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December 09, 2004

Study War Some More

Nick Coleman has been an embarassment of fisking riches this week.

Or just an embarassment. You pick.

His editorial earlier this week - "We don't always fight the good fight" - is one of the most cripplingy-irresponsible things I've seen, and even more ineptly written than most of Coleman's wretched, nepotistic ouevre.

First things first; I challenge you to find a theme for this piece. It starts out, it seems, as a broadside against war in general; the mall front of the State Capitol is getting crowded, it seems:

Walk through Minnesota's memorials on Pearl Harbor Day and there is no doubt: We are a fighting people.

The 20-acre grassy mall that stretches from the State Capitol to the noisy trench of Interstate Hwy. 94 is nearly full of memorials, most of them to the honored dead of our many wars.

There is a wall with the names of the Minnesotans who died in Vietnam. A memorial to the dead of the Korean War. There are plaques in a Court of Honor memorializing those who served in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and two World Wars, and plaques honoring civilians, women, prisoners of war and the missing.

After a planned Fire Fighters Memorial and a Workers Memorial go up, the mall will be full.

From there, it evolves into one of his customary, incoherent jeremiads against George Bush Republicans Iraq:
Unless a couple of parking lots along 12th Street are eliminated, it's going to be tough to squeeze in one more memorial:

The one for the dead in Iraq.

Iraq was not the watchword on Tuesday, the 63rd anniversary of the day that lives in infamy and that marked the beginning of the Good War, the war won by the Greatest Generation, now fading into rest. On this Dec. 7th, as always, we remembered those heroes and what they did. But this year, remembrances of a good war collide with fears of a bad one.

A thousand Americans have died in combat in Iraq. As a journalist, I have been to three funerals for soldiers killed in action. I have watched children weep for a lost father, sisters bear their grief for a brother with crudely etched tattoos on their arms, teachers mourn the loss of a gifted student who will study war no more.

Tragic, sure - but did you ask them, "as a journalist", what they believed about the war that had claimed their loved one?

I'm wondering if it might not fit Nick's agenda.

Now, here's the part of the column - the irresponsible part, sure, and the part that's becoming not just a regular part of Nick Coleman columns, but is actually verging on the cliche; the part I'm going to start calling the "Nickie" of the column. The term "Nickie" means "an unsupported assertion that the author seems to assume the audience won't question him on".

There've been some really hooters for Nickies lately; after the election, Coleman blamed the failure of an Alabama constitutional amendment on Republicans' incipient racism; a little research showed that it was actually over the Democrats to sneak a back-door tax hike in through the amendment.

Then, last week, the Nickie concerned school funding; Craig Westover and the Fraters are on this one.

And now:

Only three funerals, but that is three more than our president. He maintains that things are going wonderfully well despite intelligence reports that say he is wrong, despite increasing numbers of attacks on our troops, despite the cities we have destroyed in order to make them safe, despite the toll of November, the bloodiest month so far.
So many places to start with this one:
  • Perhaps Coleman would favor us with naming those "intelligence reports" to which he's referring? Perhaps one of the many convenient "leaks" that the CIA manages to have when they have a quibble with the President? We'll never know - because that's more "stuff" that Nick "knows". It's a Nickie.
  • Damn right the President doesn't attend funerals. How inappropriate would that be - having the Secret Service searching the mourners, tying up traffic, probably going through the coffin for bombs (how would Nick Coleman treat that, hmmmm?) all for a dubious political point?
Coleman continues:
So on a cold, gray, windy day in December on which we remembered an old Good War, it was hard to see how the war we have will get from the bloody mess it is today to the hallowed memories of tomorrow.
But then, had Nick Coleman been writing in 1942-5, he'd have had trouble seeing how we'd have gotten from innumerable fiascoes - like the "quagmire" on Guadalcanal, MacArthur's ineptitude in 1941 (failing to disperse his air force against air attack), the Dieppe raid, the horrible casualties of our Army Air Corps bomber crews or the fact that they were sent on daylight raids with no fighter escorts, the carnage at Omaha Beach, the failure to "plan for the bocage" in Normandy, the complete failure to provide enough fuel to drive Patton or Bradley across France in 1944, the diversion of so much effort into Montgomery's "Market/Garden" campaign in Holland, the scandal that was the Sherman tank (or indeed the entire Patton doctrine of building tanks - American armor design policy from 1930-1944 was a bizarre muddle of ideas) to the ceremonies we observed on Tuesday, either.
"I see no parallels between WWII and Iraq," said Annette Luther, a 23-year-old woman from Minneapolis. "We had a noble and just cause in WWII, but I am worried that we don't have those things in Iraq."
It's unclear either why there needs to be a parallel or why Miss Luther is a source of any interest on the subject.
A good war is hard to find.
If Nick were to ask, "as a journalist", any of the veterans that he flitted amongst this past Tuesday, he'd probably find that it was impossible.

