I found this obituary of Alistair Cooke to be the best in the British press today. Maybe it’s hard to convey to Americans just how important Cooke was to Britons who needed or wanted to understand this vast and powerful place. But it’s also worth noting that Cooke was a brave exception to the BBC rule during the war to liberate Iraq. He understood what America experienced on 9/11 and he never descended into the mire of knee-jerk anti-Americanism that consumed the BBC in the last few years. He did this as an old-fashioned FDR-style liberal. Beneath his urbanity, you see, there was steel. He was a real idol to me in many ways. He came to America, as I did, on a Commonwealth Fund fellowship, was absorbed by the theater, as I was, and fell in love with America, as I did, while traveling across the entire country a year later. Since I still cannot drive a car, I got a friend to drive me. My friend had been a chorister at Magdalen and a tour-guide at Oxford. He was a charmer, and after many tours, American tourists would give him their card and tell him to look them up if he were ever in Tulsa, or wherever. I don’t think they ever really expected him to take them up on the offer. But we did. We rented a car, and called people from pay-phones outside various cities and sometimes stayed the night. My friend would often literally sing for his supper, slipping into a little Byrd after dinner, while I sheepishly offered a few jokes. By this method – and various Motel Sixes – we drove from Miami to Los Angeles, and from there to Seattle and back through the heartland to Boston. What a way to learn about a country! It ensured, in part, that it was the people of America I fell in love with, not just the breathtaking beauty of the place. But I digress. Cooke was a master of his form; and his extraordinary consistency and reliability was a model for would-be foreign correspondents everywhere. Except he wasn’t finally a foreign correspondent. On the fifteenth floor in New York City, with a changed name and a new accent, he was finally home. I know how he felt.
AD-BLOGGING: Why not produce and send out political ads via the Internet? Or will the campaign finance gurus soon try and make that illegal soon as well? This one is full of dumb statistical inferences, crude comparisons, soft-lens uplift. But how does that make it any worse than most paid-for ads? And you don’t have to worry that some K-Street hustler is making money off it. (Hat tip: Glenn.)
The Dish 