i'm happy i ran across this

i loved dunn AND i love joan didion even more

Wars of Hate
America’s conflicts are fought mostly by people who have come from the powerless classes. But true patriotism is not about being a spectator.


WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
Updated: 5:35 p.m. ET Oct. 11, 2005
Oct. 11, 2005 - On or about Dec. 30, 2002, which was a day after we’d had dinner in New York and a year to the day before he died of a heart attack, John Gregory Dunne put a floppy disk in an envelope and dropped it off at the Manhattan apartment where I was staying. As happens, I misplaced it in my travels after that, and only last weekend did I find it and read the digital newspaper clippings he’d pulled together, which he’d talked about with so much excitement at our dinner.
John was interested in patriotism. He was fascinated by the real substance of it, which he saw as diametrically opposed to what he called “the spectator patriotism” exploited by the Bush administration as it went looking for wars. There was something (it took a while for John to put his finger on it) in the fact that several people he knew had children on active duty: historian Doris Kearns had a son, John himself had a nephew, I had a son. We had people we loved in uniform doing what they saw, and we understood, imperfectly perhaps, as their duty to defend the values and the dreams that are the United States of America. But why were there so few from this circle of acquaintances if the cause was so great?
John would rage. He was articulate and funny then and always, but such was his passion that I remember him as almost inchoate when he talked about the bastards who wouldn’t end their Global War on Terror, which was conceived in rhetoric and dedicated to their re-election, yet would send America’s sons and daughters on futile errands of suffering and slaughter. John said he was going to write a book about patriotism, but he had a novel to finish first, and then he died.
John’s wife of almost 40 years, Joan Didion, has written a breathtaking book about John’s death, and the illnesses of their only child, who died in August, and the experience of grief. Joan’s book, called “The Year of Magical Thinking,” has been reviewed widely and well, as it should be. (Robert Pinsky in The New York Times pointed out, rightly, that it is “not a downer” and parts of it are actually quite funny.) Joan sent me the galleys last summer-- Joan and John became our friends when we met in El Salvador in 1982--and I read Joan’s book then in a single sitting, lost in a salt sea of emotion and memory. It is a great, great book.