Daily archives: January 19th, 2007

“Hi! I’m Art Buchwald, and I just died.”

January 19, 2007
Humor
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Art Buchwald

I remember reading the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette when I was in grade school and high school. After returning from delivering the paper in the morning, I’d sit down at the dining room table with a bowl of cereal and read Art. He was incredible. He took me through the Nixon years, the Ford years. He explained national and world events more clearly than the front page ever did. The world is insane, and that’s all there is to it. Art was just stating the obvious, while the rest of the reporters played, “The Emperor Has No Clothes,” and took the world all too seriously.

“I never made the Enemies list, and it’s my biggest hurt to this day,” he said in his online obituary with the New York Times. Incredible. He credits Richard Nixon with making him rich. “I am not a crook made me rich,” he said.

He introduced me to satire, and I was captivated.

Somewhere in college I got too serious. I lost touch with Art. I “grew up” and tried to understand it all. I studied philosophy and flirted with the idea of becoming a Catholic priest. I wrote a very serious Master’s thesis on the Psalms of Lamentation. I left the seminary and started teaching. Theology.

And I started laughing again.

But I never caught up with Art, again. We had lost touch. Chicago papers don’t carry Art. They’re too serious. They’re obsessed with bad politicians and Silver Shovels and roped off elevators. And I never even bothered to look him up online. Turns out he was still at it:

Zeroing In on a Trillion (By Art Buchwald, January 2, 2007, Page C02)

So Many Cards, So Little Thought (By Art Buchwald, December 28, 2006, Page C08)

I’ll miss my old friend. He helped shape who I am like no teacher ever did. He first taught me to laugh at this crazy world. He made me feel good in spite of it all. The Professor of Satire is gone.

Lamentation?! Save me, Art!

He wrote this column for The Washington Post, with the intention that it be published after his death. He closed it thus:

I know it’s very egocentric to believe that someone is put on Earth for a reason. In my case, I like to think I was. And after this column appears in the paper following my passing, I would like to think it will either wind up on a cereal box top or be repeated every Thanksgiving Day.

So, “What’s it all about, Alfie?” is my way of saying goodbye.

Farewell, my friend.

The Real Cost of War

January 19, 2007
InternationalIraqRant
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In an article by New York Times reporter David Leonhardt, we learn the true cost of the war in Iraq. This analysis puts the real cost of the war at $300 BILLION a day.

In the days before the war almost five years ago, the Pentagon estimated that it would cost about $50 billion. Democratic staff members in Congress largely agreed. Lawrence Lindsey, a White House economic adviser, was a bit more realistic, predicting that the cost could go as high as $200 billion, but President Bush fired him in part for saying so.

These estimates probably would have turned out to be too optimistic even if the war had gone well. Throughout history, people have typically underestimated the cost of war, as William Nordhaus, a Yale economist, has pointed out.

But the deteriorating situation in Iraq has caused the initial predictions to be off the mark by a scale that is difficult to fathom. The operation itself — the helicopters, the tanks, the fuel needed to run them, the combat pay for enlisted troops, the salaries of reservists and contractors, the rebuilding of Iraq — is costing more than $300 million a day, estimates Scott Wallsten, an economist in Washington.

The analysis from there only gets more troubling:

The war has also guaranteed some big future expenses. Replacing the hardware used in Iraq and otherwise getting the United States military back into its prewar fighting shape could cost $100 billion. And if this war’s veterans receive disability payments and medical care at the same rate as veterans of the first gulf war, their health costs will add up to $250 billion. If the disability rate matches Vietnam’s, the number climbs higher. Either way, Ms. Bilmes says, “It’s like a miniature Medicare.”

In economic terms, you can think of these medical costs as the difference between how productive the soldiers would have been as, say, computer programmers or firefighters and how productive they will be as wounded veterans. In human terms, you can think of soldiers like Jason Poole, a young corporal profiled in The New York Times last year. Before the war, he had planned to be a teacher. After being hit by a roadside bomb in 2004, he spent hundreds of hours learning to walk and talk again, and he now splits his time between a community college and a hospital in Northern California.

Read the entire article here.