Sunday roundup

The toll of war on military therapists:

Dr. Peter Linnerooth, a former Army psychologist who treated soldiers in Germany and Iraq and at Fort Hood, said that in Schweinfurt, Germany, he was the sole psychologist for a community of 10,000 people in 2005.

At Fort Hood, he treated a burly man whose job in Iraq was to recover the bodies of soldiers. His patient was devastated by one particular loss, Dr. Linnerooth said.

“He had picked up this corpse that was so badly burned, it weighed about 20 pounds,” he said. “He was this big, tough, awesome guy. For him, it was like picking up his daughter. That was an extreme case. But you get those at least once or twice a week.”

Returning to our ongoing discussion about Gail Collins' book, I think this article on Germany's cultural reunification provides a good analogy, i.e. separate from the issue of gratitude to the people and events that brought about the change, not remembering the way things were, or looking back on them as if they belong to bizarro world and dismissing them because they're so absurd, is kind of a sign of how far we've come:

But he said his students found the annual ritual of dissecting the events surrounding the country’s reunification to be boring. “It’s like when we would say, ‘Oh no, Grandpa’s telling stories about the war again,’ ” Mr. Schwedler said.

After a century of war, of guard towers and barbed wire, of tanks and gas chambers, “boring” sounds tantalizingly close to that much desired national normality.

Check out the hazy photo of the sign comparing health care reform to Dachau, which Frank Rich links to in his column.

Britain asks, "who is a Jew?" I can tell you who isn't: Jews for Jesus.

A so-sad-it's-funny state of affairs as the House debated health care reform.

I think our net contribution was more positive when our main cultural cultural export was Baywatch.