Martyrs to the Bejeweled Cause of Idiocy

Me likes the primo Wolcott, and here's some for your pleasure.

The most euphonious bugler is a milblogger with the handle of Teflon Don, who sonorously proclaims:

Here I stand, in modern-day Iraq. I have come further to fight here than any soldier of any nation before me, and I fight with weapons and equipment that lay pale the panoply of earlier armies. I represent the pinnacle of force projection and decisive battle, and yet I fight here, where unnumbered young warriors have fought and died through time stretching out of memory. It was on this land that the Babylonian empire first arose out of those first Sumerian agrarians, only to be conquered by the Assyrians, and still later throw off the foreign chains. It was here that Alexander's phalanxes swept by, trailing Hellenism in their wake. Rome, and later the Byzantines, drew their border with Persia at the Euphrates River. At that river was where the Sassanids made their stand against the spread of Arabian Islam. The Khans of the Mongols laid this land waste, sometimes killing only to build their towers of bones higher.

War is war, his service to his country is commendable, we wish him safe return, but, really, there's no excuse for a pretentious prose style. Hemingway, Stephen Crane--they kept it bone-clean lean. They would have blanched at such gold-leafed Victor Davis Hanson vainglorious horseshit. Such as this:

This region is steeped in history. We walk on it; we breath it in. Eons of history surround us, infiltrate us, and turn to dust beneath our feet. The ashes of countless cultures, civilizations, and rulers dreams lie under the earth. With each breath, I inhale a few molecules of the dying gasp of Cyrus II, the Persian "Constantine of the East". In the howling wind I can almost hear the cries of a countless multitude dying on killing grounds that bridge across the ages. The same wind carries the red dust that might yet hold a few drops of blood from the battle at Carrhae- the first, crushing defeat for Rome's red blooded legions. Under my heel, a speck grinds into dust: the last grain of sand that remains of the Hanging Gardens at Babylon that are now known only in legend. Some of the world's oldest religions tell us that somewhere in this ancient Cradle of life, God himself breathed on this dust, and it became man, the father of us all. Whatever path we take here, we walk on history.

I walk softly, for I tread on the ghosts of years.

As I make my rounds on the Upper West Side, I inhale the cellular remains of lint from Lionel Trilling's old suits and the faintest trace of Alfred Kazin's old aftershave, which fortifies my faith in the wisdom of my intellectual fathers that the Iraq war is a freaking mess, a disgrace to American values, and a bloodstained blot history will find hard to remove. As for God animating the dust, I tend to think that evolution paints a more plausible explanation for the emergence of humankind.