OK, if I had trouble with Alas, a Blog, imagine the trouble Body and Soul is causing me. Let me illustrate exactly how I feel about Jeanne d’Arc’s blog: about a year-and-a-half ago, if I remember correctly, Jeanne added my site to her blogroll, which meant, to me, that I had arrived in blogdom. I don’t always agree with her — and have disagreed quite strongly, and quite publicly, on some issues — but nobody, nobody writes with the pure humanity that Jeanne d’Arc brings to even the most off-hand post. To take an almost random example (her most recent post):
But nearly two months ago, I expressed some concern about the tendency on the left to feed the myth of the noble soldier, and it’s bothered me for a long time that Kerry takes justifiable pride in his service in Vietnam, but rarely talks about the courage he showed when he returned from Vietnam and spoke up about what he witnessed, trying to stop a brutal and insane war from taking any more lives unecessarily.
Almost all of us have our schtick — the right-wingers and nearly-con liberals are prone to chest-beating, Tarzan-style; others to cooler-than-thou hipness or techier-than-thou geekness; others, like myself, to satire and absurdity and (in Steve Bates’ case) doggerel — but Jeanne just says it. A more cynical person might claim that not having a schtick is Jeanne’s schtick — even if that’s the case, it works. There’s not many blogs that can bring a tear to your eye — Body and Soul is one of them.
And the crowning factor is this: if Jeanne happens to read this, I have no doubt that she’ll deny everything I’ve just said.
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