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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

The Bully Pulpit

Monthly Archives: May 2014

Meet Alexander the Great

30 Friday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, History, War

≈ Comments Off on Meet Alexander the Great

Tags

Alexander, Alexander the Great, Arrian, Biography, combat, Conquest, Egypt, Empire, Greece, Greek History, history, History of Alexander's Expeditions, leadership, Military, military history, Philip II of Macedonia, Robin Lane Fox, Toughness, War

Alexander the Great

“Most historians have had their own Alexander, and a view of him which is one-sided is bound to have missed the truth. There are features which cannot be disputed; the extraordinary toughness of a man who sustained nine wounds, breaking an ankle bone and receiving an arrow through his chest and the bolt of a catapult through his shoulder. He was twice struck on the head and neck by stones and once lost his sight from such a blow. The bravery which bordered on folly never failed him in the front line of battle, a position which few generals since have considered proper… There are two ways to lead men, either to delegate all authority and limit the leader’s burden or to share every hardship and decision and be seen to take the toughest labour, prolonging it until every other man has finished. Alexander’s method was the second, and only those who have suffered the first can appreciate why his men adored him.

Alexander was not merely a man of toughness, resolution and no fear. A murderous fighter, he had wide interests outside war, his hunting, reading, his patronage of music and drama and his lifelong friendship with Greek artists, actors and architects; he minded about his food and took a daily interest in his meals, appreciating quails from Egypt or apples from western orchards… He had an intelligent concern for agriculture and irrigation which he had learnt from his father; from Philip, too, came his constant favour for new cities and their law and formal design. He was famously generous and he loved to reward the same show of spirit which he asked of himself… Equally he was impatient and often conceited; the same officers who worshipped him must often have found him impossible… Though he drank as he lived, sparing nothing, his mind was not slurred by excessive indulgence; he was not a man to be crossed or to be told what he could not do, and he always had firm views on exactly what he wanted…

A romantic must not be romanticized, for he is seldom compassionate, always distant, but in Alexander it is tempting to see the romantic’s complex nature for the first time in Greek history. There are the small details, his sudden response to a show of nobility, his respect for women, his appreciation of eastern customs, his extreme fondness for his dog and especially his horse… He had the romantic’s sharpness and cruel indifference to life; he was also a man of passionate ambitions, who saw the intense adventure of the unknown. He did not believe in impossibility; man could do anything, and he nearly proved it.”

__________

From the final chapter of Robin Lane Fox’s biography Alexander the Great.

In the book’s prologue, Fox includes the following assessment, sourced from Arrian’s History of Alexander’s Expeditions (150 AD):

As for the exact thoughts in Alexander’s mind, I am neither able nor concerned to guess them, but this I think I can state, that nothing common or mean would have been his intention; he would not have remained content with any of his conquests, not even if he had added the British Isles to Europe; he would always have searched beyond for something unknown, and if there had been no other competition, he would have competed against himself.

Below in red, the empire Alexander amassed in seventeen years as King of Macedonia, Persia, and Asia.

Make some more introductions:

  • Meet Isaac Newton
  • Meet Thomas Jefferson
  • Meet Saint Augustine

Map of Alexander the Great's Conquests

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William F. Buckley on Legalizing Drugs

29 Thursday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Politics

≈ Comments Off on William F. Buckley on Legalizing Drugs

Tags

Addiction, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Bordeaux, Cocaine, Conservative, Conservativism, Drug Legalization, Drugs, Freedom, Government, Heroin, interview, justice, Law, Law Enforcement, Legal System, Legalization, Legalizing Drugs, libertarianism, Marijuana, Narcotics, police, politics, Public Health, Public Policy, Richard Heffner, The Open Mind, William F. Buckley, wine

William F. Buckley

“First of all, please don’t confuse my position with that of people who are indifferent to drugs. I’m not indifferent to drugs. I think I’ve been quoted as saying if I could turn a single latch which would make all the drugs disappear from the face of the earth, with the exception of here and there, a vineyard in Bordeaux, I would turn that latch.

