The streetcar that carried the general away

We journalists are Blanche DuBois, forever depending on the kindness of strangers.

People figure no public official will ever follow Gen. Stanley McChrystal's model of allowing a reporter into his candid inner circle. The general ended up fired for his barracks room candor.

Yet I believe journalistic history will repeat itself. Often. Like Blanche's signature line from A Streetcar Named Desire.

Kindness is another way of expressing openness or even naivete.

We haven't seen the end of opening up, even or especially by star-encrusted bravado.

And the public will be the better for it -- as always.

The career mistake of Gen. McChrystal turned into his ultimate service to the nation: Government and public both refocused on the war in Afghanistan, which we are losing or at least not winning.

Miss DuBois will return. We share her perpetual dependency on strangers.

The literary metaphor of Tennessee Williams's character in his 1947 play strikes my mind like a controlled nuclear event.

Blanche's nemesis was another Stanley -- the brutish Kowalski, antithesis of her dowdy, loopy world view and romanticism that drew out the beast in Stanley.

Excuse me, Gen. McChrystal, have you read the play?

The Rolling Stone writer Michael Hastings, who did the live-in interview with McChrystal, might not remind anyone of a DuBois or of the southern playwright who wrote Streetcar.

Yet the reporter and the general acted out the archetypes of clash between brutishness and soft persistence that spin off beneficial journalism like a newly discovered molecule from an atom smasher named Desire.

Oh, yes. Journalism will replicate the explosion, because that's what journalism does.