Fight! Fight! Fight!

Great story about fisticuffs in the Washington Post newsroom. It’s a few days old, and I’m only posting it now because of this excellent post on the combatants from Gene Weingarten:

What Henry was always best at was a muscly form of writing that not only tells you what is happening, but lets you understand what to think about it — not superficially, but in the manner of explicating The Meaning of Life.

This is Henry Allen in 1991, covering the media covering the first Gulf War:

The Persian Gulf press briefings are making reporters look like fools, nitpickers and egomaniacs; like dilettantes who have spent exactly none of their lives on the end of a gun or even a shovel; dinner party commandos, slouching inquisitors, collegiate spitball artists; people who have never been in a fistfight, much less combat; a whining, self-righteous, upper-middle-class mob jostling for whatever tiny flakes of fame may settle on their shoulders like some sort of Pulitzer Prize dandruff.

They ask the same questions over and over. In their frustration, they ask questions that no one could answer; that anyone could answer; that no one should answer if they could answer. They complain about getting no answers, they complain about the answers they get. They are angry that the military won’t let them go anywhere, the way they could in Vietnam. They talk about war as if it were a matter of feelings to be hashed out with a psychotherapist, or a matter of ethics to be discussed in a philosophy seminar. A lot of them seem to care more about Iraqi deaths than American deaths, and after the big spill in the gulf, they seemed to care more about animals than people — a greasy cormorant staggered around on CNN until it seemed like a network logo, along the lines of the NBC peacock. They don’t always seem to understand that war is real.

You should, as they say, read the whole thing.