Now, you say is it inconsistent for a conservative to take my position. I don’t think it is, because a conservative seeks to be grounded in reality. That which works is quantifiable; that which simply does not work, isn’t. If you were to pass a law requiring people to go to church on Sunday, it wouldn’t work. Under the circumstances, you would eventually simply withdraw such a law. My position on drugs is that our drug laws aren’t working, and that more net damage is being done by their continuation than would be done by withdrawing them from the books. This, as I say, should not be confused as a sanction for drugs. Drugs are a form of escapism, and the damage in taking them is not by any means self-limited. It damages other people also. For that reason, the question is: How do you diminish the net harm done by drugs?[…]

Anybody who becomes an alcoholic, which is probably the primary curse of this country, in my judgment, is morally stigmatized by permitting himself to get into that condition. That is not an argument for prohibition. Adultery is widely practiced. So is fornication. You can simultaneously say it’s morally wrong, but we’re not going to tell the police to open the doors of every motel to find out whether the people inside have marriage licenses.”

__________

William F. Buckley, speaking in an interview on Richard Heffner’s The Open Mind on August 6th, 1996.

More on various vices:

  • Richard Burton discusses how alcohol pushed him to the brink of death
  • Noam Chomsky explains what the lottery can teach us about the drug war
  • Former addict Will Self reflects on the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman

William F Buckley

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Martin Amis: How Britain, Germany, and France Have Reconciled Their Roles in World War II

27 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Interview, War

≈ Comments Off on Martin Amis: How Britain, Germany, and France Have Reconciled Their Roles in World War II

Tags

Adolf Hitler, Battle of Britain, BBC, combat, Conquest, Denmark, England, European History, France, Germany, Greece, history, Martin Amis, Martin Amis's England, Nazi Germany, Nazism, Third Reich, War, World War Two, Yugoslavia

World War 2

“Britain, I think rightly, derives a great deal of strength from its performance in the Second World War. Perhaps no other nation in Europe emerges from that war intact — either because of the humiliation of conquest, the humiliation of initiating the war, or the humiliation of collaboration.

And more materially: Hitler conquered a string of countries in a matter of days, sometimes a matter of hours. Denmark, 24 hours; France, 39 days; Yugoslavia, 7 days; Greece, 12 days. And leading up to the attack on Russia, which until halfway through 1941 looked as though it was going to be maybe 45 days. The only defeat suffered by Germany in that time was the Battle of Britain in 1940.

There were all these governments in exile that were standing with us, but we stood alone and we did prevail in the end, although as a minor player by the time the war ended. And I think that’s fit to shape how you see yourself for generations. There was always a feeling — and I think a perfectly intelligible feeling — that a great evil had been bested in the end.

Germany has made superhuman efforts to come to terms with its past. And still wants to talk about it. And is not shying away from it. But it seems to me that France has made no efforts at all in that direction: the myth of the resistance nation has completely supplanted the reality of the collaborationist nation. It takes all my powers of imagination and empathy to think myself into a French skin or a German skin for that reason, because of how tremendously diminished I would be. And ultimately, the English performance, and conduct, in the war is something to be proud of. That is not the case elsewhere.”

__________

From the BBC program, released in March of this year, entitled Martin Amis’s England.

More Amis:

  • On storytelling: why failure, not success, is its main subject
  • On memory: why it matters more as you age
  • On innocence: why the world is getting less so

Martin Amis

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Theodore Roosevelt on Setting the Right Example as a Man

26 Monday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Speeches

≈ Comments Off on Theodore Roosevelt on Setting the Right Example as a Man

Tags

Alfred Henry Lewis, Brother, Brother's Keeper, Christian, Christianity, Courage, ethics, Father, fatherhood, Holy Name Society, Honor, Loyalty, manhood, morality, Oyster Bay, Son, speech, Strength, Teddy Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Trust, virtue

Teddy Roosevelt

“Every man here knows the temptations that beset all of us in this world. At times any man will slip. I do not expect perfection, but I do expect genuine and sincere effort toward being decent and cleanly in thought, in word, and in deed… I expect you to be strong. I would not respect you if you were not. I do not want to see Christianity professed only by weaklings; I want to see it a moving spirit among men of strength. I do not expect you to lose one particle of your strength or courage by being decent.

