Connor Coyne

I know that week is probably just one among many for the U.S. and for the world, but the news has been rough for me personally on a number of fronts:

Chicago’s greatest parade will be shutting down after 50 years. All of those parade scenes you’ve seen in movies; the march through the Loop in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and the imromptu march on Taylor Street in The Blues Brothers… they’ve been mostly eroded into soulless PR events. There are occasional exceptions out in the neighborhoods; small ethnic parades full of color and improvisation, and from time-to-time a sports victory brings on that refreshing chaos. But those are rare and fleeting event. For Chicago to shut down this parade is somewhat equivalent to if New Orleans shut down the French Quarter on Mardi Gras.

The closure of Flint Central seems immanent this time… this was the high school I attended in spirit, and many of my best friends are alums. It was also a point of pride and cohesion in a community that in many other ways has deteriorated in the last generation.

The Flint Journal is slashing much of its staff and reducing its print operations to three days a week. Just down the road, the Ann Arbor paper is completely giving up the paper ghost. But the Journal, famous for Pulitzer Prize winning photographers and infamous for editorial lines like “Anorexic Teen should swallow her pride” always seemed sort-of invincible to me.

It is common to say “change is scary but necessary.” This statement can be reversed. Sometimes change, however necessary it is, can be paralyzing. And I don’t think anyone would deny that change is in the air these days in a way that it hasn’t been for a long, long time.

Someone give me some good news, quick!

Evidently, Sallust was also familiar with a General Petraeus:

When he had satisfied himself on every point, Petreius sounded the signal and ordered the cohorts to advance slowly, and the same movement was made by the enemy. On reaching a distance at which the light troops could engage, the two armies raised a great shout and charged each other, standard to standard.

All they have in common is their name, however.

Sallust‘s Petreius was sent into war by Cicero, one of the greatest political minds of all time, in a decisive strike against Catiline, a wealthy citizen who had successfully raised an army in insurrection against Rome.

Our Petraeus, on the other hand, was sent into war by Bush, one of the most persistantly one-sided political minds of all time, in an decisive bid against Congress to continue a war waged for reasons subject to an unprecedented case of national amnesia.

I wonder what Sallust would write about our Petraeus.

   that will soon be a ghost itself.