When Nov. 11 rolls around, this quote from Breakfast of Champions gets dragged out of storage and put on display for the occasion of Kurt Vonnegut's birthday and Armistice/Veterans Day. But that's what remembrance and ceremony are for, after all, as mile markers on our half-blind
As a Brit I am somewhat uncomfortable with the Yank fetishising of war. The way every soldier gets a 'Thank you for your service'. It seems... suspicious? I know its a different culture, but this seems to mean nothing. British troops are respected (by most) but the 'thank you for your service'... smacks of blind adoration.
For us 11 November is Armistice day. The closest Sunday is Remembrance Sunday. Its not about soldiers. Its about those who never returned. We are reminded that they gave their tomorrows for our todays. Then the Last Post sounds and the nation falls silent.
And then they march, The ones who did come back. Old men, in overcoats against the November air, medals on chest, some in wheelchairs being pushed by a grandchild. And those of my age, solemn faces remembering those left in Afghan and Iraq.
Not just soldiers. Men of the arctic convoys, those who spotted the Luftwaffe as they came in from the Channel. Those who fought the fires during those long summer nights in 1940.
This year as they marched the crowds who had come to pay respects, applauded. I've never seen that before.
One of the major roads in London shuts, whilst the Old Men march. We don't say "Thank you for your service". Across the country we stand in silence as we remember those who made a corner of a foreign field forever Britain. And we watch the old men march, as they remember their mates who they left behind.
The "thank you for your service" line has become a cliché here, something that is pulled out in order to provide the speaker with something to say, an empty statement employed as a substitute for expressing an actual thought. It is used to conceal a base hypocrisy. It is a perfect illustration that, in spite of their occasional, very pious and very public lauding of The Soldier (an abstraction rather than a flesh and blood person), Americans actually give very little thought to our country's recent and ongoing wars, the people who have fought in them and their human costs.
Yours is a beautiful comment. Thanks for contributing it.
I remember the bombing run videos during the first Gulf War and how people cheered when they hit their targets. All the olds who got cheated out of a good war in Korea and Vietnam were watching war like it was sportsball or the Olympics. The disconnect was pretty appalling. Ice Nine looked like a pretty good option for cleaning up the human plague on the planet.
I dunno, now I kind of want to go play Destiny or Call of Duty and just spend the entire time on the mic quoting vonnegut instead of questioning other players manhood/sexuality/parentage, as is the usual fashion.
and Billy Mitchell got court martialed for insubordination for pointing out that the head brass for the army and navy were idjits for ignoring the future of airpower as they built bunches of battleships that would end up shredded by those planes and aircraft carriers that they ignored. Eventually they figured it out and named a bomber and a couple airports after Mitchell.
<i>If we&rsquo;re really lucky, we can keep adding a Kurt Vonnegut quote about war to this column every year until we run out of quotes, or we run out of wars</i>
Please let it be the latter. Though if I were a betting man, I know where my money would be...
My S4 trip to the battlefields in the Somme area was a highly formative experience.
If I were in charge, I might consider making such a trip mandatory. People ought to have some form of contact with the reality that war is a fucking murderous muddy bloody slog of a horror, not a damned video game played in real time on CNN thousands of miles away by people you&#039;ll never meet.
If anyone decides that&#039;s not enough Eric Bogle, I recommended augmenting it with No Man&#039;s Land, aka Willie McBride when the Fureys recorded it.
Vonnegut&#039;s observation of a trend towards a vicious acceptance of war may be something of a historical aberration - I&#039;d say the period 1916-1991 was probably an all time low for the public glorification of war and the recent trend is probably more a regression to the mean, I mean &quot;dulce et decorum est&quot; is an old sentiment no matter how strongly I may agree with Wilfred Owen&#039;s bitter cooption of it for the anti case.
In terms of the modern, I think the lie of a &quot;precision weapon&quot; has a lot to do with it. There&#039;s no such thing as a war without civilian casualties, but there is a depressingly effective propaganda machine with scarily powerful players behind it convincing huge numbers of the population otherwise.
