Illus. by Tarmasz
Over the weekend I went to my 45th Sewanee Military Academy class reunion. It’s the first high school class reunion I’ve attended, in part because I’ve always had mixed feelings about my years at SMA. On the one hand, I loved how the teachers introduced me to British literature and to Dostoevsky, Kafka, and the 20th century existentialists and to ancient and medieval history. I had some good friends and I was excited to play on the tennis team and be part of the debate team. But I didn’t like the military in the slightest.
I was sent there because the academics were good and because the local high school down in the valley was terrible. Parents who wanted their children to attend good colleges generally sent them to one of the two preparatory schools on the Sewanee mountain.
I will be reflecting a bit more on my reunion experience in upcoming posts but for today I’ll just share a Jacques Prévert poem that helped get me through the drills and the bullying and the Saturday morning inspections (SMI’s). Maybe it also inspired an underground newspaper that I put out. (I got caught because, pretentious little bugger that I was, I used a French expression in an article about the hazing of freshmen and there was only one student at the Academy who was fluent in French.*)
It’s a good poem to keep in mind as we see right wing Republicans unloading on Bowe Bergdahl before hearing his side of the story. It may be that Bergdahl did something that warrants a court martial but my initial sense is that he is more weird than criminal. At any rate, we need to wait rather than leaping to conclusions. What I know from my own modest experience is that different people respond to military authority in different ways, and if we find guilty every member of the military whose actions don’t conform to the hero ideal, many will stand condemned.
Prévert’s bird is the anti-authoritarian imagination that speaks its mind when released from its cage. (I’ve posted on a couple of other Prévert bird poems, here and here, in which the birds function in similar ways.) The poem also shows us a good way of responding to sarcasm:
Free Bird
By Jacques Prévert
I put my army cap in the cage
And went out with the bird on my head
What’s this!
We’re not saluting any more
Shouted the Major
No
We’re not saluting any more
Said the bird
Ah in that case
Excuse me I thought we were saluting
Said the Major
You’re excused anyone can make a mistake
Said the bird.
(Translated by Scott Bates)
Simple, quirky, and quietly rebellious, the poem sticks a pin in military bloviating. We need it now as much as ever.
*Actually my brother Jonathan was also fluent in French but he was only a freshman at the time. He would publish his own underground newspaper a couple of years later. Mine was called The Mirror of Galadriel, his The Subway Wall (after the Simon and Garfunkel song).
Note on the artist: Tarmasz’s website can be found at http://www.tarmasz.com/2011_11_01_archive.html