There is always a tendency among very young men and among boys who are not quite young men as yet to think that to be wicked is rather smart; to think it shows that they are men. Oh, how often you see some young fellow who boasts that he is going to ‘see life,’ meaning by that that he is going to see that part of life which it is a thousandfold better should remain unseen!

I ask that every man here constitute himself his brother’s keeper by setting an example to that younger brother which will prevent him from getting such a false estimate of life. Example is the most potent of all things. If any one of you in the presence of younger boys, and especially the younger people of our own family, misbehave yourself, if you use coarse and blasphemous language before them, you can be sure that these younger people will follow your example and not your precept…

I have told you that I wanted you not only to be decent, but to be strong. These boys will not admire virtue of a merely anaemic type. They believe in courage, in manliness. They admire those who have the quality of being brave, the quality of facing life as life should be faced, the quality that must stand at the root of good citizenship in peace or in war… I want to see each man able to hold his own in the rough life outside, and also, when he is at home, a good man, unselfish in dealing with wife, or mother, or children. Remember that the preaching does not count if it is not backed up by practice. There is no good in your preaching to your boys to be brave if you run away. There is no good in your preaching to them to tell the truth if you do not… We have a right to expect that in your own homes and among your own associates you will prove by your deeds that yours is not a lip-loyalty merely; that you show in actual practice the faith that is in you.”

__________

Teddy, speaking to the Holy Name Society at Oyster Bay, New York, on August 16th, 1903.

In his original compilation of Teddy’s speeches, Alfred Henry Lewis includes with this text the following worthwhile footnote:

President Roosevelt belongs to the Dutch Reformed Church. His freedom from religious prejudice, however, never fails to stick out. He would no more dream of quarreling with a man because he was a Methodist or a Catholic than he would of quarreling with a man in the car ahead or the car behind on a railway train because of the car he saw fit to travel in. There are many churches just as there are many cars in a train; but he is as tolerant of one as of the other, since they are all going to the same place.

There’s also this old joke, which expresses, in so many words, something of Roosevelt’s point about the gap between preaching and practicing:

A man is driving his five year old to a friend’s house when another car races in front and cuts them off, nearly causing an accident. “Douchebag!” the father yells. A moment later he realizes the indiscretion, pulls over, and turns to face his son. “Your father just said a bad word,” he says. “I was angry at that driver, but that was no excuse for what I said. It was wrong. But just because I said it, it doesn’t make it right, and I don’t ever want to hear you saying it. Is that clear?” His son looks at him and says: “Too late, douchebag.”

Read on:

  • ‘The Light Has Gone Out of My Life’: Young Teddy Roosevelt in Love and Grief

Teddy Roosevely and the Rough RidersTeddy Roosevelt Riding a MooseTeddy Roosevelt

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“1 Corinthians 13″ by Spencer Reece

25 Sunday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ Comments Off on “1 Corinthians 13″ by Spencer Reece

Tags

1 Corinthians 13, First Corinthians, Gore Vidal, Mark Jarman, Paul, Poems, Poet, poetry, Spencer Reece, T.S. Eliot, The Clerk's Tale, The New Yorker, Writing

Irish Coast

How long do we wait for love?
Long ago, we rowed on a pond.
Our oars left the moon broken—
our gestures ruining the surface.
Our parents wanted us to marry.
Beyond the roses where we lay,
men who loved men grew wounds.
When do we start to forget our age?
Your husband and I look the same.
All day, your mother confuses us
as her dementia grows stronger.
Your boys yell: Red Rover!
We whisper your sister’s name
like librarians; at last on the list,
her heart clapping in her rib cage,
having stopped now six times,
the pumps opened by balloons,
we await her new heart cut
out from the chest of a stranger.
Your old house settles in its bones,
pleased by how we are arranged.
Our shadow grows like an obituary.
One of us says: “It is getting so dark.”
Your children end their game.
Trees stiffen into scrapbooks.
The sky’s shelves fill with stars.

__________

“1 Corinthians 13” by Spencer Reece.