What&#039;s depressing is how widely accepted the jingoism is - I once got pounded on DKos for challenging someone for unironically saying &quot;dulce et decorum est&quot;, after having failed to read the rules for the subgroup that made clear that objections to jingoism were not permitted.
Heh... I just remembered what the point of my post was supposed to be and I left it out entirely.
The Gulf War quote really reminded me of Bono&#039;s rant on <em>Rattle and Hum</em> the day of the Remembrance Sunday bombing at Enniskillen:
<blockquote>And let me tell you somethin&#039;. I&#039;ve had enough of Irish Americans who haven&#039;t been back to their country in twenty or thirty years come up to me and talk about the resistance, the revolution back home...and the glory of the revolution...and the glory of dying for the revolution. Fuck the revolution! They don&#039;t talk about the glory of killing for the revolution. What&#039;s the glory in taking a man from his bed and gunning him down in front of his wife and his children? Where&#039;s the glory in that? Where&#039;s the glory in bombing a Remembrance Day parade of old age pensioners, their medals taken out and polished up for the day. Where&#039;s the glory in that? To leave them dying or crippled for life or dead under the rubble of the revolution, that the majority of the people in my country don&#039;t want. No more!</blockquote>
Obviously as a country we like to lie to ourselves that we only kill soldiers (or more recently, &quot;combatants&quot;) on the battlefield, but I&#039;d have to ask, where&#039;s the glory in using a remote control from hundreds or thousands of miles away to drop a bomb on a wedding party?
Mitchell was court-martialed for accusing the high brass and war/navy departments of incompetence, criminal negligence and &#039;almost treasonable&#039; maladministration in a newspaper article on a matter unrelated to the notorious bombers vs. battleships argument. And though he was right about the BvB issue in the long run in the context of the early 1920s he was wrong: the technology hadn&#039;t yet been perfected. And a lot of people didn&#039;t believe in the results of his tests because he cheated shamelessly. In any event it was sort of moot because the U.S. was prohibited by international treaty from completing any of those battleships and building aircraft carriers (and cruisers) instead.
As a Brit I am somewhat uncomfortable with the Yank fetishising of war. The way every soldier gets a &#039;Thank you for your service&#039;. It seems... suspicious? I know its a different culture, but this seems to mean nothing. British troops are respected (by most) but the &#039;thank you for your service&#039;... smacks of blind adoration.
For us 11 November is Armistice day. The closest Sunday is Remembrance Sunday. Its not about soldiers. Its about those who never returned. We are reminded that they gave their tomorrows for our todays. Then the Last Post sounds and the nation falls silent.
And then they march, The ones who did come back. Old men, in overcoats against the November air, medals on chest, some in wheelchairs being pushed by a grandchild. And those of my age, solemn faces remembering those left in Afghan and Iraq.
Not just soldiers. Men of the arctic convoys, those who spotted the Luftwaffe as they came in from the Channel. Those who fought the fires during those long summer nights in 1940.
This year as they marched the crowds who had come to pay respects, applauded. I&#039;ve never seen that before.
One of the major roads in London shuts, whilst the Old Men march. We don&#039;t say &quot;Thank you for your service&quot;. Across the country we stand in silence as we remember those who made a corner of a foreign field forever Britain. And we watch the old men march, as they remember their mates who they left behind.
The people who memorialize the &quot;glorious victory&quot; of a war are those who never fought in one.
The &quot;thank you for your service&quot; line has become a clich&eacute; here, something that is pulled out in order to provide the speaker with something to say, an empty statement employed as a substitute for expressing an actual thought. It is used to conceal a base hypocrisy. It is a perfect illustration that, in spite of their occasional, very pious and very public lauding of The Soldier (an abstraction rather than a flesh and blood person), Americans actually give very little thought to our country&#039;s recent and ongoing wars, the people who have fought in them and their human costs.
Yours is a beautiful comment. Thanks for contributing it.
<i>And now killing is Whoopee.</i>
I remember the bombing run videos during the first Gulf War and how people cheered when they hit their targets. All the olds who got cheated out of a good war in Korea and Vietnam were watching war like it was sportsball or the Olympics. The disconnect was pretty appalling. Ice Nine looked like a pretty good option for cleaning up the human plague on the planet.
