Electric Guest – "Troubleman"

This one's been running through my head for the past couple of weeks. Here's a live version from their KCRW session. (It's good, but I prefer the stronger harmonies on the studio version.)

The Aristocrats

I read a great deal of fantastic stuff on the internet tubes I rarely get around to linking, apart from my Mike's Blog Roundup stints at Crooks and Liars. (Limited blogging time, alas.) Without slighting the many other excellent pieces I've read so far this year, this post by Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution is absolute fucking perfection, and wins the internets for the day, the week, and possibly the year. It may sound grandiose, but the best comedy and most biting satire depend on truth, and really can be transcendent. This piece might not hit all readers as hard, but I know some people who will really appreciate it as the pure distillation of a certain something, especially if they get the references and know the story (and comedy tradition) behind ATR's name. (It's explained in a link on the sidebar, and also see this post. Wheels within wheels, man.) The Emperor's New Clothes isn't just a fairy tale; it remains the eternal ethos of the ruling class. For folks who sometimes feel like members of the endangered sane staring at naked emperors, it can often also feel like they're taking crazy pills. We might not be able to save the world, but there's a great deal to be said for a few well-placed, artful "fuck you"s to the appropriate people and sharing some warmth and laughter with our comrades along the way. Viva the blogosphere. Bravo.

Update: Driftglass, who not incidentally has been one of David Brooks' sharpest critics for years, wrote a similar post back in 2007. I believe that's called prescience or something.

Update 2: David Dayen (D-Day), who's done some standup comedy, also referenced "The Aristocrats" in a post, although in 2009 and with a different approach.

Elton John – "Rocket Man"

One of John/Taupin's best songs, and supposedly partially inspired by a Ray Bradbury short story.

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012)

Ray Bradbury has died, at the age of 91. He was a prolific and highly influential writer of speculative fiction (he preferred the term "fantasy" to science fiction), and one of the most enthusiastic advocates for public libraries the world has ever seen. Especially as he aged, he had his cranky, curmudgeonly side, but whenever he talked about stories, his face lit up and he became a little kid, full of wonder, excitement and the joy of imagination. Every book he described reading was in his telling the best book ever, every film he remembered seeing was the most wonderful movie ever. His enthusiasm was infectious. I heard him speak several times, once to a packed crowd at my local public library (he was a long-time Angeleno) and a few times introducing adaptations of his plays (which friends of mine appeared in). Even though the productions didn't make a lot of money or even lost it, he loved the theater, just as he loved the movies and the written word. He didn't have the money to go to college, so he got his education by going to the library constantly and reading voraciously. He also rented a typewriter for a dime an hour at the UCLA library to write what would become Fahrenheit 451. He knew how special libraries were, and the magic of getting lost in a story.

His physical ailments as he aged became considerable (he had a stroke in 1999, was diabetic and used a wheelchair and braces), but once he got going, he became an animated, inspiring speaker. Not all of his work is great, and he eschewed revisions, preferring to move on to the next thing. He generated, by some counts, 27 novels and over 600 short stories, in addition to dozens of teleplays and scripts. The number of pieces adapted or derived from his work bump that number up considerably. Bradbury's work, a staple of junior high and high school curriculums, was surely the introduction to science fiction and fantasy for many a young reader. With Bradbury, it's the gems, the extensive corpus and the general inspiration that matter. His greatest work is among the best in the genre and will last long after him: Fahrenheit 451, "The Pedestrian," "A Sound of Thunder" and the stories that make up The Martian Chronicles. Film adaptations of Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes remain the most memorable, but the TV series Ray Bradbury Theater adapted 65 of his short stories fairly successfully, and the "Bradbury 13" radio adaptations are quite effective.

The obituaries and remembrances abound: his official site, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post (which also has photos, video and a set of favorite quotations from him), i09, Locus, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, driftglass (who uses a Bradbury line on his masthead), Blue Gal, Tom Levenson at Balloon Juice, Lance Mannion with that very funny and NSFW Bradbury tribute video, and NPR pieces one and two. Local NPR station KCRW has some great material, including videos and remembrance from Joe Mantegna, biographer Sam Weller, and Steven Paul Leiva, who organized the 2010 Ray Bradbury Week out here in L.A. There's also a 1960s video profile of him. The Week collects some quotations, and Boing Boing has video of him reading his poem, "If Only We Had Taller Been." And don't miss Mark Evanier's remembrance: "Ray Bradbury gave me all that time and encouragement. I can't waste that."