I can’t understand Spencer Reece. His CV: Born in Hartford, Connecticut; Master of Theology, Harvard; Master of Divinity, Yale; Missionary to the Nuestras Pequenas Rosas orphanage in San Pedro Sula, Honduras; Missionary to the homeless and ordained priest of the Episcopal Church in Madrid, Spain; Manager of a Brooks Brothers in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

It’s that last bit which is, as Gore Vidal would say, the joker in the deck. French cuffs and Windsor knots hardy pair with homeless shelters and Honduran slums. But then again, rarely does religious poetry move with such a frantic, almost manic, energy, so perhaps Reece is capable of registering and giving voice to an usually wide spectrum of human experience. I once wrote, in a stroke of mild hyperbole, that Mark Jarman (a reader of this blog and my favorite living religious poet) wrote like T.S. Eliot in a fever dream. There is certainly something feverish to “1 Corinthians 13” as well, though Reece seems to be less in a reverie and more in a careful though entranced plod through the wilderness of memory.

When I first found it, I was so moved by this poem that I reread it about six times and immediately ordered the containing collection, Reece’s The Road to Emmaus. I think this poem is the strongest in the book, though Emmaus also contains “The Clerk’s Tale”, a poem so intricate and strangely stirring that The New Yorker, in an unprecedented editorial move, devoted a full back page to it. Oh yeah, and, coincidentally, it’s about a guy who works at a men’s clothier at the Mall of America in Minnesota. I suggest you give it a slow and careful read.

By the way, in the 13th chapter of his letter to the church in Corinth, Paul says, among other things:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing…

Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away.

I took the above picture in Ireland.

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Douglas MacArthur: Will We Find an International Peace?

25 Sunday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Speeches, War

≈ Comments Off on Douglas MacArthur: Will We Find an International Peace?

Tags

Address to Congress, Air Force, Armageddon, army, Balance of Power, combat, Congress, Douglas MacArthur, history, international relations, League of Nations, Military, navy, Old Soldiers Never Die, peace, Speeches, War, World War Two

Douglas MacArthur“Men since the beginning of time have sought peace. Various methods through the ages have been attempted to devise an international process to prevent or settle disputes between nations. From the very start workable methods were found in so far as individual citizens were concerned, but the mechanics of an instrumentality of larger international scope have never been successful. Military alliances, balances of power, Leagues of Nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war.

The utter destructiveness of war now blocks out this alternative. We have had our last chance. If we will not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature, and all material and cultural developments of the past 2000 years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.”

__________

General Douglas MacArthur, quoting himself in his “Old Soldiers Never Die” Speech to Congress on April 19th, 1951.

Douglas MacArthur

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“Does It Matter?” by Siegfried Sassoon

23 Friday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry, War

≈ Comments Off on “Does It Matter?” by Siegfried Sassoon

Tags

Afghanistan war, Barack Obama, combat, conflict, Department of Veterans Affairs, Does It Matter?, Iraq War, Memorial Day, Poem, poetry, scandal, Siegfried Sassoon, veterans, Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration, War, War Poetry

Siegfried Sassoon

Does it matter? — losing your legs?
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When the others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.

Does it matter? — losing your sight?
There’s such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.

Do they matter? — those dreams from the pit?
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won’t say that you’re mad;
For they’ll know you’ve fought for your country
And no one will worry a bit.

__________

“Does It Matter?” by Siegfried Sassoon.

As we near Memorial Day, the subject is war. And on this Memorial Day, in the United States, the subject is how we treat veterans who have made it home.

In November of last year, I wrote a post in which I argued,

As of last week, the Department of Veterans Affairs has stopped releasing the number of non-fatal casualties of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. The International Business Times suspects this is an attempt to conceal a “grim milestone”: the one millionth American serviceman or woman who has returned home maimed or wounded…

Yet what we should see in the homecoming of these impossibly brave people is obscured by the context in which we see them return. So often, an apparently emblematic veteran is shown coming home at the halftime of an NFL game, his teary-eyed family rushing across the field for a hug as reverent claps and raucous chants of “USA!” reverberate through the stadium. In this contrived ceremony, many Americans believe they have seen the typical homecoming: a healthy soldier in uniform, his adorable and adoring wife, proud children, and the appreciative cheers of a grateful nation. Yet far more veterans will come home to trouble — physical, interpersonal and financial trouble — which is often the direct consequence of their deployments. But at the football game, you clap, you cry, and you absolve yourself of responsibility to that overjoyed family on the field.

