Had he lived, the poet Joseph Brodsky would have been 70 today. For a too-brief period in the early 1990s, his prose graced the pages of the WQ, when he agreed to become our first poetry editor. It was an experiment by the editor at that time, Jay Tolson, who was as surprised as anyone when the Nobel Prize–winning poet agreed to introduce a poet in each issue with a short introductory essay followed by a selection of poetry. Brodsky wrote movingly about fellow exile Zbigniew Herbert, intimately about his friend Evgeny Rein, and knowledgably about C. P. Cavafy and other poets he thought deserved more attention, such as Weldon Kees or—typical for a classicist such as Brodsky—the Roman poet Sextus Propertius.

Re-reading these pieces now, I am struck again by how gifted a writer Brodsky was, even in a language that was not his native tongue. Although we communicated only over the telephone I was, for a time, his “editor.” (I include the quotation marks because Brodsky was prickly about his prose, and would only grudgingly agree to any alterations.) It wasn’t long before the restless Brodsky moved on, and one of the WQ’s last poetry sections was an appreciation of Brodsky by one of his successors as poetry editor, Anthony Hecht, at the time of his death in 1996.
 

A week before the spring WQ appeared with my article, “America’s Changeable Civil War,” Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia unintentionally drew attention to its main thesis by proclaiming Confederate History Month without making any mention of slavery. The Washington Post and others immediately jumped down his throat, and the governor quickly apologized for his omission. Issue over? Not necessarily. As the Civil War Sesquicentennial gets under way, the country still seems to be divided over what the war was about and, of more immediate importance, how Americans today should feel about it.

P. W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, who wrote about the U.S. Military’s increasing use of robots in Iraq and Afghanistan in a WQ cover story last year, has an interesting piece in Popular Mechanics. In it, he says that today’s Packbots and Predators “are merely the first generation—the equivalent of the Model T Ford or the Wright Brothers’ flyer.” Singer warns that, historically, military planners often become enamored with the early success of new technologies, causing them to stop seeking more innovative weaponry:

“At the start of this revolution in robotics, it is folly for us to think we have all the answers yet. Back in World War I, the early tanks were visualized as mobile pillboxes, supporting infantry as they marched on trench lines. It later turned out, though, that the technology could be far more effective when gathered together into a single armored punch, a blitzkrieg that moved at a speed well beyond that of a soldier’s legs. Similarly, the future of unmanned weaponry may well be jacks-of-all-trades like the MQ-X or robotic Apache helicopters that look and operate very much like the manned and early unmanned versions they are replacing. Or, it might be something as vastly different as the Rand Corporation’s concept of PRAWNS (PRoliferated Autonomous WeapoNS). In this, rather than a single large (and likely expensive) plane trying to do it all, the task is divided among a variety of smaller, cheaper

This isn’t a product endorsement, though I’m not above a shameless plug for the Nook version of The Wilson Quarterly. (Note that the original print version comes in a similar handy portable size.) No, count me more in the camp of Christine Rosen, who wrote a nice paean to print for us last fall.