(My signed copy of Fahrenheit 451.)
I wrote more about Ray Bradbury and Fahrenheit 451 in 2008 for Banned Books Week, when, in supreme irony, a parent sought to prevent high school students from reading the book. (I also asked the question: if you were going to memorize a book to save it for posterity, which book would you choose?)

I'll probably update this post as I find other good pieces. If you wrote something on Bradbury, feel free to write me or link it in the comments. Regardless, his best work will endure and his spirit will be missed.

Here's Bradbury thanking his fans on his 90th birthday, and advising that 'the essence of life is love':




(One of the blog's past "Read" posters.)

Update: Here are some more posts on Bradbury, from Crooked Timber (with a good thread), P3, Thinking Aboot, Chicago Guy and Neil Gaiman.

Primary and Recall Elections 2012

California, New Jersey, Utah, South Dakota, Montana and New Mexico have primary elections tomorrow.

If you're a California voter, you can get the official voter information guide here. Some candidate statements and analysis is included (Orly Taitz' is both disturbing and hilarious). The Smart Voter site also has useful information on all the various elections, particularly the overlooked ones such as judicial positions. Because of California's new open primary rule, the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, will face each other in November. In some cases, that means the race will essentially be between the same candidates twice. That's the likely scenario in my congressional district, the newly-redrawn California 30th, with two incumbent Democrats squaring off, Howard Berman and Brad Sherman. Which Way L.A.? had them on as guests back in April (along with two Republican candidates). It also ran an election show tonight.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin is holding recall elections, most notably of Republican Governor Scott Walker, but the other elections are important, too. As David Dayen points out, turnout will be key: "one must acknowledge that no public poll has shown [Tom] Barrett in front [of Scott Walker]. That argues strongly that Walker will be able to hold on. He goes into Election Day a small favorite." Walker's Koch backing and anti-labor stances make this a significant election, but Walker's rich backers have given him a three to one spending advantage. Kay at Balloon Juice has more about the expectations game.

In any case, if your state is up tomorrow, make sure you vote!

Doc Watson and Jack Lawrence – "Tennessee Stud"

RIP. Erik Loomis has a nice post up and some other clips and links.

Life Is Cheap when Your Great Nation is Buying

These days, Memorial Day is meant to honor those who have performed military service, particularly those who have died doing so, but is also an apt day for remembering the horrors of war and the follies that instigate and perpetuate them. We've looked at the impulse to dehumanize one's perceived enemies in the past, and sadly, the subject always seems relevant.

Jonathan Schwarz wrote a fine, biting piece back in March called "America's 300 Year-Long Lucky Streak Continues"

One of the great things about being American is we're just lucky. Lots of countries have killed millions of people, and it made their families really angry and sad. So the countries sometimes had to feel bad about it. But when WE'VE done it, we've always been lucky enough to do it to people who turned out not to mind being killed. So no harm done.

Most recently, Steve Inskeep of NPR pointed out that Afghans haven't gotten all bent out of shape about a U.S. soldier massacring sixteen of them, because "human life is already cheap" way over there.

That's great journalism. However, it would have been even better if Inskeep had found out whether life is not just cheap in Afghanistan, but also plentiful, like it was in Vietnam:

WILLIAM WESTMORELAND: The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.

And what about Iraqis? Were they whiny bitches when we killed them? No way:

FRED KAGAN, ARCHITECT OF IRAQ "SURGE": If anyone has seen pictures of Ramadi or Fallujah, they looked like Stalingrad. Cities absolutely crushed...

The interesting thing is that when we were fighting those battles and doing that damage, on the whole the Iraqis were not bitching about collateral damage...the Iraqis don’t on the whole say "darn it, you shouldn’t have blown up all of our houses." They sort of accept that.

We know this is correct because Iraqis felt the same way in the twenties when they were being slaughtered by the British:

"The natives of these tribes love fighting for fighting's sake," Chief of Air Staff Hugh Trenchard assured Parliament. "They have no objection to being killed." The military's argument was that, though the often indiscriminate air attacks might perturb some civilized folks back in London, such acts were viewed differently by the Arabs. As one British commander observed, "'[Shiekhs]...do not seem to resent...that women and children are accidentally killed by bombs."