I dunno, now I kind of want to go play Destiny or Call of Duty and just spend the entire time on the mic quoting vonnegut instead of questioning other players manhood/sexuality/parentage, as is the usual fashion.
sadly, you can bet the farm on it
and Billy Mitchell got court martialed for insubordination for pointing out that the head brass for the army and navy were idjits for ignoring the future of airpower as they built bunches of battleships that would end up shredded by those planes and aircraft carriers that they ignored. Eventually they figured it out and named a bomber and a couple airports after Mitchell.
remember, it&#039;s all about reforming gaming journalism
<i>If we&rsquo;re really lucky, we can keep adding a Kurt Vonnegut quote about war to this column every year until we run out of quotes, or we run out of wars</i>
Please let it be the latter. Though if I were a betting man, I know where my money would be...
My S4 trip to the battlefields in the Somme area was a highly formative experience.
If I were in charge, I might consider making such a trip mandatory. People ought to have some form of contact with the reality that war is a fucking murderous muddy bloody slog of a horror, not a damned video game played in real time on CNN thousands of miles away by people you&#039;ll never meet.
If anyone decides that&#039;s not enough Eric Bogle, I recommended augmenting it with No Man&#039;s Land, aka Willie McBride when the Fureys recorded it.
Vonnegut&#039;s observation of a trend towards a vicious acceptance of war may be something of a historical aberration - I&#039;d say the period 1916-1991 was probably an all time low for the public glorification of war and the recent trend is probably more a regression to the mean, I mean &quot;dulce et decorum est&quot; is an old sentiment no matter how strongly I may agree with Wilfred Owen&#039;s bitter cooption of it for the anti case.
In terms of the modern, I think the lie of a &quot;precision weapon&quot; has a lot to do with it. There&#039;s no such thing as a war without civilian casualties, but there is a depressingly effective propaganda machine with scarily powerful players behind it convincing huge numbers of the population otherwise.
What&#039;s depressing is how widely accepted the jingoism is - I once got pounded on DKos for challenging someone for unironically saying &quot;dulce et decorum est&quot;, after having failed to read the rules for the subgroup that made clear that objections to jingoism were not permitted.
-THIS-
If people appreciated the brutal, vicious, bloody true nature of war, maybe they wouldn&#039;t always be clamoring for a new one
Heh... I just remembered what the point of my post was supposed to be and I left it out entirely.
The Gulf War quote really reminded me of Bono&#039;s rant on <em>Rattle and Hum</em> the day of the Remembrance Sunday bombing at Enniskillen:
<blockquote>And let me tell you somethin&#039;. I&#039;ve had enough of Irish Americans who haven&#039;t been back to their country in twenty or thirty years come up to me and talk about the resistance, the revolution back home...and the glory of the revolution...and the glory of dying for the revolution. Fuck the revolution! They don&#039;t talk about the glory of killing for the revolution. What&#039;s the glory in taking a man from his bed and gunning him down in front of his wife and his children? Where&#039;s the glory in that? Where&#039;s the glory in bombing a Remembrance Day parade of old age pensioners, their medals taken out and polished up for the day. Where&#039;s the glory in that? To leave them dying or crippled for life or dead under the rubble of the revolution, that the majority of the people in my country don&#039;t want. No more!</blockquote>
Obviously as a country we like to lie to ourselves that we only kill soldiers (or more recently, &quot;combatants&quot;) on the battlefield, but I&#039;d have to ask, where&#039;s the glory in using a remote control from hundreds or thousands of miles away to drop a bomb on a wedding party?
No more!
Mitchell was court-martialed for accusing the high brass and war/navy departments of incompetence, criminal negligence and &#039;almost treasonable&#039; maladministration in a newspaper article on a matter unrelated to the notorious bombers vs. battleships argument. And though he was right about the BvB issue in the long run in the context of the early 1920s he was wrong: the technology hadn&#039;t yet been perfected. And a lot of people didn&#039;t believe in the results of his tests because he cheated shamelessly. In any event it was sort of moot because the U.S. was prohibited by international treaty from completing any of those battleships and building aircraft carriers (and cruisers) instead.