fuck. I didn't know him very well. Stopped reading OW as often & somehow was too dim to even realize who G'Kar was. but such a decent guy, such a loss. Fuck, fuck fuck.
The end of the post is especially heartbreaking. Christ.
The thing that I'm really going to miss about him is that he was such a good explainer of military matters, rolling together the technology, history, and culture to show how choices get made, what priorities apply and how those change, and so on. There are a lot more good ranters than explainers in the world. If anything, his explanations tended to lead me further away from his own conclusions, but on the basis of understanding rather than guesswork, and that's one of the best things a person can do for another. Goddamn this tragic waste.
Oh my fucking God. Oh sweet Jesus. Ohh. Ohh.
Instant tears. I argued so hard with Andrew at ObsWi. I told him not to go.
Ohh, no.
I literally had nightmares about this. Week after week. Month after month.
I was going to the post office today, to mail out some DVD movies he said he'd be glad to get.
I spent over a dozen hours last week copying them.
We .... oh, fuck it. fuck it all. just fuck it all and fuck it all and fuck it all.
I'm so sorry for Amanda.
I'll say a bunch of stuff later. I hope. I have a bunch of stuff to say, anyway.
But fuck it all.
Andy was an early blogosphere friend. We squabbled, we made up, we emailed a lot.
I turn out to be so no good with words.
The words of Delenn (a character in B5) might be appropriate here: "Let us light candles to honor the stars that will go out in the Universe tonight."
(Personal update: my daughter returns from Iraq on leave for two weeks and goes back in February)
You must be so glad to see her.
I think -- though I'm not entirely sure -- that this article is about Andy's death. He was ambushed yesterday.
He was a wonderful, wonderful person, and gutsy and honorable and funny.
He said not to politicize his death. The next time someone asks, hey, why not try the surge? What the heck?, as though it was some sort of cost-free option, the fact that I do not rip that person's lungs out will be due entirely to respect for Andy.
Hilzoy, sincerest condolences to you as well.
More generally, Death, could you give it a fricking rest for a bit? k tks
It is said that the future is always born in pain. The history of war is the history of pain. If we are wise, what is born of that pain matures into the promise of a better world, because we learn that we can no longer afford the mistakes of the past.-- Citizen G'Kar, Babylon 5
Oh my God. I can't believe how shocked I am.
He was writing for a CO newspaper, too, I think. I don't know if he was still doing that. I thought it was so powerful and good to see a clear, honorable writer talking about his work.
Every death makes it worse, and new again.
That accords with the comments on his blog on the newspaper -- the other death was (according to those comments) a captain he worked with.
He really was a decent guy -- I got into a couple of conversations with him about stuff that people are very touchy about, and he was always willing to work with you: to accept that something contentious sounding wasn't meant as an insult, to take an apology in good humor and start fresh... And I'll remember not to use his death as evidence of anything about the war.
Hilzoy, please accept my condolences too. A fine man will always be missed.
Multiply this one times one and a half million, and you'll have some idea of how Iraqis feel right now.
This is shocking and sad. Condolences to all with a personal connection to him.
For my part, when I read him he seemed like the kind of decent conservative that radicals like myself need.
This is terrible news. My deepest condolences.
For those who didn't click through, I request that you regard his request:
I do ask (not that I'm in a position to enforce this) that no one try to use my death to further their political purposes. I went to Iraq and did what I did for my reasons, not yours. My life isn't a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side. If you think the U.S. should stay in Iraq, don't drag me into it by claiming that somehow my death demands us staying in Iraq. If you think the U.S. ought to get out tomorrow, don't cite my name as an example of someone's life who was wasted by our mission in Iraq.
There's a picture of him here. His dad and mother in law comment in that thread. Sad.
And my condolences to Hilzoy, too. I can't imagine how hard it must be to have to post something like this.
Please, stras. Not now.
