It's been a loooooong time

I confess: I unceremoniously abandoned this blog a year ago when I got a position as blog editor at BreakPoint. To blog all day and then blog in my free time was just too much. However, I've heard that people still come to this blog occasionally and wonder what happened. So if you've been looking for me, you can now find me at http://thepoint.breakpoint.org. I apologize for not saying something about this much earlier. Thanks to those of you who read this blog, and please come join us over at The Point!

Remembering

There's not much to say today that hasn't already been eloquently said over the past five years. The truest and the most profound things one could say are still the plainest and most obvious: Thank God for those who gave their lives for us that day -- perhaps quite literally for my colleagues and me who were in Washington at the time. God help the ones who loved them and will never forget them. God protect us and keep us all.

If you haven't already rewatched the footage today, James Lileks has posted a short compilation of clips that I really think is worth watching. It's personalized by shots of his daughter playing on the floor as the buildings went up in smoke. Nothing could be simpler or more heartbreaking.

The music at the end of the video is the same tune we sang in our church choir yesterday, with different words, under the title "A Prayer for our Time." The new lyrics were written for the first anniversrary of 9/11. I can't find them online to link to, but I can at least post the closing lines:

Eternal Father, ever be
Our refuge in the time of need. Amen.

Poor Tom Shales

When is the Washington Post going to pull a Frank Rich and move this poor guy to the op-ed page? It's increasingly obvious (just ask him!) that this entertainment gig he's stuck in is holding back one of the most brilliant and original political minds of our generation.

Filthy bedfellows

Had I known who Ned Lamont's new buddy was, I might have gone up to Connecticut and campaigned against him myself.

Welcome to product placement hell

I grew up on the Anne of Green Gables books (the miniseries are NO comparison), and one of my favorites was Anne of the Island, about Anne's college years. One thing in it puzzled me, though, when I was a kid: the part where Anne writes a story, and a friend of hers secretly takes it and works in a couple of plugs for baking powder so that the story can win a contest. Anne's distress over this made no sense to me. I simply didn't understand what was so awful about advertising a product in a story.

Now that I'm grown up, I understand. Unfortunately, most of the grown-ups who make their living writing stories do not.

The new bigotry?

So this guy is bellyaching to an advice columnist about his family signing the Florida Marriage Protection Amendment petition. She tells him he shouldn't condemn his family based on their names being on a website, that their names might have been put there fraudulently, that they might have misunderstood what the petition is all about, etc., etc.

Notice what she doesn't say?

She doesn't say that, if his family did sign the petition and did understand what it was all about, that this is their own valid point of view and their right to express it freely. The implication is clear: that such an action would be wrong on their part.

Think I'm exaggerating? I think this attitude has been developing for a long time -- you see signs of it all over the place -- and we're going to see more and more of it. Once homosexuality was declared an inborn and unchangeable trait (even for those who would like to change), it was inevitable that one day people who sign petitions against same-sex marriage would be placed on the same level as those who wouldn't let black people sit at lunch counters or at the front of buses. And that, of course, would mean that the petition-signers' views have no place and no right to be considered among decent people.

Superwuss (or, Is it really THAT hard to write a good superhero?)

Two excellent writers, whom I'm lucky enough to call acquaintances, help explain why Superman Returns has been something of a superflop this summer. I'm not sure quite why or how this happened, but somehow our culture has lost the ability to create or to sustain a decent hero. First, the creators of Smallville, in the space of five years, manage to turn the perfectly nice teenage Clark Kent they started with into a lazy, selfish brat who's better at getting people killed than saving them. Now we get a dour movie with little of the joy or hope you'd expect from a Superman story, instead providing us with a heaping helping of superhero angst.

Which is why I ditched plans to see it and ended up going to the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie instead. It wasn't nearly as good as the first, but at least, thanks be to God, Captain Jack hasn't yet taken to whimpering that he's all alone in the world and nobody wuvs him. Right now that fact alone is worth quite a few points in my book, and apparently in a lot of other people's books as well.