One year ago, the world said goodbye to an amazing writer, speaker, investigative journalist, and social observer. This remarkable man was William Norman Grigg
When that happened, I also said goodbye to a friend I'd known for eighteen years.
Something that I didn't quite realize in my first few years of knowing him is that Will was "famous," after a fashion: As such, you can read much more eloquently written tributes to him from more gifted writers like Dan Sanchez and Tom Eddlem. His passing was mourned by many noted pundits and politicians including Lew Rockwell, Radley Balko, and Ron Paul.
Now that Will is gone it's hard to believe that someone as extraordinarily gifted as he was even lived: he was an athlete who, up to age 50 had physical strength that would have been the envy of an NFL player, a gifted guitarist, an eloquent speaker, an invincible political debater, and a powerful wordsmith.
As sad as his funeral and wake were, a small warm memory I'll take from them is how often I made his family and friends startle when I spoke because of how much my cadence and lexicon reminded them of him. I'd been talking to him for half my life (since age 19) and probably had no idea how much of how I express myself is from his influence. I cannot imagine a kinder compliment!
I was going to write something deeply personal and vulnerable about what Will's friendship meant to me and my own life, but this isn't really about me, so I've decided not to. Besides, I hate talking about my life on social media.
Below, I want to share some of my favorite turns of phrase from his writing career.
on Mitt Romney: "Mitt Romney, a polymer-based life form of nearly limitless pliability, is as long on cash as he is short on genuine convictions"
on talk-radio host Mark Levin: "a squalid little fleck of snot who pollutes print, cyber-space, and the airwaves with his bilious brand of neo-Trotskyite bloodlust"
on the NYT's Tom Friedman: "Make no mistake: Friedman is a bully -- albeit one who outsources the actual bullying to more physically accomplished people -- and the foreign policy he supports as a 'public intellectual' is bullying writ large."
on the reality show, "COPS": "a kind of authoritarian pornography for the badge-licker population"
I could compile so many more--and better--examples, but these examples show you why colleagues so often referred to him as "Thesaurus Rex."
With eerie prescience, one of Will's last major writing pieces expressed alarm at America's growing political violence and shrinking ability to have civil discourse and debate across ideological divides. This piece was entitled "Rise of the Wannabe Political Street Warrior".
In the current horrifying rush to war against Syria, his 2011 piece about Libya entitled "The War Party's Atrocity Porn" is even more eerie in its striking parallels.
The world feels dimmer without Will and his magnificent intellect, and my own life has been unimaginably poorer.