I mean absolutely no disrespect to Andew Olmsted. The death of any human being anywhere is a tragedy and any death by war is a pointless, stupid, horrible crime. But the overwhelming majority of the victims of war don't have names and faces to us the way Andrew Olmsted does. We'll read about some random massacre or bombing or missile strike in Africa or the Middle East, and those victims will be lucky to be represented as a body count, much less as actual human beings. I'm not trying to reduce Andrew Olmsted's death at all. What I'm asking people - begging - is for them to try to extend the same empathy they have for Andrew Olmsted to all those other victims, equally tragic and equally dead.
Psychologically, that's not going to happen. I knew him personally, and I'm not going to feel the same about someone I didn't know. Politically, (a) anyone likely to read this thread agrees with you already about the damn war, so you're not talking to anyone who needs to be convinced, and (b) he asked specifically that no one use his death to make political points, and I'd very much like to see that request honored. Please drop it.
I looked on the Pentagon's website and couldn't find any mention of Andrew's death. Based on the press releases, it'll probably be Monday before they identify the three soldiers killed yesterday.
I'm so sorry for his family and friends.
Psychologically, that's not going to happen. I knew him personally, and I'm not going to feel the same about someone I didn't know.
But you can try. And I don't see how it's wrong to bring up deaths in wartime at the death of someone who died fighting in a war.
Stras, I'm deleting any future comments from you on this thread.
And I don't see how it's wrong
More a question of appropriateness. Can we have this conversation on another thread at another time?
16,26:Andrew also asked us to respect his decision to go to Iraq, and while I certainly respected Andrew and that decision, after long consideration I felt that as an anti-war citizen I had a right and a duty to express an opinion or feeling about that decision to Andrew, to interject myself between Andrew and his command, or between Andrew and his perceived duty.
Maybe that was very wrong, presumptuous and unkind. It was a tough call in an old argument. Andrew was at least kind to me about it.
It probably won't be necessary to use Andrew as a political weapon or tool. But my conscience must make that call, with Andrew's wishes only one among other factors.
And all arguments on some other day.
Yes, some other day when the emotional pull will not be so great. When we can conveniently forget the strong emotions generated by such a tragic event, and why these things matter to human beings.
What complex emotions this inspires. That any should die so terribly is awful, and wrong. My condolences to those near him. The rest of it... discomfiting, queasy, and muted per requests.
"There's a picture of him here."
The mustache was a late development, and he found it kinda silly, at least for a while (I didn't update on that recently, but he said so in the first few months).
He did it because Iraqis supposedly respect the facial hair, and all.
That was Andy. He really wanted to do good.
"What I'm asking people - begging - is for them to try to extend the same empathy they have for Andrew Olmsted to all those other victims, equally tragic and equally dead."
If you actually respect people, you might trust that you needn't ask. It's possible that you are not actually the only person who has such awareness, and that people you respect don't need someone else to educate and enlighten them with your uniquely valuable insights.
Oh shit. Shit shit shit. What a terrible thing. Fuck.
40 says it all.
"...an einem Tag, der so ruhig und so still war, daß der Heeresbericht sich auf den Satz beschränkte, im Westen sei nichts Neues zu melden."
Christ, that's heartbreaking and infuriating. Condolences to all who knew him.
It's just so overwhelmingly terrible.
(And fuck, I see Gawker has picked it up.)
What a fucking waste. I'm so sorry for Andrew's family.
Just had me first whiskey since 11/2006. Are we gonna have a wake around here or not? I know it's Friday night, but I think AO deserves some playlists or poetry or dirty limericks or something.
Andrew's post was warm & funny, and grievin is so lonesome and exhaustin and borin.
Christ, I should have known better than to go looking for the Gawker link.
46: It's wretched. I can comment there, and at first thought I should say something, and then just decided that I didn't want to participate at all.
I wish I knew him well enough to contribute a funny story or two--as it is, I'd only come up with either something way too bitter & political or way too maudlin. So I'll just ask: is Babylon 5 seriously that good? I'm deeply skeptical.
