Who Is Walter Kirn?

I love the paragraph as an art form: A cluster of sentences put together in a way that, with just 20 or 30 seconds of reading, changes or amplifies the way you think about something... and does so in a way of speaking that really sets your mind skipping to the beat. I've read hundreds of paragraphs that I should have flagged and set aside for future remembrance, but truth be told, I would have already filled up several file folders already.

However, one man, Walter Kirn, guest-blogging for Andrew Sullivan (another paragraph artist) has hit me 3 or 4 times in one week with some awesome paragraphs.

I put them here so that I will remember them:

On Tom Cruise's new baby:

Of all the world's great traditions of exploitation -- master over slave, husband over wife, rich man over poor man-- parenthood is the most absolute and the least subject to scrutiny or pressure. Not only do the stronger parties involved have the right to construct the weaker one's reality and then imprison their subject inside of it, they have the right to create the subject at a moment not of its choosing and not necessarily to its advantage. For Holmes and 'Cruise' to have marched a helpless new spirit into the global media s***-storm that they, their publicists and their clerical overseers have been whipping up for many months now should not only be an actionable infraction but a grave reminder to all of us not to toy around with unformed soul material.

On Iran's nuclear program:

It’s been funny to hear the leader of Iran talking about his nation’s natural right to exploit the secrets of nuclear physics and join the global technological vanguard. His basic argument is “You can’t stop progress” even though stopping progress, I recall, is the great goal of his theocracy. Fundamentalist Islamic futurism? Can such a strange cultural particle exist, even for a half an instant in a cyclotron? Perhaps the man should speak more carefully, lest he unwittingly split the nucleus of the system he’s trying to hold together.

On the right to privacy, which I linked to earlier:

In the land of manic attention-getters, which is what the country's become in the age of American Idol, Oprah, and nonstop self-revelation on the Web. Consider the wild growth of MySpace. Com, a service that grants all who use it at least the hope of obtaining an audience for their biographies. The personal secrets that people broadcast on this and other websites far outstrip, in intrusive depth and detail, anything the government is capable of gathering. Users cough up, without ever being asked, and for the benefit of perfect strangers, every last sexual quirk, obsessive thought and grandiose fantasy that they can render in words. And then they add pictures. Sometimes naked pictures. They spill their souls onto the Web as though trying to purge themselves of loneliness through exhibitionism.

On "The Tipping Point" strategy in Iraq:

Behind every failed war is a failed metaphor (remember The Domino Effect, the Vietnam-era version of The Tipping Point?) that mesmerized its masters into waging it, kept them waging it once they started losing it, and immobilized them with disbelief when it turned back into intellectual smoke. From business-section bestseller to Pentagon battle-plan. Only in America. And it was a phony, decrepit notion to start with, despite being updated for today's executives and cleverly remarketed to every no one who ever dreamed of being a someone by working at home, in his or her spare time. The idea that one straw can break the camel's back, that one well-placed lever can move the world, that one added particle can bring on "critical mass" is the delusion that wears a thousand faces. It's the manic creed of the assassin: fire a single bullet, alter history. The principle rarely works when applied on purpose, but because it quite often works by accident (or seems to have worked, when viewed in retrospect; Henry Ford built his Model T and, presto, freeways!) it never loses its appeal.

To me, all of these paragraphs are great examples of "I knew that... but couldn't think it out quite like you did." I love that kind of paragraph. You, of course, by definition, can never write one yourself (because then you would have thought it out exactly as hoped), which is what makes finding them so much fun. They are little idea fuses: You read one, and bang, your brain starts jumping around saying, "thank you thank you thank you!"

Thank you Walter Kirn. Great stuff!