Category: please let it end

A Tool's Guide to Loot

"We fear the anarchy, the feral fanaticism and, at the heart of it, the primeval bugbear . . . " Yes, and what we fear most of all has come to pass: Linton Weeks, the WaPo's poetaster of Style, breaks down the cultural meaning of looting. But 12 or so graphs into his bugbear-baiting, our Style savant clearly loses track of things and resorts to that last desperate gambit of all lazy elementary school book report authors: He supplies a dictionary etymology. "The word 'loot' comes from Sanskrit and means 'booty' or 'spoil.'" But I dunno, that just isn't folksy enough somehow, is it? You can just picture Linton whittling on the porch as he adds: "It has that basic sound to the ear. Something meaningful; something valuable."

Something . . . meandering. But, you know, also historically significant:

Surely looting dates back to the dawn of humans and their caves full of stuff. Looting has always been a tenet of war. The Vandals looted Rome in the 5th century. The Nazis were notorious looters.

Caves. Vandals. Nazis. Check. Now let's go for some contemporary relevance, shall we?

We've seen looting by the rich before a company like Enron goes bust. And looting by the poor after a National Basketball Association game.

And we've seen a horrifying national calamity looted for precious-sounding copy that tells us precisely nothing. We never thought we'd say this, but if this is how the Style section rallies to a Katrina-scale catastrophe, it should stick to writing about all the pretty things it sees in summer. -- HOLLY MARTINS

Carried Away [Washington Post]

READ MORE: katrina , linton weeks , please let it end , style , washington post

David Broder's Beaver Island Exile

OK, so maybe we've been a little hard on the WaPo Style section's handling of the wondrous sensorium that is summer. After all, we very nearly missed David Broder's dispatch on the security fence surrounding his own summer getaway, which we are so very happy to report is named Beaver Island. (What, the guy couldn't find it on Pay Per View?) Yet--wouldn't you know it--the island's hifalutin security measures proved unequal to a crisis that befell Broder and his 500 or so other cabin retreaters hoping to cross a channel from Lake Michigan via a drawbridge on the fritz:

An electrical surge in the municipal power plant had knocked out switches in the bridge controls, and no one knew how to repair them -- until a Highway Department technician could drive up from Lansing. That meant that the 8:30 trip from Charlevoix didn't leave until 1:15 in the afternoon.

On most Sundays this would have bothered only a few passengers and those waiting for the Sunday papers to arrive on the island. But this was the Sunday of Homecoming Weekend, the busiest day of the summer. On Sunday afternoon and early evening, all the visitors and island folks throng to the Holy Cross Parish Hall for a charity dinner -- a half-chicken, roasted on an outdoor grill; mounds of mashed potatoes and gravy; sweet corn; cole slaw; home-baked biscuits and pies; coffee and cold drinks, $10 for adults, $5 for children.

The Dean of the DC Press Corps actually drones further on--though unconscionably, he refrains from itemizing the cold drinks menu!--before rumbling into the moral of the tale:

Now, I ask you, is it just a coincidence that things went haywire around the time the fence went up, or is there a message for those homeland security bureaucrats in Washington?

Well, since you ask, Mr. Dean, Sir: It's pretty much a coincidence. Yepper. But nice job of hitting your wordcount--and of demonstrating that a columnist doesn't have to be exiled to Crawford to plunge readers into teeth-gnashing banality. --HOLLY MARTINS

Homeland Security on Beaver Island [WaPo]

READ MORE: david broder , please let it end , summer , washington post

The Gentle Snorts of Our Readers Nodding Off. . .

In Installment No. 947 of the ongoing "It's Summer, and We're Officially Out of Ideas" series, editors of the WaPo Style section at least stop flogging the old heat-and-shade warhorses. Today, instead, they turn the redoubtable Linton Weeks loose on "the sounds of summer." Get out your onomonopoeia headphones, nimble readers:

As the season fades into fall, these are some sounds we have savored: The scruuussshh of a full-grown man sliding through the dust into third base. The dinka-plinka of the ice cream van skulking about the neighborhood. The rumble of coming thunder and the white-noise pleasantness of an afternoon rain. Wasps whispering, bullfrogs bellowing, the crisp flapping of the flag on the 17th green, the metronomic numbness of ocean waves and the ker-swooch ignition of charcoal on the grill.

Yes, the fulsome dinka-plinka, the lovely scruussshh; as one fond editor acquaintance once remarked: "That's not writing; that's writin'!" Still, amid all the bellowing froggies and whispering wasps--who we are almost certain are Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, by the way--this stray quote caught our, uhm, ear:

"I think I hear humidity," says Andy Rosenberg, a broadcast engineer who has worked at National Public Radio for more than 30 years. "I think it has to do with the density of the air. Things sound kind of deadened."

Dude, that's not humidity: That's Susan Stamberg. -- HOLLY MARTINS

The Sounds of Summer [WaPo]

READ MORE: please let it end , style section , summer , washington post

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