Michael Kelly was a national treasure writing insightful columns that were a delight to read and an oasis of truth in a deceitful time. This article by Bret Stephens is an ode to Kelly who died in Iraq ten years ago. This is the part that stuck in my mind.
Take his view of Frank Sinatra. Everyone loved Old Blue Eyes and mourned him when he died in 1998. Everyone except Michael Kelly.Kelly hated Frank because Frank had invented Cool, and Cool had replaced Smart. What was Smart? It was Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca: "He possesses an outward cynicism, but at his core he is a square. . . . He is willing to die for his beliefs, and his beliefs are, although he takes pains to hide it, old-fashioned. He believes in truth, justice, the American way, and love. . . . When there is a war, he goes to it. . . . He may be world weary, but he is not ironic."Cool was something else. "Cool said the old values were for suckers. . . . Cool didn't go to war; Saps went to war, and anyway, cool had no beliefs he was willing to die for. Cool never, ever, got in a fight it might lose; cool had friends who could take care of that sort of thing."It never, ever would have occurred to me to make the distinction until I read Kelly's column. And then I understood Sinatra. And then I understood Kelly, too.
Sometimes something that is true a decade or more ago becomes, somehow, a supernova of truth. Today, cool is omnipresent; embodies in Obama, the comedians on Comedy Channel and in video games like "Bioshock" where it's defenders tell us, to "chill man, it's only a game." And Mein Kampf is only a book.
1 comment:
I remember reading his last collection of columns in book form and wistfully wishing he were still here, his story on Ted Kennedy was priceless ! He would have had a field day with the duplicitous nature of our government. Sometimes I wonder if his death was orchestrated and caused by government....
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