So much has happened this week that plenty of essential reading went unmentioned here. First on the list: "With Trembling Fingers," an angry, bitter, and most of all, truthful invective by Hal Crowther, who won the H.L. Mencken Award for column writing in 1993. A former writer for Time and Newsweek, his column has appeared for years in the Independent Weekly.

Crowther is fed up with the sort of commentary represented by Maureen Dowd or Molly Ivins. He doesn't name them, but whom else does he mean when he writes of "the columnist who trades in snide one-liners"?

If this is not the worst year yet to be an American, it's the worst year by far to be one of those hag-ridden wretches who comment on the American scene. The columnist who trades in snide one-liners flounders like a stupid comic with a tired audience; TV comedians and talk-show hosts who try to treat 2004 like any zany election year have become grotesque, almost loathsome.

He goes on to say:

Our most serious, responsible newspaper columnists are so stunned by the disaster in Iraq that they've begun to quote poetry by Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen. They lower their voices; they sound like Army chaplains delivering eulogies over ranks of flag-draped coffins, under a hard rain from an iron sky.

I don't know what he'd say about Straight Up. He must loathe all my one-liners (or my attempts anyway, though I doubt he's read them), and in self-defense I could point out that I quoted Wilfred Owen long ago in "The Juice," which preceded this blog. At same time, Crowther is not above cracking wise himself:

I come from a family of veterans and commissioned officers; I understand patriots in wartime. If a spotted hyena stepped out of Air Force One wearing a baby-blue necktie, most Americans would salute and sing "Hail to the Chief."

He believes that Iraq is this generation's Vietnam, which is the conventional wisdom on the left — and rightly so. But he offers this striking historical context, and he's such a fucking good writer:

Vietnam proved conclusively that no modern war of occupation will ever be won. Every occupation is doomed. The only way you "win" a war of occupation is the old-fashioned way, the way Rome finally defeated the Carthaginians: kill all the fighters, enslave everyone else, raze the cities and sow the fields with salt.