The crazy logic of Milo Minderbinder in Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22” shows up in Pakistan’s Secret Service using funds donated by the U.S. to hire terrorists to attack the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
Tag Archives: war
Weep, For You May Touch Them Not
In his poem “Greater Love,” Owen describes two deaths. One is the physical death of soldiers, which is tragic enough. But the other death is also heartbreaking: the death of innocence that occurs when people become intimately acquainted with war.
Libya: Gargoyle Laughing, Fist Pounding
First Muammar Gaddafi, Guernica-like, bombed his people. Now the United States and several western countries are bombing Gaddafi. As this Carl Sandburg poem makes clear, the nightmare has no end: Gaddafi jeering and Allied responding go on and on (if not in Libya, then elsewhere) as America enters its third war in ten years. Gargoyle […]
Brother Fire Unleashed in Libya
As I watch Muammar Qaddafi turn his air force against his own people, I am trying to imagine conditions on the ground. I asked my father for literature describing the experience, he having once undergone a bombing himself. It occurred in 1944, a couple of weeks after the D Day invasion of Normandy, when the […]
Strangelove Somewhat Dated (Thank God!)
Film Friday Recently, maybe on National Public Radio, I heard a story that struck me as marvelous: an American tourist was visiting underground Russian bomb shelters. What with improving relations, apparently the Russians no longer feel they need a place where their government officials can hide out for two weeks following a nuclear attack. The […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Dr. Strangelove, Film, politics, Stanley Kubrick Comments closed
How to Tell a True War Story
Two weeks ago I was honored to participate in two conversations with high school classes about the Tim O’Brien Vietnam War novel The Things They Carried. Carl Rosin, an English high school teacher and regular reader of this blog, set up the occasion. I have taught O’Brien’s marvelous work in our College’s 20th century English-Language […]
The Grand Illusion that We Fight Over
Film Friday I wrote Tuesday and Wednesday about Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” and the fences that divide us, both externally and internally. Today I write about one of the great humanistic films about dividing lines: Jean Renoir’s 1937 classic La Grande Illusion. The final scene of the film reminds me of “Mending Wall.” Two World […]
Young People Fighting Old People’s Wars
Memorial Day Today we honor our soldiers killed in the line of duty. Many of them were idealistic, most of them were young. I offer up today an enigmatic poem by A.E. Housman that captures, in an understated way, the tragedy of their deaths. The poem is unusual in that it talks about soldiers having a choice. […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Here Dead We Lie", A. E. Housman, Afghanistan War Comments closed
