I can't believe Tim Russert is dead. The odd thing is, I feel like I have no right to be bothered by this - he was just a face on the television to me. But I do think the U.S. has lost a valuable voice of reason when it comes to politics. We need smart, inquisitive, determined people to ask the questions that need to be asked. I have no interest in inane mudslinging - I want intelligent discourse on prescient topics. I can't imagine who will fill his void.

If you have not been following the election insanity in Zimbabwe then you really need to sit up and take notice. Robert Mugabe had this to say over the weekend on the prospect of losing the runoff election:

Describing the opposition as 'traitors', he claimed Zimbabwe would never 'be lost' again. Speaking at the burial of a veteran of the independence war, Mugabe said he would never accept the Movement for Democratic Change taking over. 'It shall never happen ... as long as I am alive and those who fought for the country are alive,' he said. 'We are prepared to fight for our country and to go to war for it.'

That country is going to burn; I wonder if anyone in the world will save them.

The Supreme Court decided - again - that in the United States of America you can not throw someone in a hole forever and deny them the right to a trial. If Timothy McVeigh and Ted Bundy were worthy of trials, then so should everyone else. (What are we talking about here - if you're evil and American you have rights but if you're maybe evil and not American you don't?) John McCain did not like the decision. I'll be honest - this really really surprises me:

McCain said he that while he has been a vocal opponent of torture and advocated closing Guantanamo, he does not believe prisoners deserve the same rights as U.S. citizens.

“These are enemy combatants, these are people who are not citizens, they are not and never have been given the rights that the citizens of this country have,� he said. “Our first obligation is the safety and security of this nation and the men and women who defend it.�

It should be noted that "enemy combatant" is a manufactured term that means only what those who use it wish for it to mean. I'm so disappointed in Senator McCain; as my Military History professor (a Major in the Army) would say - "America is better than this".

And just for the record, I say this as a historian and someone who recognizes that the U.S. is only at war when Congress declares it - something that has not happened since World War II. Currently we are involved in conflicts (like Korea was termed), police actions (like Vietnam was termed), invasions, occupations, or whatever term you choose to use, but not war with all its rules and standards, as the Constitution defines it. Right now, we are fighting a couple of "military engagements authorized by Congress". The problem with that is no one explains what is supposed to happen with people who get caught in those engagements. Hence, we have Guantanamo, and all this resulting chaos.

Okay, off my military history soapbox now.

I read Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss and never really understood it. I just couldn't figure out why she had a sexual relationship with her father even though the book was supposed to explain that. I ended it thinking she didn't know why she did what she did and was maybe hoping the process of writing the book would help her figure it out. As to her new true crime book, she seems to have approached this one with a different mindset:

I saw aspects of myself in those children. I understood Billy's rage. You could say there was some ugly gratification in exploring what it was like to pound your father's head in with a baseball bat because I am someone who felt murderously angry at my father. I have fantasized about killing my father. Not with a baseball bat; a little more distantly, with a gun … I got both Billy and Jody in a way that made me want to tell what was a very different story from mine, but one I felt connected to from the beginning. It resonated. (link via)

As to Jody, the only other survivor of that tragedy (other than her murderous brother) she has found some solace in literature:

"I took courses in memory and amnesia. I did an independent study in orphans," she says. "I really wanted to know, to the degree that it's knowable, what the signs of health and un-health are. I didn't want to get stuck. I didn't want to be depressed and limited by my issues." When she read All Quiet on the Western Front, she recognized herself in Erich Maria Remarque's descriptions of suffering in battle. "We see men living with their skulls blown open," he wrote. "We see soldiers run with their two feet cut off, they stagger on their splintered stumps into the next shell-hole."

She and Harrison butted heads on more than on occasion while the book was being written and weirdly, Harrison now stays in contact with both Billy and Jody - even though they do not speak to each other (and have not since the murder trial). She better hope he never gets out of prison. (I never understand authors who court murderers - it is just too close to the dark side for me).

On a much much lighter note, the divine Nicola Beauman talks about Persephone Books, a publisher I adore:

She started the imprint in 1999, frustrated by books that failed to grab her in the first paragraph and those bereft of plot. "I very rarely read a modern book where, when I get to the end, anything is different from the beginning. Give me an example of a modern book with a plot," she demands, and because she's that little bit stern and decidedly adamant in her preferences, I stutter instead of rising to the occasion.

"I don't count activity as plot," she continues. "Plot is something which keeps you engaged and changes you. What is the point of reading a novel? It's to be taken out of yourself, to be engaged, to want to spend an evening lying on the sofa reading instead of all the other things you can do. If you're not gripped, there's no point. Something like Dorothy Whipple. When you get to the end of Someone at a Distance, you are a different person, and also you haven't been able to put it down."

Someone at a Distance is amazing - as are so many of the books I have bought and read from them over the years.

Cherie Priest has signed a deal for a new novella from Subterranean Press, The Clementine. Her description:

1879. Maria Isabella Boyd has had just about enough of this goddamned Civil War. Her early successes as a Confederate spy have led to notoriety that prohibits further espionage work; and her loyalties have been called into question over a disastrous marriage to a Union officer. Exiled, widowed, and on the brink of poverty, she goes to work for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in Chicago.

OMG I cannot wait to write this book.

I could not possibly be happier to hear about this one!

Oh and wait - John Mellencamp has a new CD due out in July that was produced by T Bone Burnett, Life, Death, Love and Freedom. My son loves Mellencamp...it's part of how we know we are doing pretty good with this whole parenting gig. (His other favs are the Beatles, Jewell and Louis Armstrong - I'm working on Sinatra and Tina Turner.)