Speaking of obsessions, a new factotum about Custer’s death that I was unaware of. From Slate:

“More than anything else, he wanted to be remembered.” That’s how Nathaniel (“Mayflower”) Philbrick sizes up George Armstrong Custer toward the end of “The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn,” and no one will dispute that America’s ultimate glory hound got his wish. Too bad the victorious Lakota and Cheyenne weren’t feeling respectful after wiping out his command in what’s now Montana on June 25, 1876. They not only punctured the dead Custer’s eardrums because he “wouldn’t listen,” but — in a detail long suppressed by decorum — jammed an arrow up the corpse’s penis.

It’s actually one hell of a good article, if Custerology’s your thing.

And I’ve always liked Custer’s subordinate, Captain Frederick Benteen.

A hard drinker himself, Benteen — the source of the “My Lie on The Plains” crack — was a very different kettle of fish otherwise. Cantankerous and sardonic, he saw himself as a hard-boiled professional disgusted by Custer’s “pretentious silliness.” Yet his chilling satisfaction at the sight of Custer and his inner circle dead on the field — “The Lord, in His own good time, had at last rounded the scoundrels up” — has a touch of Iago. “In Russia,” Benteen once bragged, “they’d call me a Nihilist sure!”