I received several comments and a handful of emails in response, prompting me to offer a more direct clarification:

We send soldiers on a string of protracted deployments, from which they eventually return to a VA that is thoroughly backlogged and utterly inefficient. And underlying these operational disgraces is a strategic program that entrenches them (and us) in conflicts that are completely open-ended. There is no victory without objectives, and our objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan are, and have been for a long time, either muddled or unattainable…

It’s ignoble to charge men and women like [my brother-in-law] with quixotic missions — missions which we as a people neither seriously engage with nor sacrifice for, except in meaningless, vicarious gestures… What counts is, first, adopting sound policy so American power is used justifiably and effectively in the world; and second, making sure we have the proper care and support waiting for those brave men and women when they return home.

At this point, I’m on the verge of hysterics about the Veterans Affairs Health Care scandal. I think President Obama should be too. The opening words at his press conference yesterday should not have been “… people will be held accountable.” They should have been, “Not one more veteran dies because this sort of negligence. Not one more veteran loses care because of it. Not one more veteran will wait an extra minute, in any waiting room, in any state, at any time of day, because of it… otherwise, heads will roll.”

More war poetry:

  • “The Soldier” by Rupert Brooke
  • “Gone, Gone Again” by Edward Thomas
  • “On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam” by Hayden Carruth

Siegfried Sassoon

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Dexter Filkins Tells a Tragic, Symbolic Anecdote about the Fate of Iraq

22 Thursday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in War

≈ Comments Off on Dexter Filkins Tells a Tragic, Symbolic Anecdote about the Fate of Iraq

Tags

conflict, Dexter Filkins, Dora, Gazaliya, Insurgents, Iraq War, Journalism, Saddam Hussein, Sadiya, Shia, Sunni, The Forever War, The New York Times, War, Yusra al-Hakeem

Dexter Filkins

“In places like Dora, Gazaliya and Sadiya, the insurgents had taken to killing the garbagemen. It seemed strange at first that they would do that, kill a man who collected the trash. Then they started killing the bakers. In those places, naturally enough, the garbage piled up in the streets, heaps of it, mountains of it, and there wasn’t any bread. Then they started killing the teachers, and the teachers stopped going to the schools. And the children stopped going, of course. So: no bread and no schools and mountains of trash. Ingenious, I guess, if you wanted to stop the functioning of a neighborhood.

Not long after, I talked about these things with Yusra al-Hakeem, one of the Iraqi interpreters I worked with. Yusra was one of my best Iraqi friends. She was bright, funny and loud, one of those Iraqis who had taken immediately to the new freedoms. And yet in the past year life had changed dramatically for Yusra, and Yusra had changed herself. A Shiite and a liberal, Yusra had begun wearing a long black abaya, which she loathed but which was necessary, she believed, to protect her from the militias in her neighborhood. Yusra usually tore it from her head the second she walked inside the Times compound. ‘Stupid thing,’ she’d say, hurling it onto the couch.

And now Yusra had decided to leave the country. At first she joked in her usual way. ‘After 1,400 years, the Shiites have had their chance, and look at the mess they made. The Shiites, they cannot govern Iraq—bring back the Sunnis!’ And then a laugh. Yusra didn’t mean it—she loathed Saddam. But the danger was different now, debilitating in a way it had not been during the years of Saddam.

‘I am so tired,’ Yusra said. ‘In Saddam’s time, I knew that if I kept my mouth shut, if I did not say anything against him, I would be safe. But now it is different. There are so many reasons why someone would want to kill me now: because I am Shiite, because I have a Sunni son, because I work for the Americans, because I drive, because I am a woman with a job, because’—she picked up her abaya—‘I don’t wear my stupid hejab.’