Head over to read the rest. Steve Inskeep is normally a decent journalist, but really dropped the ball here, or is just trapped in a typical cultural attitude (especially endemic to the Beltway). The cognitive dissonance really is remarkable (if perhaps sadly predictable), isn't it? As we've examined before, people doing horrible things tend to come up with all sorts of "interesting" rationalizations for their actions, and the most common route is to dehumanize their victims, decide that they deserved it, or that they don't mind it being done to them. One can argue that this or that military conflict is necessary, but this sort of grotesque hypocrisy and self-deception tends to needlessly start and prolong wars.

Schwarz' post also made me think of a social gathering I attended a few months back. This particular crowd would probably have described itself as left of center, libertarian or independent, but certainly believes itself to be fairly intelligent and well-informed. None were veterans. I won't go into all the details, but someone started opining approvingly about Israel or the U.S. bombing Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons. The same person also said things were fine when the Shah was in charge. (I felt compelled to mention the American and British-backed coup of Iran in the 50s, and that Iranians might not see things the same way.) Somebody else approved of the U.S. or other nations assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists. This wasn't really the time or place for a serious debate, and the conversation moved elsewhere, but I found it unsettling. (I try to avoid discussing politics in certain crowds, but if someone brings them up...) It brought home once again that even among college-educated people who may not be news junkies but at least try to follow current events and should know better, saber-rattling can be met uncritically and imperialism is reflexive, acceptable and even lauded.

It wasn't long ago that the Bush administration lied relentlessly and shamelessly to start an unnecessary war in Iraq. Many of the same people are saber-rattling over Iran, even though "American intelligence analysts continue to believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb." That might change, but some of the war hawks haven never cared about evidence and are obviously arguing in bad faith. Skepticism is clearly warranted. Regardless, there should always be a high threshold for going to war. Meanwhile, if someone wants to advocate assassinating private citizens of another nation, um, okay, that's one opinion, but it's also an imperialistic position. You can't reasonably claim the moral high ground anymore; now it's about might-makes-right. You also can't reasonably be shocked when other countries fear or hate you. It's hardly shocking if Iranians have gotten nervous given how casually American politicos have advocated bombing Iran or killing its citizens as if this was their god-given right. None of this is to deny legitimate discussions of these issues, but nationalistic narcissism tends to crowd out sager talk.

Some of this comes down to vanity and social dynamics. At least in certain circles – parties, Sunday talk shows – people want to appear knowledgeable and smart. Their opinions can far outstrip their knowledge and certainly any sort of wisdom. They borrow opinions from supposed experts, even if those "experts" are fools or charlatans. If those "experts" express opinions fitting the social norms of that circle – even if those opinions are completely unsupported or refuted by the evidence – they are unlikely to be challenged. (I'm not entirely immune to this crap myself, and have kicked myself later when I've found myself parroting the bullshit du jour.) If you're arguing about films, books and pop culture, a silly opinion isn't so bad, although it helps if it's expressed in good cheer and not obnoxiously. When it comes to war, the stakes are higher, even if the speaker doesn't possess any significant power, because citizens can at least vote and speak out.

Unfortunately, blithe imperialism and a belligerent American exceptionalism or triumphalism are widely acceptable or even prized. It has a veneer of tough-minded realism, even if it is really pseudo-tough, posturing machismo. Even the most consistently wrong, unrepentant war hawks seem to be granted far more respectability than any war skeptics, and never lose their cushy jobs. Warmongers never go hungry in the Beltway, and some citizens eagerly ape their opinions. For those of us who should know better, the moral obligation is to resist the temptation to parrot bullshit, and to push back – gently or forcefully, as appropriate – especially against particularly odious and dangerous bullshit. I fear it will be hard to put an end to unnecessary wars as long as blithe imperialism is socially acceptable or even seen as the mark of a Very Serious Person.

Related Pieces (Updated)

Driftglass urges that "We Should Have a Day of National Remembrance" for Max Blumenthal's 2007 interviews of chickenhawks. Agreed.

Emptywheel: bmaz writes thoughtfully "On Chris Hayes & America’s Fallen Heroes."

Digby posts about "Arlington West," in Santa Monica.

David Atkins remembers Pat Tillman.

David Dayen writes about a debate on counter-insurgency at West Point.

To the Point: "Memorial Day in America: Fun or Remembrance?"

The Business: "War Movies: 'The Tillman Story' and 'The Hurt Locker'"

TBogg posts a lovely song for the day.

