Well my friends, today I woke up and saw my name on a column for NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE. Let me tell you how that feels:
A couple of years ago, I was reading AOPA PILOT magazine. I usually start by reading Rod Machado, a snappy and funny fellow and a great pilot and flight instructor. About three quarters of the way through the article, I got to a paragraph that read something like this: Essayist Bill Whittle wrote that “We don’t call industrial-sized air conditioning units ‘she.’ Well, most of us don’t anyway. We don’t refer to buildings this way very often, or to generators or dumpsters.
But vehicles, they are different somehow. If you do not believe it is possible to love an inanimate object, then you do not know too many teenage boys and their first cars. Ships have always been she. Airplanes, too. And I don’t think this is so hard to figure out, because there is something about a machine that takes us places, something alive and magical.”
I got through that much of it — no kidding now, I read two whole paragraphs — and then I said to myself, Holy crap! There’s another guy named Bill Whittle out there writing about airplanes!
It was an out of body experience. I am not making that up. And now here I am in the house that Buckley built. Wow.
The article is here. If you got here from NRO, do NOT press the link: you will open a Hawking anti-gravitronic circular linking field that may threaten the time-space continuum.
If you are new here, the SILENT AMERICA essays on the right sidebar are how I made my bones. (I like TRINITY very much, for what it’s worth, and COURAGE and MAGIC are personal favorites too.) FORTY SECOND BOYD AND THE BIG PICTURE (below) has gotten a lot of play lately, due the way McCain has been playing ball.
I hope to be able to continue doing a series of shorter-format articles with them, if Kathryn Lopez is not hunted down with dogs, torches and pitchforks as a result of her taking a risk on me. In either event, this has been an honor and a thrill that I never imagined I would achieve, and I owe it all to you regular troopers who have been so kind to me over the years.
I’ll have a long-format essay on this incredible campaign in a few days. Look for FOUR CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF A STORY in the near, near future.
Thank you all. You made my day, week, month and year.
B
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