, but the film, if we remember correctly, did take note of the unintended consequences of Charlie Wilson’s War, which we won’t bother to enumerate here, aside from mention of Bush’s Obama’s continuing war in Afghanistan. One local station, Channel 11, also referenced the aftermath of that secret war, even hauling out Herring––who appears to have supplied her own creamy-dreamy backdrop for her interviews with both 11 and 13––to provide this shrugging acknowledgement of the vagaries of history: “You can’t predict future wars.”

As William Jennings Bryan could have told her.*

*If he hadn’t died four years before her birth (!?!).

Just One Book, But a "Huge Upwelling" (Updated)

We were primed to throw down a hasty appreciation of J.D. Salinger but felt inadequate to the task after reading the insight from Tony Hoagland of the UH writing program that someone from the Houston Chronicle artfully inserted into its pick-up of the L.A. Times' obituary of Salinger (Hoagland, by the way, is a fearsomely good poet whose "Lucky" can break your heart, if you have one):

"Salinger broke through so many walls. He articulated the internal life, with all
its moods and contradictions and ironies. When Holden is seeking refuge in his
teacher's apartment and suddenly the teacher is rubbing his head and that feels
strange to Holden, the moment is real. … The book was a huge upwelling of: ‘This
is life that has not been described before but that we all recognize.' You feel
the generosity Salinger has towards human nature and you really feel included in
it.”

To that we can only add that the other genius of Catcher in the Rye is the way it speaks so directly to the sensitive or at least half-sensitive 15 year old (of all ages), which we suppose is the reason they assign it in the high schools these days. Our own 15 year old informed us of Salinger's passing and expressed wonder at the eerie "coincidence" of his death, the coincidence being that her English class had just started reading Catcher.

We mentioned that she's 15, right?

Update: We initially found a truncated version of the above-mentioned story on the Chronicle's Web site late Friday afternoon in the "Celebrity Buzz" section. We can't channel the dead, just yet, but we're pretty sure this isn't where Salinger pictured himself, post-mortem. Meanwhile, our 20-year-old, who tells us that, surprisingly, he's never read Catcher in the Rye but seems to have a deep and learned knowledge of Nine Stories and Raise High the Roof Beam, which we drew on to refresh our faded memories of those tales, informed us of a too-perfect headline he saw (from The Onion, it appears): "Bunch of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger."

Dead Poets Discuss Michael Jackson

"Michael Jackson in Disneyland
Don't have to share it with nobody else.
Lock the gates, Goofy, take my hand
And lead me through the World of Self."
-- Splendid Isolation, 1989, by Warren Zevon (1947-2003), Los Angeles, Calif.

The pure products of America
go crazy

... as if the earth under our feet were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September
somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

-- "To Elsie," 1923, by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), Rutherford, N.J.

A Short Note Re: Eleanor Tinsley

With her high-pitched, fluttery voice and a painstakingly deliberate delivery that radiated sincerity, it was easy to underestimate Eleanor Tinsley. Yet Tinsley was a deceptively tough politician, and, as Alan Bernstein's front-page obituary in today's Chronicle makes clear, she was in it for the long haul (that is, committed to a particular place over a long period of time). She was also unfailingly gracious, even to news reporters, a trait that could be disconcerting to those accustomed to more brusque treatment by elected officials. Yes, the do-gooderism could be a tad grating, but it grew naturally from her upbringing and never seemed to be driven by personal ambition or self-glorification or the urge to boss others around. She helped Houston grow up a bit, but for our taxpayer's money her greatest accomplishment was those SPARK parks for kids, a simple, cost-effective way to address the city's lack of park space. An expression of synergistic vibrancy, if you will, although we're pretty sure Tinsley would've been too embarrassed to use such a term.