Steven Vincent - Observer - Art Crtic, Journalist, Writer, Blogger. True to him self.

His beautiful Blog - In The Red Zone

Remembering Steven Vincent By Jacob Laksin
Excerpts-

"It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one." So wrote Azar Nafisi in Reading Lolita in Tehran, her heartrending memoir of life in Islamist Iran. Unyieldingly modest, Steven Vincent would have questioned the pertinence of that insight to his own circumstances. Yet it aptly captures the legacy of the indomitable journalist who was brutally murdered in southern Iraq this week."...

"Most stirring of all, perhaps, was Vincent's eye for the little things -- the unremarked though by no means unremarkable snapshots of civilian life in free Iraq. An art critic in his former life, Vincent had a painterly knack for detail. Savor this image, from a report he filed during a January 2004 visit to Baghdad:

Once a rare delicacy -- Saddam prohibited many imported foodstuffs -- the fruits have flooded the country since liberation and the Iraqis can't get enough of them. Yesterday, while we were stuck in a traffic jam, my cabbie purchased two from a vendor walking between the immobilized cars. "Once bananas were just a dream," he laughed, handing me one. "Now, praise God, we can buy them on the street!"...

"Vincent harbored no illusions about the speed of democratic progress. "The transition from slave to citizen usually takes generations," he cautioned. But neither did he doubt that with the right mix of ingredients -- the courage of American troops, the determination of Iraqi democrats and reformers, and the steadfastness and good faith of the American people -- a free and placid Iraq was well within the realm of possibility. "We didn't start this fight, but by the grace of God, the power of the U.S. Constitution and the strength of the American people, we will finish it," he once remarked. Steven Vincent lived and died for that noble cause."