48:Well, it was one of the first, if not the only series to have a multi-year plot arc. No kidding, the exact center of its 5-yr span is the critical episode that explains everything before and sets up everything after. Straczynski had the 100 episode structure in mind and used it.
Now as usual, individual stories were watchable independently (yeccch...blogging Becks' style), with individual character arcs and substories, but most contributed in subtle ways to the overall.
Very an adult SF series. Pretty dark.
48: Not to speak ill of the dead... but Andrew's taste in entertainment was, shall we say, suspect. (OTOH, I think he'd probably have been the first person to admit that.)
It's good (like most of new-BSG) if you're comfortable with sf/f trappings. A lot of people aren't.
So Babylon 5 felt much more like a novel than most series, with characters and situations always gradually changing in directions you didn't quite understand (much more and faster than Tony Soprano) but that you knew would make sense further on. The process of very slow revelation, with each episode standing well enough alone but adding just enough information to tantalize without frustration was a lot of fun.
Had the usual SF elements, well done with a lot of backstory:multiple interesting races, technologies, etc.
I don't think it was great art but I watched every episode. Probably as good as TV SF ever got. Maybe ever will.
Katherine, the good points of B5 are really, really good. The work as a whole is not as great as its creator's hopes or plans, and sometimes you have to deal with fans who read the producer's account of what he had in mind and take that as reality rather than what ended up on the screen. And even he admits that some stuff just plain didn't work, for one reason or another. If you like science fiction in general, it's an easy recommendation as well worth the time to watch. If you dabble very selectively in sf, then I'd watch a few select episodes and see if you like them before diving in. Recommendations for that if and only if you want 'em.
I'm neither particularly bothered by nor particularly enamored of S.F.--I really like the new Battlestar Galactica. But it has to be pretty damn good to be worth the abuse I'd take for it.
is Babylon 5 seriously that good?
It was an ambitious series, Straczynski gets points for that. I was never a dedicated viewer--so fans can feel free to discount my opinion--but what I saw seemed to combine the worse qualities of an SF series, namely aliens with silly names and siller makeup, with the worse qualities of a soap opera, namely, elaborate plots which seemed to go nowhere, forever. On the other hand, I can remember watching episodes that were riveting.
Somehow, even though I was/am an enormous X-Files and Buffy fan, I just never caught the B5 bug. I never really cared enough to believe in their world. But it's all available on DVD, so if you have any interest at all in SF TV, it's worth renting the first season and seeing for yourself.
B5 is like a soap opera: if you watch one episode, the only thing you notice is the weaknesses. If you watch a bunch of episodes, all you care about is finding out what happens next.
The actors that play aliens (G'Kar included) were noticeably better than the ones that played humans, presumably because they could cast ugly people in the roles.
Being able to act decently in facial prosthetics is also something of a rare and special skill, I've heard. It makes sense, certainly.
Again, late, but this kills me. My only relation to the Major Olmstead was reading his work and yelling at him across the internet a couple of times, but Jesus Christ Fuck Cunt. Pardon the profanity, but this shit is intolerable; the man was smart, funny, and, at least intellectually, generous. I want to break something, and according to the wishes of the deceased, I shall do so indiscriminately.
P.S. All of stras' comments were inappropriate, and should be nudged towards the memory hole. stras: you might be correct, but either you didn't give enough of a fuck to read the man's last wishes or you disregarded them. In either case, I see no reason for posterity to remember it. Your reputation will be better for it.
It's not possible for me *not* to feel political to some degree about Andrew's death, nor for me to *not* to feel what a waste it was, and Andrew's not the only friend whose wishes I have disrespected after death - especially the kind of friend who says "Don't be maudlin! Don't be sad!" because, dammit, what else can you be? I argued with Andrew a lot, but political disagreement didn't mean personal disrespect.