She took my notebook and flipped it to a blank page. This was Yusra’s way of explaining her situation and, sensing the limitations of language, she would sometimes seize a reporter’s notebook and diagram her predicament. She drew a large circle in the middle.

‘This was Saddam,’ she said. ‘He is here. Big. During Saddam’s time, all you had to do was stay away from this giant thing. That was not pleasant, but not so hard.’

She flipped to another blank page. She drew a dozen circles, some of them touching, some overlapping. A small galaxy. She put her pen in the middle and made a dot.

‘The dot in the middle, that is me—that is every Iraqi,’ she said. ‘From everywhere you can be killed, from here, from here, from here, from here.’ She was stabbing her pen into the notepad.

‘We Iraqis,’ she said. ‘We are all sentenced to death and we do not know by whom.’

And so she would leave Iraq. For Jordan, for Syria—and then, if she was lucky, for America.”

__________

From The Forever War by Dexter Filkins.

Read on:

  • Andrew Bacevich cites the theological concept of original sin to answer a political question about future warfare
  • My all time favorite debate: Christopher Hitchens versus George Galloway on the Iraq War
  • I wrote a post about how the incentives of the U.S. political system, and structure of our military, perpetuate endless wars

Iraq War

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‘Your Leaders Are Crazy’: The Leaflet We Dropped on Nazi Germany

21 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, War

≈ Comments Off on ‘Your Leaders Are Crazy’: The Leaflet We Dropped on Nazi Germany

Tags

Adolf Hitler, Aviation, Belgrade, Bombings, conflict, Coventry, Detroit, Ford, German-occupied Europe, Hermann Goering, history, Leaflet, London, Luftwaffe, Marshall Plan, Nazi Germany, Nazis, Nazism, peace, Plymouth, Rotterdam, Royal Air Force, Sir Arthur Harris, Third Reich, War, Warsaw, Wehrmacht, Willow Run, World War Two

Easter Eggs for Hitler

In the Spring of 1942, printing presses around Britain began pumping out 20 tons worth of a leaflet that would later be dropped from the skies over German-occupied Europe. This pamphlet, which was written and signed by the Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Sir Arthur Harris, is a riveting historical fragment that displays the Brits’ stiff and gritty dignity as well as their ironclad confidence, a few months after Pearl Harbor, in the forthcoming support from their ally across the Atlantic. This document, which cannot be found in full anywhere else on the internet, is reproduced below exactly as the Wehrmacht would have read it.

__________

“We in Britain know quite enough about air raids. For ten months your Luftwaffe bombed us. First you bombed us by day. When we made this impossible, they came by night. Then you had a big fleet of bombers. Your airmen fought well. They bombed London for ninety-two nights running. They made heavy raids on Coventry, Plymouth, Liverpool, and other British cities. They did a lot of damage. Forty-three thousand British men, women and children lost their lives; Many of our most cherished historical buildings were destroyed.

You thought, and Goering promised you, that you would be safe from bombs. And indeed, during all that time we could only send over a small number of aircraft in return. But now it is just the other way. Now you send only a few aircraft against us. And we are bombing Germany heavily.

Why are we doing so? It is not revenge — though we do not forget Warsaw, Belgrade, Rotterdam, London, Plymouth and Coventry. We are bombing Germany, city by city, and even more terribly, in order to make it impossible for you to go on with the war. That is our object. We shall pursue it remorselessly. City by city; Liibeck, Rostock, Cologne, Emden, Bremen; Wilhelmshaven, Duisburg, Hamburg — and the list will grow longer and longer. Let the Nazis drag you down to disaster with them if you will. That is for you to decide.

Royal Air Force

It is true that your defenses inflict losses on our bombers. Your leaders try to comfort you by telling you that our losses are so heavy that we shall not be able to go on bombing you very much longer. Whoever believes that will be bitterly disappointed.