Wonkette: Intern Riley Waggaman pens "Goodbye Forever! Also: No More War, Please"

No More Mister Nice Blog: "Do We Really Fight More Because We Call the Troops Heroes?"

Balloon Juice: DougJ contributes "Fuck War," although yes, he really needs to listen to Hayes in context.

Balloon Juice: John Cole weighs in later with "About What He Said."

Thers at Whiskey Fire provides "Memorial Day Reminder" (featuring "And the Band Played Waltzing Mathilda") and "Fuck the Troops." While I wouldn't put it that way, Thers' point, like Chris Hayes' point, has been completely misunderstood and misrepresented. I believe some of that misunderstanding is sincere, but it's deadly for all that. These dynamics are key to understanding war and preventing unnecessary tragedies. The bmaz post linked above handles this stuff quite well, but let me also rerun a few passages. From "Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels":

Being "pro-soldier, anti-war" normally means: given a war, the troops should be well equipped, the generals shouldn't be stupid with human lives, and the war should be fought to be won. However, the most obvious way to be "pro-soldier" is not to endanger any troopers unnecessarily. An unnecessary war, a fundamentally flawed mission, an assignment where the danger far outweighs the potential gains – none of these "supports" the troops. Being truly "pro-soldier" necessitates being "anti-war" in this sense. There are also times when it is sheer folly to continue a war. Heroism in war is to be honored, and the camaraderie between troopers in war is greatly prized, but this is because of helping one another through a horrible ordeal. There's nothing "good" about the ordeal itself. Surviving an atrocity does not somehow ennoble the atrocity. War is anything but glorious...

As for continuing an unnecessary war, and doubling down so that those who have died "will not have died in vain," we'll get into that in far more depth in a subsequent post. I've said it before as well, but briefly: regardless of the rightness or mendacity of a given mission, a trooper's service can be honorable or even heroic. But their virtue does not necessarily ennoble the mission itself, nor does any heroism they show transfer to those making the decisions, no matter how many times those bold, intuitively brilliant, God-touched Deciders don a flight suit and show off their genitals. Consider Pat Tillman, killed by "friendly fire" – clearly his service was honorable, but just as clearly, his death was unnecessary. His death was a tragedy, but it becomes a tragedy compounded if more people die by continuing an unnecessary war.

From "War and the Denial of Loss":

Gary Trudeau satirized the "not die in vain" mentality superbly in a 2005 Sunday cartoon, which includes this line from his Bush: "Again, we'll stay the course. We cannot dishonor the upcoming sacrifice of those who have yet to die." (Read the whole thing.) I commented in a 2007 post on it:

The stupidity of leaders or the pointlessness of a mission do not diminish the heroism of the troops themselves. Troops only die in vain if we are too stupid to learn from our mistakes or face our own vanities. Having the courage to admit someone acted heroically, but died unnecessarily, can be essential for preventing more unnecessary deaths. No one should die for pride and image alone, and the pain of facing the harsh truth of a given mistake is as nothing to the pain of actually dying or the pain of mourning a loved one. To pretend otherwise is dreadful, deadly vanity.

Or (to quote an earlier post in this cycle), consider Pat Tillman, killed by "friendly fire." Clearly his service was honorable, but just as clearly, his death was unnecessary. One could say, of so many dead in senseless wars: They were honorable but the mission was flawed. They did not die for nothing. Or one could say: They died for nothing. But they will not have died in vain if you fight to prevent others from dying for nothing. Their deaths were meaningless only if you learn nothing from them, and let this needless, horrible waste continue.

Paul Fussell (1924–2012)

Professor, author and World War II veteran Paul Fussell died last week at the age of 88. I first encountered his scholarly work, and still have his well-regarded book, Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, on my shelves. He may be best known for his ambitious and insightful work of literary criticism, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975). He wrote two great war memoirs, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1989) and Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (1996). He also wrote the occasional introduction and article. (I made a point of getting the edition of E.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed with Fussell's introduction.) Here are the obituaries from The New York Times, The Washington Post and the AP. Fussell was firmly in that pro-soldier, anti-war tradition, an acerbic, lucid and candid writer. The WaPo piece captures this well:

Mr. Fussell returned from the war with a deep respect for ordinary soldiers but with a lasting contempt for war itself. He was critical of Tom Brokaw, Stephen Ambrose and other writers and filmmakers who, he believed, sentimentalized war without describing the brutality and violence faced by soldiers.

