It is very tempting for some to say that any person willing to die for their nation is stupid, or that no dumb person won a fight by dying for their nation, but if it were not for such persons, then just image an Europe run today under Nazism or a Korea under Communism undivided. As distasteful and unnecessary as nationalism and patriotism ought to be, we should all be thankful for those brave persons who stand guard with a gun so we can sleep well at night. The term "brave" is likely best, because it was advised to me by a serving infantry soldier that the key quality making a good combatant is not having company or equipment or skill or weaponry, but is having courage under fire.
-Frances -----Original Message----- From: William Conger [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, May 25, 2009 11:37 AM To: [email protected] Subject: memorial day aesthetics I'm not sure if there's an aesthetic root to my admittedly rather sappy regard for vets on this Memorial day in America. For people of my generation and even those of earlier and later decades, It was an accepted commonplace that a young fellow would serve in the armed forces, not by choice but by law. I served in the Naval Reserve for eight years -- a sort of cop-out that enabled me to continue my studies and civilian life so long as no military emergency arose. By sheer luck, my term was up just weeks before the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis and the call-up of Navy Reserves. Friends not so lucky had to leave their jobs and families for more than two years to blockade Cuba and rattle swords. A decade later I was teaching kids in a junior college, not the best students around, who were drafted and shipped off to Vietnam if they flunked just one course....and many of them went to war by that harsh rule. Once in a while a few would return, totally messed up or missing a limb. A colleague had a nervous breakdown and had to quit teaching because he had flunked a nice kid who was then drafted and came home in a coffin. I've known quite a few people who had to go to war, unwillingly, but with resolve. I knew only one who talked about it (how he shit his pants as a gunner in a B-29 over Germany) and even today a good friend, in his eighties, won't discuss his personal horrors. Growing up in WWII America had a huge impact on me and my generation just as the Depression did for my parents' era. Everyone realized that something bigger and better or worse and more menacing could and likely would affect them at any moment, no matter what seemed to be. Life's bottom line had several forms: "no guarantee, no free lunch, no privilege, no easy path, no me first. In military training you learn to think as if you're the other guy, the one next to you or the one aiming at you and so you're trained to love the one and regard the other as a mute and inhuman target. That's a tough paradox to keep in mind and it's shaped by all sorts of propaganda, weird ceremony, plus God-centered duty and patriotism. This fosters an aesthetic of paradox, a flip-flop bright side-dark side kind of outlook. So artists of my generation are not convinced by any theory, sensing them all as just more poop-deck propaganda that separates the good from the bad by the same insane war-time logic that says this guy is good and that other guy is nothing but a brainless, foaming animal. Like the vet I know, the eighty year old one time private who had to kill his way across Europe, and now won't speak of it and only wants to hear good music, walk the city and fields, and be a gentle and modest person, many artists of my age are just looking for a good day in the studio, the chance to glimpse order and create something with the good side of the paradox showing first, but only first. I honor my forebears who fell like lumpy sacks while shooting for America. I know where they died and when, but not really understanding it was simply ordinary, blind, bad luck. It's crazy to honor tragedy, as if to give proud meaning to bad luck, but that's the only way to keep the dark side face down if not absent. WC