Am feeling less raw about Obwing's wake thread now so many people who had never had any contact with Andrew before are piling in to do the American-y "London Hurts" thing. For some people it's genuine, for others I think it's just a goddamned opportunity to get sentimental and weepy in the right kind of way on such a proper occasion for that.
But I'm sorrier than I can say about Andrew's death.
(I take it slightly back: there are still people commenting who actually knew Andrew, in among all the bloggers who didn't.)
48 and 55: Almost every plot element introduced did go somewhere, but it might take years to do it.
B5's tragic flaw was that JMS thought his five-year storyline was going to get cancelled after the fourth year, so he rushed through the climax of the important part of the story in season 4, then the show was renewed against expectations, so season 5 contains a lot of fumbling around looking for a new storyline (but also has resolutions to some of the threads that they didn't have time to wrap in season 4, so you can't just skip it, unfortunately.)
(Also, both of the human male leads, Sheridan and Sinclair, will just NOT STOP SMIRKING through the ENTIRE FIVE SEASONS and I just want to PUNCH THEM IN THE FACE. They make the actors playing silly-makeup aliens look damn good by comparison.)
Andreas Katsulis' portrayal of Ambassador/Citizen G'Kar, in particular, is heartbreaking -- at first he seems there for comic relief, but in the end he's a deep, memorable, tragic figure with some amazing writing (esp. the "born in pain" monologue that meant so much to Olmsted), and Katsulis should have gotten some kind of award for Best Acting Through A Freaky Latex Prosthesis, EVER.
If you like the way BSG plays with current political issue through a fractured mirror, B5 has some of the same -- the Centauri/Narn conflict has something to say about the Israeli/Palestinean, for example.
It's a big commitment of a show, and you need to get at least four or five episodes into the second season before it's fair to pass judgement on it.
For what it's worth, I was a skeptic about both Buffy and the Python programming language, and couldn't see how either one could possibly fail to suck, and loved both after I gave them a fair shot.
B5 has some aesthetic merits, too.
The music is a mix of synth and orchestral, composed by Christopher Franke, long one of the members of Tangerine Dream. The theme changed significantly for each season, and several of the flavors are really excellent, and there are some just plain wonderful passages along the way. As Straczynski settled in and realized just what a good deal he had in Franke, he wrote more key moments that happen in silence except for music, and the emotions run high in some of them. (I'm thinking here particularly of a sequence showing one race's bombardment from space of another's homeworld. The camera pans through the fleet as mass launchers fling asteroid debris down, and craters erupt on the world below, and it pans and pans to capture the character whose decisions led to this moment, and his horror and self-loathing are all too clear. But he won't turn away from it, and that refusal is important too.)
The show also really broke ground in the use of computer graphics for television, not just in the space shots (which are altogether lovely) but in digital set extension and other things that have now become commonplace. One of my favorite examples of this is the "meditation room" set with the big windows showing the station's axis overhead and traffic coming and going. Lots of folks figure that the view out the window is CGI. But in fact everything in that room apart from a few marks on the floor is CGI: the walls, ceiling, windows, everything. And virtually nobody ever realizes it. Not all the effects work, but the willingness to keep pushing led to some remarkable successes.
Finally, though JMS can be an awful blowhard sometimes, I gotta give props - and more now than then - to a creator who did habitually show the virtues of cooperation over conflict, how kindness and love can change worlds, the rewards of integrity in times of corruption, the merits of overcoming fear...of a general humaneness. It's this rich warm heart that makes it worthwhile for me, at least, to deal with the shows sundry flaws.
Andrew was not free-diving or exploring the Amazon. Of course it is political.
The post itself contains political content, and his desire to have hilzoy put it up was political. I am sure Andrew understood how many thousands of people would read it.
It is all Andrew, in its blend of personal & political. It is, and I mean this in the best sense, a admirable piece of propaganda. Not propaganda for or against this particular war, or any other commonly disputatious or divisive positions, but for the concept and reality of the free citizen-soldier in a democracy.
