Of Pouts, Vietnam, and Shameless Cross-Marketing
I’ve been wallowing in a full-scale blog pout for the past week, ever since my 1200-word blog entry on the fortunes of the Minnesota Timberwolves was erased by some idiosyncrasy of the software 98 percent of the way through the piece. To add a little shape and predictability to my far-flung taste in topics—sports, music and politics, in no particular order—I had decided to post a weekend basketball blog spot, along the lines of my Hang Time online column of last year. But my Luddite idiocy with all things computer collided with the stupidity of the software (visiting other websites while inside your blog space risks total erasure) and postponed that little plan.
This week I’m tied up shaping an interview with Minneapolis activist Ron Edwards that will appear on the cover of our Christmas issue, so the weekly (at least) Wolves update will have to commence with the new year. I also anticipate quick capsule hits on my top 40 CDs for 2002 to run at regular weekly intervals. That will give readers a chance to anticipate when my sports and music stuff will run. Since we have been ordered to temporarily disable the “comment” key (don’t ask why), I’ll just have to trust that you trusty readers are standing up and applauding this grand mission.
So much for process. (Blogs about process. None of us have lives, apparently.) Today’s entry will be to plug a book I picked up at Half-Price Books for $7.98 last week: Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1959-1975. It’s a fat 850-word paperback culled from the two-volume hardcover set published in 1998, a marvelously enlightening tome. Arranged chronologically, the paperback includes all the major works, including book excerpts from David Halberstam’s Making of a Quagmire and Michael Herr’s Dispatches; Sy Hersh’s prize-winning account of the My Lai Massacre, Neil Sheehan’s classic “Not a Dove, But No Longer a Hawk” (the most cogent historical primer I’ve ever read about the war and our arrogantly misguided foreign policy assumptions); and surprisingly relevant pieces from Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and James Michener.
Those are some of the obvious highlights and/or celebrity lures, but the fact is that everything I’ve read so far has been pretty damn compelling. There’s a selection of a pilot’s letters hom from November ’63 to March ’64 originally published in U.S. New & World Report; a round-robin account from about eight POWs sequested together for months in the jungle; the perspective of North Vietnamese soldiers reported by Fox Butterfield, and superb on-the-ground coverage from Peter Arnett, Sydney Schanberg and Mary McCarthy.
What makes the book especially poignant is that Vietnam was probably the last “theatre” in which our government permitted journalists such unfettered access. In this new age of push-button carnage from our military hardware and rampant paranoia and image-control from the White House, U.S. citizens will not soon be treated to such an honest and intimate portrayal of the hell we visit upon the world (including our own soldiers) in times of war.
Finally, in a shameless bit of cross-marketing, I highly commend to all the crazed mutterings of City Pages’ blogger Brad Zellar, the most creative insomniac I’ve ever had the pleasure to know. Go to citypages.com, click on Babelogue, and then to Zellar’s weblog to see what I mean. Anyone interested in an opinionated but well-reported look at the machinations inside Minneapolis City Hall should swing by Gerry Anderson’s blog at the same citypages.com site.
Meanwhile, I can’t help but note that CP editor Steve Perry, who bullied us all into this blog game, has been decidedly lackluster in his own blog output.
4:47:43 PM 
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