WOULD WALT WHITMAN STAY IN THE PALESTINE HOTEL?

It works this way with me: a thought flashes through my brain at the speed of light and before I can do anything with this stroke of genius it's gone; society is deprived of the product of my great mind. I don't know how many thoughts are wasted each day; ten per? Twenty? I don't know. But every once in a while one of those lost and gone forever thoughts return from the intergalactic blackness of thoughtsuckingness and I grasp it.

That happened yesterday.

While switching ball games I happened to catch some dopey woman reporter defend the bogus dispatches from Iraq as exactly what we should expect; "it’s so dangerous there a reporter can’t leave the Palestine Hotel"; "they’ll get killed; they are frightened." She said this with that practiced sincere smile on her face that all female "reporters" seem to learn in all the right places; she said it as if reporting from the safety of the Palestine Hotel was perfectly normal. The only thing a reporter could do.

It's true that Hotel Bulletin reporting is the only thing that reporters who graduate from the prestigious journalism schools and fed a diet of left wing books and journals for four years can do. The universities are good at teaching cowardice and demanding students conform to the latest Lefy fad. Students are educated to think courage is sneaking around Washington bars picking up the latest dirt on some Republican politico or surfing the net for old slander that can be quoted in the next column.

Was it always this way?

Believe it or not, there have been reporters in the past who had the balls to get out of the Palestine Hotels of their era and risk their lives to report. No matter the risk, those guys gave us the news and sometimes they died doing it. Starting with that 16 year old kid in the Revolutionary War, Robert Penn Martin, the one who kept a daily diary that was published later and has become the main source for every historian who writes about that war. That kid walked from the woods of Maine to Boston so he could join up. He didn't go to the right schools," he graduated from the fourth grade" which meant he wasn't smart enough to find a hotel in New York or Philadelphia in which to hide throughout the war even if he had wanted safe haven.

And then there's the guy who wrote this one:

Adieu, dear comrade!
Your mission is fulfill’d—but I, more warlike,
Myself, and this contentious soul of mine,
Still on our own campaigning bound,
Through untried roads, with ambushes, opponents lined,
Through many a sharp defeat and many a crisis—often baffled,
Here marching, ever marching on, a war fight out—aye here,
To fiercer, weightier battles give expression....

------Walt Whitman

Written by someone who spent the Civil War war in a Palestine Hotel? Hell no, but Walt Whitman had the balls to report from the front during the Civil War. He had the guts to risk leaving his Palestine Hotel, the guts to spend the years from 1847 to 1855 writing twelve poems that he published himself, and the guts to write Leaves of Grass.

And how about this one: "Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull unrelenting no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved......

----Ernest Hemingway

"Failure and well-disguised cowardice" is a suit that drapes about the reporters from the Palestine Hotel like a tailor made suit. Hemingway, the guy who wrote a few books in his time, reported from the trenches during WWI and wrote from the hills of Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway would have shot the gutless pricks who hang out in the Palestine Hotel. Hemingway would have told the truth or died typing.

And you don’t describe the feeling of a war this way from some posh hotel bar: "If you go long enough without a bath, even the fleas will leave you alone..." as Ernie Pyle explained it several times a week during WWII. Ernie Pyle wouldn’t have written a word in or about the Palestine Hotel. Ernie was killed by a Japanese sniper but no Jap sniper could kill what he wrote.

So it is in this war, the one not inside the Palestine Hotel, the one our guys are fighting (and winning by the way), the one Big Media has decided not to tell us about. The one we aren't allowed to learn about. But there are a few guys with balls who tell the truth. One of them, Michael Yon writes:

The operation has begun. The Commander of Deuce Four, LTC Erik Kurilla, was shot three times in combat yesterday in front of my eyes. Despite being seriously wounded, LTC Kurilla immediately rejoined the intense and close-quarter fight that ended in hand-to-hand combat. LTC Kurilla continued to direct his men until a medic gave him morphine and the men took him away.

The paragraph above appeared in a blog called, Michael Yon, who is one of the guys who didn't go to the right schools and naturally can't get a job anywhere in MSM. Michael, like Walt Whitman before him, has the balls to just write it and live off our purchases of his output. Another blog called In the Red Zone written by Michael Vincent was telling us the truth. Vincent was killed in some shithole somewhere in Iraq by some tire head who thinks democracy is a sin against God.

A truth is being reported all the time by a guy named Major K who posts:

He was not grazed on the side, he was shot through the center of his neck. SGT C. already knew at the time that his unit was under attack by a sniper. As his men came to get him out of the line of fire he warned them to stay back. He knew that one of them could be next, and he was unwilling to put his men at risk. Well, they just wouldn't have it, and came forward anyway, pulling him back to a covered position where they administered first-aid and prepared to evacuate him. Luckily, no one else was hit that day. SGT C. was evacuated to the Military Hospital in the Green zone where he was pronounced the luckiest man in Iraq. The sniper's bullet had passed through his neck and throat with an absolute minimum of damage. It missed his carotid artery, jugular vein, spine, and spinal cord by millimeters. He was offered the opportunity to fly to Germany and probably then on to the US to recuperate by the medical staff. He turned it down. He wanted to get back to his men and his brothers in Charlie Company.

The Iraq reporters, a synonym these days for cowards, slink through each day inside the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad pretending they are doing their job. Unfortunately their equally gutless bosses proudly strut around the chic bars in New York and Washington D.C. always having time for the next TV interview, telling everyone who will listen about how much guts it takes to challenge that prick Bush every day. Each morning they vomit out the latest from the Palestine Hotel and wonder why circulation has fallen 9%......