Here's the story I was waiting for to contrast with Bink's diaryon Sunday, "Privileged Girls in an Elite Suburb Are Slightly Uncomfortable."
In "Injured in Iraq, a Soldier Is Shattered at Home," this morning's New York Times reports the sad tale of an Iraq war veteran from an impoverished town in southwestern Pennsylvania. Blinded and disabled on the 54th day of the war, he now "faces charges of attempted homicide, assault and arson in the burning of a family trailer in February."
Both stories are important in gaining an understanding of American lives on either side of the great economic divide.
Many who responded to Bink's diary felt that The Times was being "typically elitist" in reporting the so-called woes of high-achieving teenage girls whose only apparent stressors were which Ivy League college would accept them this year. These respondents felt it was a non-story, a fluff piece, more deserving of a place on the style pages rather than a sociological analysis.
I disagree. Using that line of thinking, I could use a reductio ad absurdum argument and claim that the following description of the Iraq vet's life also has very little relation to most middle-class Kossack lives:
Fayette County in southwestern Pennsylvania, once a prosperous coal mining center, is now one of the poorest counties in the state. The bucolic but ramshackle town of Dunbar sits off State Route 119 near the intersection marked by the Butchko Brothers junkyard.
Past the railroad tracks and not far up Hardy Hill Road, the blackened remains of Mr. Ross’s hillside trailer are testament to his disintegration. The Support our Troops ribbon is charred, the No Trespassing sign unfazed.
Mr. Ross lived in that trailer, where his father shot his stepmother, at several points in his life, including alone after he returned from Iraq. Its most recent tenant, his younger brother, Thomas, was in jail when the fire occurred.
Many in Mr. Ross’s large, quarreling family are on one side of the law or the other, prison guards or prisoners, police officers or probationers. Their internal feuds are so commonplace that family reunions have to be carefully plotted with an eye to who has a protective order out against whom, Mr. Ross’s 25-year-old cousin, Joseph Lee Ross, joked....
As I wrote the other day, I've been reading The Times for 25 years. It's the paper of record -- AND it's far from perfect. I can live with both of those facts. Yes, the Jayson Blair case was shameful, it didn't confront the Bushies strongly enough before the invasion of Iraq, and the Judith Miller fiasco was unforgivable.
But remember, it was also The Times that published Joseph Wilson op-ed's piece that jump-started the unraveling of Bush-Cheney's WMD claims. It remains a serious paper: thorough, detailed, and filled with some of the best damn writers around, and most days it succeeds in providing an intelligent, balanced approach to reporting. (And it also has no respect for the Bush-Cheney administration.)
Personally, having gone to college and grad school and having worked in and around Newton, Mass., with friends who sent their kids to the high school featured in The Times piece, I was just as keen to read about that class of teens as I am to know about the underbelly serving in the military alongside my 20-year-old, middle-class Marine son, who is days away from finishing his deployment in Iraq.
Anyway, what do YOU think? Discuss, please.