When the Book Babes Talk War, What Is It Good For?

I'll say it again: absolutely nothing. This week, Ellen leads off by introducing the genuinely compelling-sounding American Nightingale, a biography of Frances Slanger, a U.S. Army nurse who volunteered for the D-Day front and became famous after the publication of this letter in Stars and Stripes. But then Ellen decides to take another stab at analysis:

Naturally, [this] is the kind of story that will be trotted out in newspapers across the country to acknowledge D-Day. But in the shadow of the Abu Ghraib scandal, this heroic view seems such a sharp contrast to current reporting on another war that I wonder if readers' heads will do an "Exorcist"-like spin.

Poynter really should ask itself what benefit it derives from employing a book culture columnist who seemingly doesn't believe that the American book-and-newspaper-reading public can hold two not-even-that-contradictory ideas in its head at the same time. I don't know of anybody, whether they believe the Abu Ghraib 7 acted on their own or at the Pentagon's behest, or even if they think the whole Iraq project is a boondoggle of the highest order, who has been inspired by current events to doubt even for a second the valor of veterans in the Second World War.

Ellen then tries to peg this on what Vietnam-era soldiers-turned-novelists hath wrought; once Margo finally gets hold of the column, she at least tries to steer things in the direction of suggesting that war stories need to zoom out past closeups on individuals to look at the systemic costs of large-scale combat. Ellen counters, "The chicken-and-egg question is whether the American public shares your view, or if it's just the media (and liberal media at that) which focuses on the cost instead of the cause." That, of course, is not a chicken-and-egg question at all, and when she ultimately concludes "the more nuanced writing from the Vietnam era seeks to establish [that] political and military solutions are inseparable," savvy readers will ask themselves what nuanced Vietnam-era writers has she been reading?