21 For the Salute … Turn Everything Else Upon the Enemy
Aug 27 '03
The Bottom Line If there is to be one, let it be free of the truckling-popular, the smug. Honor the old veterans who made this site what it was at its best
It is rare these days that my hibernation is interrupted by events at Epinions, of all unlikely places. But I am given to understand that there is a move afoot to establish a sort of Cooperstown of the site; and it falls (he said modestly) to me to speak for, as it were, the Veterans’s Committee.
Jack Lewis (the don, that is) once observed that while most moderns would consider themselves superior to, and at the same time tend to flee, a dinosaur, the inquisitive amongst them would at least find the dinosaur, should one suddenly appear, worthy of study. Well, having been a member in good standing in this parish (St Nirav’s and All Servers) since 9 OCT 1999 – and having in all that time been ‘known to the treasurer’ and a long-time vestry member, at that – I doubtless qualify as a ‘dinosaur’ for most of y’all. But, again, that precisely vests me with a certain rare perspective, and it is a very meet, right, and proper thing, and my bounden duty, that I should be the one to remind all of y’all of the giants upon whose shoulders you stand.
As it happens, I’ve had rather more to do with castigating than with commending members here, if for no other reason than that so many people who write (if you can call it that) for the site are more deserving of being damned than of being praised. It would be incredibly, dismayingly easy, though lengthy, to nominate an Epinions Hall of Shame, and I have on several occasions begun the task. That I never completed that task is a tribute to my cardiologist’s advice – no, it’s not. Actually, it’s the result of having ceased finally to give enough of a damn to make the labor involved worth my time. But a Hall of Fame? That is at once trickier, less labor-intensive, and more worthwhile.
Unlike most Halls of Fame, I see no reason why ours ought be limited to the retired or the inactive, but insofar as I am dealing with veterans, in the main, most of those I would place in the pantheon have long since shaken the unrewarding dust of this place from their feet and departed.
Nor are my criteria weighted towards praising mere controversialists, as such. There have been times management has been in the wrong, and I have done as much as anyone, publicly and privately, to address those wrongs; but I don’t think that that alone qualifies a member for nomination to the Hall. There have been still more times – in fact, for some years now, those times have been effectively ‘twenty-four㢼㢼 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year’ – there have been still more occasions on which, despite the best efforts of management and of the better writers hereabouts, the site’s worth, potential, and available Income Share have been, respectively, obscured (well, covered up with manure to a depth of several fathoms, really), thwarted, and wasted by and upon the Usual Suspects. The Bundists and the Brownshirts and the Mommy-Knows-Best Brigade. The subliterate peddlers of Hallmark platitudes and high-prole taste. The crooks, thieves, scam artists, grifters, fakes, titled plagiarists, fraudulent pullers of heartstrings, creators of multiple identities, defrocked cheats and phonies, twits (insert your own vowel), idjits, clotpolls, dim bulbs, idiotarians, and general fæces Romuli. We all know who they are: the backscratchers, circle-formers, trade-off artists, heifers (fried, baked, smoked, or broiled), pietistic fellatrices, badged-, hatted- and titled-smarms: the Uriah Heeps, Eddie Haskells, and Carmelita Spatses of the site (credit: CDE). Merely standing up to them is not in itself grounds for being acclaimed as a Hall-of-Famer, either: as the old rector of St Christopher’s used to say, ‘you don’t get points for doing what your duty minimally requires of any decent person.’
So who, then, is to be revered?
Self-evidently, those of whom one can truly say, Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumpsice. (For those who attended Baylor or TU, I translate: ‘Reader, if you seek his monument, look about you.’)
On that basis, let the commendations be made.
To Jeff Clow and his lovely wife Bev, bonies7 and Amana97, as having from the beginning done excellent work, encouraged the newcomer, and promoted a spirit of collegiality at the site that has long since been lost with the influx of people whom no sane person would acknowledge as a ‘colleague’ on a bet;
To the Old Sarge, Dave Abrams, Grouch, so inappositely named, who always insisted upon standards and professionalism, and incarnates both whenever he touches a keyboard: the sort of man, the sort of mensch, whom I and all decent people should wish to be when we grow up;
To Laura Winzeler, Leah, at once feisty and giving, generous yet uncompromising on the principles of the craft, who created the first adumbration of what became the site’s cherished ‘Write-Offs’ with her Cyber Taste-Offs in Wine, a category she effectively established and animated;
To SS Peter and Paul, our patrons, PeterLRuden and sweetpaulie, gentlemen and scholars, exemplars of how to combine passion and precision in writing, ostensibly of wine, but actually of Life Its Own Self;
To Chris Conti, caconti, my endlessly patient Ol’ Pardner, who, with a certain grousing old military historian alongside, created and co-named the phenomenon of the Write-Off as it is known today, and was long engaged in bringing to the Books section, every Thursday, in his Write-Off contributions, youthful enthusiasm and critical engagement in a single, sometimes deliciously snarky package – and whose personal courage, often in the face of the first assaults of the Unco’ Guid’s little Waffen-SS around here, set a standard for bringing the personal touch to reviews that is still followed today;
To CDE, Curtis Edmonds, CurtisEdmonds, scourge of cant and fakery, wit, Texan, Christian gentleman, National Review Online contributor, and indefatigable consumer of Dr Pepper, whose media reviews were and remain, not a breath, but rather a cleansing norther, of common sense and rare perception;
To Dwight Moody, Esq., counsel, maven of singlemalts, SUVs, suburban anomie, shortstops, sons, spouses, servers, software, and Slow-Smoked Real By-God Barbeque, landlord and proprietor of that rollicking old inn that yet preserves, as nowhere else quite does, the hopes, now long dashed, that once animated the Old Ones to throw themselves into this site and its potential;