Next, Coleman changes subjects. Again.

Tuesday's Pearl Harbor remembrance, in spitting snow, took place beside the 4-inch naval gun that fired the first U.S. shot in World War II. A crew of sailors from St. Paul used the gun to sink a Japanese submarine before the bombs fell on Pearl. Now it stands forlornly and neglected at the edge of the mall, looking like it might blast the Minnesota History Center across the interstate. It isn't shipshape: Thick gray paint, slapped on in layers, is peeling in places, rusting in others. A proper WWII memorial is planned for the center of the mall, but for now, a decrepit gun from the USS Ward is all we have. [And it's a wonderfully affecting memorial, at that. Does it need a coat of paint? Sure, but you'd have to be a moron not to get the significance - Ed.]

The Ward sank in a kamikaze attack three years to the day after Pearl Harbor, but the historic gun had been removed in recognition of its place in history...[a visitor] O'Keefe and I checked the names of the gunners against the names on another plaque listing all the St. Paul sailors aboard the Ward. They were all from St. Paul, those guys who fired that first shot: Knapp, Fenton, Nolde, Domogall, Gruening, Peick, Flanagan, Bukrey and Lasch.

"Wow," O'Keefe said again. "I finally get to see it and here it is: Rotting away."

Even war memorials turn to dust. Putting them up is the easy part.

So - do we have too many memorials, or is it not enough? Should the President start ghoulishly flitting around funerals, like Nick Coleman? Should we take up a collection to slap a coat of paint on the 4-inch gun on the MNDOT grounds?

Do I have to start diagramming these things?

Posted by Mitch at December 9, 2004 06:48 AM | TrackBack
Comments

I'm honestly a little surprised that the Strib keeps Coleman on the payroll. I mean, he's just a bad writer. I'm no Hawthorne, but I tend to think I could write huge, looping circles around Coleman. Reading him is like flipping channels between overdone, overly-dramatic movies on cable. Find a point, Coleman, and work with it. That's the first step. From there, drop all the gooey, dripping cliches and the faux wounded-heart rhetoric. Looking at his picture on the Stib Web site, though, he looks almost exactly like I'd imagined him. He's a visual cliche of himself.

Posted by: Ryan at December 9, 2004 10:05 AM

The bad writing is tolerable, because it is so common in newspapers' local columnists. However, the cheap, smugly self-absorbed, crack about having attended more funerals than Bush (like Mitch said, it would be undesirable for many, many, reasons pertaining to those grieving, among other things), moves Coleman from merely being a bad writer to an execrable human being. Hey Nick? Nobody gives a good goddamn about how many funerals you have attended, and we don't need to be educated by the likes of you about the nature of grief. What a despicable sack of skin.

Posted by: Will Allen at December 9, 2004 06:06 PM

I suspect the President receives more intelligence reports, even with the CIA leaking like a sieve, than Nick does.

Posted by: Old Whig at December 10, 2004 12:07 AM

Sometimes I wonder if Nicky Boy is the Greatest Hustler in Journalism. He churns out this unfocused, puerile scribbling like raw sewage flowing from a broken pipe...and gets paid a Crocus-Hill sum of money to do it.

Posted by: Paul Carter at December 10, 2004 12:23 AM

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Posted by: Constance at December 29, 2004 03:37 PM
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