America has only just entered the fight in Europe. The squadrons, forerunners of a whole air fleet, have arrived in England from the United States of America. Do you realize what it will mean to you when they bomb Germany also? In one American factory alone, the new Ford plant at Willow Run, Detroit, they are already turning out one four-engined bomber able to carry four tons of bombs to any part of the Reich every two hours. There are scores of other such factories in the United States of America. You cannot bomb those factories. Your submarines cannot even try to prevent those Atlantic bombers from getting here; for they fly across the Atlantic.

Soon we shall be coming every night and every day, rain, blow or snow — we and the Americans. I have just spent eight months in America, so I know exactly what is coming. We are going to scourge the Third Reich from end to end, if you make it necessary for us to do so. You cannot stop it, and you know it.

Royal Air Force

You have no chance. You could not defeat us in 1940, when we were almost unarmed and stood alone. Your leaders were crazy to attack Russia as well as America (but then your leaders are crazy; the whole world thinks so except Italy).

How can you hope to win now that we are getting even stronger, having both Russia and America as allies, while you are getting more and more exhausted?

Remember this: no matter how far your armies march they can never get to England. They could not get here when we were unarmed. Whatever their victories, you will still have to settle the air war with us and America. You can never win that. But we are doing so already now.

One final thing: it is up to you to end the war and the bombing. You can overthrow the Nazis and make peace. It is not true that we plan a peace of revenge. That is a German propaganda lie. But we shall certainly make it impossible for any German Government to start a total war again. And is not that as necessary in your own interests as in ours?”

__________

The leaflet penned by Sir Arthur Harris and dropped over Nazi Europe in the late Spring of 1942.

More war:

  • “If”: A quick anecdote about how Sparta stood up to Philip of Macedon
  • A.N. Wilson points out the central paradox at the heart of World War II
  • Journalist Sebastian Junger reflects on what the War in Afghanistan taught him about human nature

Below: Dresden, capital of German Saxony, Spring 1945.

Dresden Bombing

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John Updike on Making Peace with Our Past Selves

21 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

≈ Comments Off on John Updike on Making Peace with Our Past Selves

Tags

Aging, Biography, consciousness, Ego, F. Scott Fitzgerald, fatherhood, Growth, Haven Hill, High School, identity, Ipswich, John Irving, John Updike, marriage, Maturation, memoir, Mortality, Parenting, Philosophy, Self-Consciousness, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, Selves, Shillington, Writing

John Updike

“Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

It is even possible to dislike our old selves, these disposable ancestors of ours. For instance, my high-school self — skinny, scabby, giggly, gabby, frantic to be noticed, tormented enough to be a tormentor, relentlessly pushing his cartoons and posters and noisy jokes and pseudo-sophisticated poems upon the helpless high school — strikes me now as considerably obnoxious, though I owe him a lot: without his frantic ambition and insecurity I would not now be sitting on (as my present home was named by others) Haven Hill. And my Ipswich self, a delayed second edition of that high-school self, in a town much like Shillington in its blend of sweet and tough, only more spacious and historic and blessedly free of family ghosts, and my own relative position in the ‘gang’ improved, enhanced by a touch of wealth, a mini-Mailer in our small salt-water pond, a stag of sorts in our herd of housewife — flirtatious, malicious, greedy for my quota of life’s pleasures, a distracted, mediocre father and worse husband — he seems another obnoxious show-off, rapacious and sneaky and, in the service of his own ego, remorseless. But, then, am I his superior in anything but caution and years, and how can I disown him without disowning also his useful works, on which I still receive royalties? And when I entertain in my mind these shaggy, red-faced, overexcited, abrasive fellows, I find myself tenderly taken with their diligence, their hopefulness, their ability in spite of all to map a broad strategy and stick with it. So perhaps one cannot, after all, not love them…

Writing… is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world — it happens to everybody.”

__________

From John Updike’s magisterial study of the internal life, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.