The best way to honor Fussell is to feature his own writing. His 1982 Harper's feature "My War: How I Got Irony in the Infantry" should be read in full, but here are some excerpts:

Over the past few years I find I’ve written a great deal about war, which is odd because I’m supposed to be a professor of English literature. And I find I’ve given the Second World War a uniformly bad press, rejecting all attempts to depict it as a sensible proceeding or to mitigate its cruelty and swinishness. I have rubbed readers’ noses in some very noisome materials—corpses, maddened dogs, deserters and looters, pain, Auschwitz, weeping, scandal, cowardice, mistakes and defeats, sadism, hangings, horrible wounds, fear and panic. Whenever I deliver this unhappy view of the war, especially when I try to pass it through a protective screen of irony, I hear from outraged readers. Speaking of some ironic aesthetic observations I once made on a photograph of a mangled sailor on his ruined gunmount, for example, a woman from Brooklyn found me “callous,” and accused me of an “overwhelming deficiency in human compassion.” Another reader, who I suspect has had as little empirical contact with the actualities of war face to face as the correspondent from Brooklyn, found the same essay “black and monstrous” and concluded that the magazine publishing it (Harper’s, actually) “disgraced itself.”

How did I pick up this dark, ironical, flip view of the war? Why do I enjoy exhibiting it? The answer is that I contracted it in the infantry. Even when I write professionally about Walt Whitman or Samuel Johnson, about the theory of comparative literature or the problems facing the literary biographer, the voice that’s audible is that of the pissed-off infantryman, disguised as a literary and cultural commentator. He is embittered that the Air Corps had beds to sleep in, that Patton’s Third Army got all the credit, that noncombatants of the Medical Administrative and Quartermaster Corps wore the same battle stars as he, that soon after the war the “enemy” he had labored to destroy had been rearmed by his own government and positioned to oppose one of his old allies. “We broke our ass for nothin’,” says Sergeant Croft in The Naked and the Dead. These are this speaker’s residual complaints while he is affecting to be annoyed primarily by someone’s bad writing or slipshod logic or lazy editing or pretentious ideas. As Louis Simpson says, “The war made me a foot-soldier for the rest of my life,” and after any war foot soldiers are touchy.

My war is virtually synonymous with my life. I entered the war when I was nineteen, and I have been in it ever since. Melville’s Ishmael says that a whale ship was his Yale College and his Harvard. An infantry division was mine, the 103rd, whose dispirited personnel wore a colorful green-and-yellow cactus on their left shoulders. These hillbillies and Okies, dropouts and used-car salesmen and petty criminals were my teachers and friends.

This intro immediately makes me like the guy, someone who can and does connect Melville with his time in the infantry, and who still identifies as a skeptical, "pissed-off infantryman, disguised as a literary and cultural commentator."

Later in the piece, he describes his first months of combat, and how they changed him:

We were in “combat.” I find the word embarrassing, carrying as it does false chivalric overtones (as in “single combat”). But synonyms are worse: “fighting” is not accurate, because much of the time you are being shelled, which is not fighting but suffering; “battle” is too high and remote; “in action” is a euphemism suited more to dire telegrams than description. “Combat” will have to do, and my first hours of it I recall daily, even now. They fueled, and they still fuel, my view of things.

Everyone knows that a night relief is among the most difficult of infantry maneuvers. But we didn’t know it, and in our innocence we expected it to go according to plan. We and the company we were replacing were cleverly and severely shelled; it was as if the Germans a few hundred feet away could see us in the dark and through the thick pine growth. When the shelling finally stopped, at about midnight, we realized that although near the place we were supposed to be, until daylight we were hopelessly lost. The order came down to stop where we were, lie down among the trees, and get some sleep. We would finish the relief at first light. Scattered over several hundred yards, the 250 of us in F Company lay down in a darkness so thick we could see nothing at all. Despite the terror of our first shelling (and several people had been hit), we slept as soundly as babes. At dawn I awoke, and what I saw all around were numerous objects I’d miraculously not tripped over in the dark. These objects were dozens of dead German boys in greenish-gray uniforms, killed a day or two before by the company we were relieving. If darkness had hidden them from us, dawn disclosed them with open eyes and greenish-white faces like marble, still clutching their rifles and machine pistols in their seventeen-year-old hands, fixed where they had fallen. (For the first time I understood the German phrase for the war dead: die Gefallenen.) Michelangelo could have made something beautiful out of these forms, in the Dying Gaul tradition, and I was startled to find that at first, in a way I couldn’t understand, they struck me as beautiful. But after a moment, no feeling but shock and horror. My adolescent illusions, largely intact to that moment, fell away all at once, and I suddenly knew I was not and never would be in a world that was reasonable or just. The scene was less apocalyptic than shabbily ironic: it sorted so ill with modern popular assumptions about the idea of progress and attendant improvements in public health, social welfare, and social justice. To transform guiltless boys into cold marble after passing them through unbearable fear and humiliation and pain and contempt seemed to do them an interesting injustice. I decided to ponder these things. In 1917, shocked by the Battle of the Somme and recovering from neurasthenia, Wilfred Owen was reading a life of Tennyson. He wrote his mother: “Tennyson, it seems, was always a great child. So should I have been, but for Baumont Hamel.” So should I have been, but for St. Dié.

