It’s a dark day in Washington. My generation will, I suspect, be the last human generation in either a very good way (we will transcend our limitations, we will live incredibly long lives, we will expand our moral imaginations, and in the process we will become something better than human) or in a very bad way (we will all be killed by nanite goo). So I hate the thought of any one of us biting the dust and missing the adventure to come, though of course that is as it must be.
My bet is on the nanite goo. Rex Wockner sends me this column as a tribute of sorts. Gay men responded to Ledger and not just because he was surpassingly handsome. He really inhabited a dark place many of us escaped from, and he evoked it with enormous restraint and integrity. The darkness clearly haunted him, but he turned it into a thing of beauty and redemption. For a while.
The Dish 