Apart from his consistently masterful (and often playful) use of language, the real charm of Updike, at least in this reader’s view, can be boiled down to several factors that don’t exist in another American writer — or at least not in another one of Updike’s caliber. Like his style itself, which constantly bears the marks of a mind at serious play, these attributes exist in relationships that are, in some essential sense, oppositional. His intellect, weighted with a heavy dose of classical philosophy but buoyed by a boyish inquisitiveness; his well-bred WASPiness, clothed in the pastels of New England sans the starch you can smell on the pages of a Fitzgerald or John Irving; his fixation on women, tempered always by the guilt of consistently looking (and usually pursuing) the ones who are — in some sense, and for one reason or another — wrong. Tack all of this atop a Christianity which comprehended doubt, and a cheeriness that could face deep questions, and you have a mind that will always give you something worth seeing – if you can only keep up with such an agile pen.

Looking close at the above paragraph, you’ll recognize all of these attributes. If you do yourself the favor of exploring deeper into Self-Consciousness, you’ll get a better sense of each of them and how they shape the man and his understanding of the conscious and subconscious life.

Read on:

  • Paul Newman reflects: “Men experience many passions in a lifetime. One passion drives away the one before it.”
  • Updike explains why he was skeptical as a young man
  • Updike ruminates on how religious belief is ‘a part of being human’

John Updike

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Gore Vidal: What ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ Means Today

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Politics, Speeches

≈ Comments Off on Gore Vidal: What ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ Means Today

Tags

American Founding, American History, Bill of Rights, Conservativism, Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Federalist Papers, Freedom, Gore Vidal, Government, Law, liberty, Life, Patriarchy, political philosophy, politics, Pursuit of Happiness, Speeches, State of the Union, The Nation, Thomas Jefferson, tyranny

Gore Vidal Portrait Session

“We would together constitute a new nation, founded upon ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ The first two foundation stones were familiar, if vague… ‘The pursuit of happiness’ is the real Joker in the deck. To this day, no one is sure just what Jefferson meant. But I suppose what he had in mind was that government will leave each citizen alone, to develop as best he can in a tranquil climate, to achieve whatever it is that his heart desires, with a minimum of distress to the other pursuers of happiness. This was a revolutionary concept in 1776, and it still is…

Although the Founding Fathers were, to a man, natural conservatives, there were enough Jeffersonian-minded pursuers of happiness among them to realize that so lawyerly a Republic would probably act as a straight jacket to those of an energetic nature. So to ensure the rights of each to pursue happiness, the Bill of Rights was attached to the Constitution. In theory, henceforward, no one need fear the tyranny of either the state or of the majority. Certain of our rights, like the freedom of speech, were said to be inalienable.

But some like to remind us that the right to privacy cannot be found anywhere in the pages of the Constitution, or even in the Federalist Papers… We are told that since the Constitution nowhere says that a citizen has the right to have sex with another citizen, or to take drugs, or to OD on cigarettes — or, as the nation is now doing, on sugar — that the Founders therefore did not license them to do any of these things that may be proscribed by the prejudices of a local majority. But this is an invitation to tyranny…

Was the United States meant to be a patriarchal society? I think the answer is no. Was the United States meant to be a monotheistic society, Christian or otherwise? The answer is no. Religion may be freely practiced here, but religion was deliberately excluded from the political arrangements of our republic…

Each year it is discovered with some alarm that American high school students, when confronted anonymously by the Bill of Rights, neither like it nor approve of it. Our society has made them into true patriots — but not of the idea of a free society, but of a stern patriarchy, where the police have every right to arrest you for just about anything that the state disapproves of. To me the tragedy of the United States in this century is not the crack up of an empire we never knew what to do with in the first place; but the collapse of the idea of the citizen as someone autonomous, whose private life is not subject to orders from above.”

__________

From Gore Vidal’s speech at The Nation’s 125th Anniversary in 1990.

As typically is the case with Vidal, the combination of his intelligence and charm — conveyed as they are in his patrician, cisatlantic tones — masks a scattering of sins of hyperbole and historical judgement. I nevertheless recommend the speech below, and have listened to it twice now — not because of it’s heavy scholarship, but because it’s as heady and sardonic a piece of political theater as you’ll find.

Read on:

  • Vidal’s hilarious, prophetic rebuttal to Bush’s second inaugural
  • Reader of this site Dr. Robert P. George debates Krauthammer on the founders’ views of human nature
  • The greatest debate of all time: Hitchens grapples with Galloway on Iraq

Gore Vidal

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