To Our Own Best, kchowell, whose book reviews, and still more whose splendid self, refute C. P. Snow’s notion of the Two Cultures: who marries a sense of æsthetics to keen acuity and the analytical mind, and who truly understands the infield fly rule;
To My Two Yentas, hadassahchana and theeye, who have ‘at all times and in all places’ exemplified the heights to which human dignity and decency can reach, who can and do turn their keyboards to any worthy subject, and who have touched no subject that they have not illuminated;
To Casey Stewart, kcfoxy, one of the earliest, least-deserving-of-it, and longest-suffering victims of the unrelenting hatred of the mediocre and the pathologically self-centered, but whom such spite can never touch, she being too wise, too secure, too much imbued with grace, to care; who remains under any circumstances the embodiment of earthy wisdom and salty good sense; and who is enviably gifted with acute powers of observation and a naturally evocative prose that seems artless (which is, of course, the height of the writer’s art);
To Brett – that’s AggieBrett to you Teasips – the crabgrass-lawned successor to Twain, Bill Brett, John Henry Faulk, Frank Dobie, and Lyle-’n’-REK, with a touch of Joe Ely, a pinch of Warren Zevon, and a smattering of Jim Lileks tossed in: he who never saw a pomposity he couldn’t and wouldn’t puncture; a foe of pretense and of the pathological insistence of various wastes of carbon that they are not merely entitled to an opinion, but entitled to have their vaporings taken seriously; and a staunch friend to all attempts, however hopeless, to salvage the site from being dominated by the Typing Marmots of Stupidity;
To Miz Amy, amykhar, another of those eminently capable of turning from the esoterica of technology to the deep wellsprings of human aspiration that animate all good literature, and who, like counsel, maintains in her own sphere (at EA) a sort of Gondor that yet recalls somewhat of our lost Numenor: the site as it started to be all these years ago, and might have been, and sadly never was;
To the two best CLs this site has ever had, in any category, at any time, gracef (Grace, so aptly named, and always a saving Grace) and Redlass, Bridgette, without whom the Books section at this site would have gone the way of the passenger pigeon; two ladies – a term I use in the most Southern of senses – of rare discernment, of infinite patience despite appalling and unremitting personal attacks from the sociopathic fringe, the ‘I AM YOUR EMPRESS OF ALL MEDIA’ crowd; both dowered with that endless painstaking that is the true mark of genius: both of them at once writers of the first water and Leads who truly lead;
To Dave Burckhard, sweeper, the last Renascence man, master of the mysteries of this damnable technology, yet always attuned to the real and earnest world, and than whom I can think of damned few I’d rather know ‘had my back,’ a man who combines wit with wisdom;
To Cousin Cornelia, cornelia, the Mrs Parker of our Algonquin Round Table, save that Cornelia is wittier, more soignée, smarter, wiser, funnier, and a better human being; and whom I think most of us veterans have most in mind when we tell the newbies, ‘Ah, but you should have been here in the old days,’ for she made them golden;
To Adam, DoubleCoog, the Sage of South Padre, who has quietly, unobtrusively, and without the relentless seeking of publicity that afflicts too many here, elevated the tone and raised the bar at this site from his first post to his most recent, and for whom all knowledge is his province;
To Beth, forkids, who established the principle that expertise is acquired by dint of hands-on experience, whose intellectual honesty never flagged, who conducted herself at all times beyond reproach, who never mistook seriousness for humorlessness, who was a colleague of the highest and noblest order, ever helpful and uncomplaining, and who – without meaning to at all – remains a standing reproach to her successors in her fields;
To the Greater Crested Greebs, the Ineffable Matty, mgreber, forever the one small boy in the crowd who was willing to point out the Emperor’s essential nekkidness, brilliant son of a brilliant mother, whose wit glittered and rang with the sheen and clash of swordsmen dueling;
To Tom Gray, tomgray, the Burt Spiller of the culture, staunch, sparely elegant in his prose, and incorruptibly concerned with justice and honor; a man of hammered prose and sterling character; a man from whom a compliment meant (as is true of all these) that you had made a very austere grade at last;
To Mike, mkp51, at least my equal in the great discipline of history and by far my better as a kind and decent man: an exemplar of the Down East, rock-ribbed virtues of Maine;
To Buffles, buffoonery, a man whom it is an honor to be called the friend of, who has somehow managed to combine the practice of law with the practice of the cardinal virtues, and who is a breathing refutation of the notion that wisdom and high intellectual attainment are the province of the Dead Serious and the Glumly Self-Righteous (or, usually, Lefteous); and
To Peter William Warn, eplovejoy, who combines civility with incisiveness, whose prose is a moveable feast, whose passion, always supported by cool reason, never fails to sway even on subjects on which it may not convince everyone, and whose ceaseless care for the community and its writers and readers is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
To all of these let commendations issue, for service that reflected great credit upon themselves and was in keeping with the highest traditions of Epinions.
And to the many others whom my aging brain may not call to mind but whom my heart, at least, will never forget, from Arazim to auntnono to erik_kosberg to halfsweet to kurt_kurosawa to mrkstvns to Penguinlady to tipu to my beloved one and only Elle, wildvirgogirl, let citations be given; for whatever of good yet remains here that you, Reader, have found, it is their monument, it is the work of their hands and hearts.
Try not to mar it. Try to live up to it.
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Epinions.com ID:
mshawpyle
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 - Top 500 |
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Member: Markham Shaw Pyle, JD
Location: Houston, Texas
Reviews written: 539
Trusted by: 391 members
About Me:
Historian, baseballing bon vivant, Boll Weevil, W&L man; and the Walter Mitty of field sports
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