Category Archives: Obituaries

Paul Newman, R.I.P.

Posted on September 27, 2008 | Comments Off on Paul Newman, R.I.P.

His movies seem dated to me now. Like me, I suppose. We’ve used his salad dressing for years. The jokes on the labels were some of the first that Mr. B. could read, and he insists on buying more whenever we shop for groceries. I also liked his wife. Didn’t everyone?

MORE:  I used to write obits, but I would never have attempted a movie star. This one is good.

UPDATE:  Glad I missed this aspect of him, however: "President Jimmy Carter appointed him as his delegate to nuclear disarmament talks at the United Nations…In 1995, Newman bought a controlling interest in The Nation, a liberal political journal, and even began writing for it occasionally….Newman is also on the board of Cease Fire, a gun control group funded by prominent celebrities…."

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Posted in Mr. Boy, Obituaries, Rancho Roly Poly, Scribbles

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Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Semitism

Posted on August 7, 2008 | Comments Off on Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Semitism

Nevermind this sort of hagiographic obituary babble. No doubt the Great Writer helped open some blinded eyes on the Left, as well as do humankind a favor by helping bring down the Soviet Union. Pity he had to do it while apologizing for lynching–and continuing that right up until his death.

Via Creaky Pavillion.

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Posted in Obituaries, Scribbles

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Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, R.I.P.

Posted on July 16, 2008 | Comments Off on Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, R.I.P.

A real baby killer goes free, while two soldiers of the right come home dead, two years after they were captured patrolling the Israel-Lebanon border. But revenge will come, too, and it will be sweet.

Via Simply Jews.

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Posted in Israel, Obituaries, The War, Troops

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Keeping it clean

Posted on June 24, 2008 | Comments Off on Keeping it clean

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I don’t like reading it, and so I don’t write it. And that’s one reason I won’t write an obit-hymn for George Carlin, who I think mainly contributed to the coarsening of our culture. If you disagree, you can join in the wake here, but to paraphrase some of the commenters there, he seemed to have become just an old liberal ranting at conservatives; I thought he was brilliantly funny when I was twenty-five, but I grew up. He didn’t.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obituaries

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Robert Barnstone, R.I.P.

Posted on June 23, 2008 | Comments Off on Robert Barnstone, R.I.P.

Austin developer and former city councilman Barnstone could be quite a character, and we didn’t always get along when he was in politics. But he was one of the first people I met in Austin and I always liked him. I was sorry to hear that he killed himself, still a young sixty-one, but health problems seem to be behind it. I even considered buying one of his first downtown condos, but the price, a mere forty thousand dollars, which is nothing today, seemed too exorbitant for so small a space. Later, I would buy someone else’s near the river for almost twice that and be glad to get it. I wish he had become mayor, as he tried to do in 1991. He would have been a lot of fun at it.

UPDATE:  The family’s paid obituary for the Austin daily is here.

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Posted in Obituaries

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Giants to midgets

Posted on April 4, 2008 | Comments Off on Giants to midgets

When Dr. King was murdered, forty years ago today, a pall of shock fell over our almost-entirely white class at Infantry Officer’s Candidate School at Fort Benning, Ga. His goal of changing hearts and minds certainly had affected all of ours. If anyone was racist enough to be glad–and many of us were Southerners–they hid it well. They knew they would find no approbation. We knew that a giant had passed. We didn’t guess there would be only midgets to follow.

MORE: The detail nobody remembers: Dr. King was a Republican. Or that a Republican won passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act that banned segregation in stores and other "public accomodations."

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Posted in Infantry OCS, Obituaries, Scribbles

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Vietnam Inc.

Posted on March 20, 2008 | Comments Off on Vietnam Inc.

Phillip Jones Griffiths, the Welsh photographer/author of Vietnam Inc.–an amazingly one-sided harangue on the Americans and Vietnamese unfortunate enough to have come under his lens–has died. He was 72. I have an old review copy of the 1971 book, which I acquired somewhere. It’s the sort of thing Noam Chomsky would love. Did love, in fact, because as the BBC says, it "became crucial in challenging attitudes to the war" No kidding. It’s also a good lesson in how photos can be made to seem more (or less) than they really are–for instance by the act of moving a headless doll into the foreground for enhanced pathos. The camera does lie. Even without photoshopping. Jones Griffiths proved it.

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Posted in Library, Obituaries, Viet Nam

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