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Notes -
I finished Sandman. I see why people loved it, but it's interesting reading a commercial serial with literary pretensions, you can see the plots become more interesting and long running as Gaiman had more leash to play from his audience and publisher. I started it as a result of the all the Neil Gaiman furor, people kept saying he was a genius and I thought gee let me check it out. Reading between the lines, one very clearly sees Gaiman's sexuality spelled out in the pages.
I'm wrapping up Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer's bio of Pat Tillman, which I'd started last fall and then forgotten at my parents' house. It is a favorable biography, just short of hagiography, but I nonetheless find myself disliking Tillman. I should like him: he was an athlete, a reader, a striver. But I find myself so frustrated with Tillman! Krakauer writes off his high school assault charge, which Tillman maneuvered with his lawyer to get out of by cleverly hiding it from the colleges he was recruited by to get a scholarship offer, then present to the judge that he had a scholarship and if the judge didn't have mercy he would lose the scholarship. Krakauer never grapples with how to square this with Tillman's emphasis on honesty with regards to personal values and straightforwardness in relationships. Tillman gets credited with turning down a massive contract to change teams so he could stick with the Cardinals, who proceeded to bench him; Krakauer presents this as an unconcern with money, I see it as annoying stupidity and weakness, letting the billionaire's take advantage of you. Tillman joining the Rangers was admirable, as was his written opposition to the conduct of the wars, but I'm once again frustrated by him. His decision to join as a grunt instead of an officer mirrors, exactly, the decision made by one of my best friends to join the Marines. Tillman was, of course, killed by friendly fire, my childhood friend was permanently traumatized after being caught in a "friendly" artillery barrage for hours. Knowing my friend, I always wondered if he would have wound up so fucked up if he had gone in as an officer, because he was such a brilliant competent guy. But he wanted to, like Tillman, go in as a grunt, go in to fight, and as a result they lost everything. It's a similar dynamic to turning down money to change teams, self-victimizing out of a misguided sense of honor. I'm getting to the end of the book, which is clearly going to be a second-by-second breakdown of the day Pat died, followed by the fallout. I'm curious to see if I get anything out of it all.
It's interesting realizing that Krakauer's assumptions are a little different, in 2009, than ours are today. He wrote just after Obama's first election, when there was still a feeling that the GWOT and its accoutrements were reversible. It turned out that they weren't, or at least that no one was much interested in doing so. Obama would disappoint his anti-war supporters, and constant overseas deployments in semi-legal wars and police actions are now a fact of American life, accepted by everyone to varying degrees.
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