Bob Zangas

I've just got the word that Bob Zangas, a blogger in Iraq, was killed in an ambush on Wednesday.

Lord Macaulay, in "Horatius at the Bridge" wrote:

To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods?

Bob Zangas found a better way : he died while helping to heal a nation ravaged and raped by an odious tyranny.

Much that's what is written on the Net is being archived, here and there. It will be a fertile field for historians and Internet Archaelogists in the future, trying to figure out exactly how people lived, and what they thought, in the days around the turn of the Millenium. (And if any of them are reading this fragment from 2004, Hi There!)

Bob Zangas' blog may well live through the ages, a monument to people who put their lives on the line, "just trying to help out". If you're going to die eventually - which at our current level of technology is still the case with everyone - then I can think of no, not better, but more meaningful way of going about it. I just wish he had lived a bit longer, and been able to see his work to a successful conclusion. My sympathies to his family.