After that, one day was much like another: attack at dawn, run and fall and crawl and sweat and worry and shoot and be shot at and cower from mortar shells, always keeping up a jaunty carriage in front of one’s platoon; and at night, “consolidate” the objective, usually another hill, sometimes a small town, and plan the attack for the next morning. Before we knew it we’d lost half the company, and we all realized then that for us there would be no way out until the war ended but sickness, wounds, or oblivion. And the war would end only as we pressed our painful daily advance. Getting it over was our sole motive. Yes, we knew about the Jews. But our skins seemed to us more valuable at the time.

Fussell writes clearly and very candidly. He paints strong images and has a good sense of irony and absurdity, but also brings an honesty about what he saw and felt, including his own fear, leading to striking passages like this:

That month away from the line helped me survive for four weeks more but it broke the rhythm and, never badly scared before, when I returned to the line early in March I found for the first time that I was terrified, unwilling to take the chances that before had seemed rather sporting. My month of safety had renewed my interest in survival, and I was psychologically and morally ill prepared to lead my platoon in the great Seventh Army attack of March 15, 1945. But lead it I did, or rather push it, staying as far in the rear as was barely decent. And before the day was over I had been severely rebuked by a sharp-eyed lieutenant-colonel who threatened court martial if I didn’t pull myself together. Before that day was over I was sprayed with the contents of a soldier’s torso when I was lying behind him and he knelt to fire at a machine gun holding us up: he was struck in the heart, and out of the holes in the back of his field jacket flew little clouds of tissue, blood, and powdered cloth. Near him another man raised himself to fire, but the machine gun caught him in the mouth, and as he fell he looked back at me with surprise, blood and teeth dribbling out onto the leaves. He was one to whom early on I had given the Silver Star for heroism, and he didn’t want to let me down.

Part of the piece involves him as an older man looking back over his letters home and dissecting his own youthful self, especially his own self-delusion. He's harsh and clinical but not unnecessary cruel in these self-judgments. I was particularly struck by this passage, as older, author Fussell speaks of young infantryman Fussell writing to his parents:

He seems unable to perceive what is happening, constantly telling his addressee what will please rather than what he feels. He was never more mistaken than when he assured his parents while recovering from his wounds, “Please try not to worry, as no permanent damage has been done.”

Near the end of the piece, he discusses his entry into academia:

In becoming a college teacher of literature I was aware of lots of company: thousands of veterans swarmed to graduate schools to study literature, persuaded that poetry and prose could save the world, or at least help wash away some of the intellectual shame of the years we’d been through. From this generation came John Berryman and Randall Jarrell and Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow and Louis Simpson and Richard Wilbur and William Meredith and all the others who, afire with the precepts of the New Criticism, embraced literature, and the teaching of it, as quasi-religious obligation.

There's a gentle self-reproach here, and that's completely appropriate. Still, Fussell shouldn't sell himself or his compatriots short, given how many lives they have touched for the better. Fussell is one of a number of fine war writers who have given a much more honest portrait of what war actually entails. War itself is not noble, even if service is, and there's something admirable and necessary in writing about it truthfully. Human folly is pernicious. But good poetry and prose can save the world, or at least give some solace. At the very least, they make the world more worthy of saving.

Biden with Families of the Fallen

This segment is from May 25th. Whatever one thinks of Biden otherwise, he has faced great personal tragedy in his life, and understands something of grief. I particularly like his discussion of people who "meant well" but didn't get it. I wish more Memorial Day and Armistice Day speeches showed similar understanding.

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Tennis – "My Better Self"