Free citizen-soldiers in the democracy, for some reasons I can approach in understanding and some I will never come anywhere near, were obviously very important to Major Olmsted. By removing the tendentious elements from this event, the political advantage of this statement goes to Andrew.
i did not know about your departed friend until yesterday, my condolences
that gawker post was awful
how one can be so cruel and cynical
if i was a regular reader of that poster i would boycott her, though sure her karma is working on the reward without my efforts
My deepest condolences to Hilzoy and all who knew Andrew.
and congratulations to Swampcracker on the upcoming return of his daughter.
But for those who knew me and feel this pain, I think it's a good thing to realize that this pain has been felt by thousands and thousands (probably millions, actually) of other people all over the world. That is part of the cost of war, any war, no matter how justified. If everyone who feels this pain keeps that in mind the next time we have to decide whether or not war is a good idea, perhaps it will help us to make a more informed decision. Because it is pretty clear that the average American would not have supported the Iraq War had they known the costs going in. I am far too cynical to believe that any future debate over war will be any less vitriolic or emotional, but perhaps a few more people will realize just what those costs can be the next time.
My deepest sympathies to all.
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated ... As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness .... No man is an island, entire of itself ... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
(John Donne)
"Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.[10]"
...Judith Butler, via Wiki
By removing the tendentious elements from this event, the political advantage of this statement goes to Andrew.
Oh yes. And, the right bastardly thing is: I can't even bring myself to consider begrudging the rhetorical win.
Goddammit.
45: Andrew's post was warm & funny, and grievin is so lonesome and exhaustin and borin.
Holy shit. bob mcmanus is Fafnir???
71:I am not so free.
72:Shhhhh
Okay, to continue as obliquely as possible:
Institutions, especially the unassailable nearly invisible institutions like liberalism, capitalism, gender roles, are what make politics seem so trivial, ineffective, frustrating.
I find it interesting that not only is Andrew (and a cast of thousands) seeking to delimit his own role as citizen-soldier in the discourse but also (with a cast of thousands) seeking to delimit my role as a citizen in relationship to citizen-soldiers in the discourse. As a citizen in a democracy, I don't think I want soldiers defining and determining the roles.
It is also interesting that as I abstract from the particulars and concrete circumstances to the superstructure and institutional roles I am returned to a position of painful subjectivity and raw emotions. It doesn't hurt less when you see the patriarchy.
"For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us." Audre Lorde
For myself, honoring Andrew's request on the limits on comments is easy particularly because it is his last one. I have days and months and years ahead in which I can say whatever I wish about Iraq, the role of soldiers in American society, and everything else that might be related, and his life and death will be influencing what I say on those things. But he has nothing new to add and never will now. I don't feel deprived by grieving in personal terms now and letting his wake thread have the nature he wanted for it. There are other days for the rest...for those of us who remain.
I don't feel deprived by grieving in personal terms now and letting his wake thread have the nature he wanted for it.
Ya know, Bruce, I don't think I have ever personally insulted you, certainly not to the degree you have insulted me, here and at Crooked Timber.
This isn't about me or my perogatives. And it really isn't about Andrew or his wishes. Andrew's dead. It is about everybody at the wake.
"Only the dead have seen the end of war."
Plato* ...as quoted at the top by Andrew
They showed Olmsted's name at the end of This Week in Washington yesterday, along with the other soldiers who were killed last week.
Front-paged on MSNBC today.
I'd been thinking about rewatching B5 anyway, so since I'm sick at home with little to do besides refresh Unfogged, I went ahead and bought the first season on iTunes. If anyone's watching it for the first time, don't make any judgements on the pilot movie. It's embarrassingly lame in spots, but it sets up a lot of plot points so you kind of have to watch it. The weakest actor in the pilot is replaced in the series. Etc.