Hi Marsha, Someone once told me, "a soldier is not a hero because of what he does, he is a hero because of what he risks".
I said this to a Marine friend of mine, and he looked at me really seriously and said "you'd be surprised how many people, civilians and soldiers, don't understand that". In a song called Red Army Blues (by The Waterboys) the lyrics open with... When I left my home and my family my mother said to me Son, it's not how many Germans you kill that counts It's how many people you set free. When we look closely, many times, at the unbridled patriotic masturbation of the modern political dialogue, we can see this subtle yet profound misunderstanding. And as such we are moving back to the pre-WWI idea of "war". This is, as is seen in the following Pirsig quote, simply systemic of the overall retreat to Victorianism Pirsig talks about later. "The Victorian social system and the Victorian morality that led into World War I had portrayed war as an adventurous conflict between noble individuals engaged in the idealistic service of their country: a kind of extended knighthood. Victorians loved exquisitely painted heroic battle scenes in their drawing rooms, with dashing cavalrymen riding toward the enemy with sabers drawn, or a horse returning riderless with the title, "Bad News." Death was acknowledged by an occasional soldier in the arms of his comrades looking palely toward heaven. World War I wasn't like that. The Gatling gun removed the nobility, the heroism. The Victorian painters had never shown a battlefield of mud and shell holes and barbed wire and half a million rotting corpses-some staring toward heaven, some staring into the mud, some without faces to stare in any direction. That many had been murdered in one battle alone." (LILA) I am convinced the modern war will not end until a draft is instated, and all exceptions to it abolished. Too few are sacrificing too much for too little. And we are maintaining that disequilibrium by the deceitful rhetoric of political ideologues and politicians. Arlo At 04:32 AM 10/3/2007, you wrote: >Greetings, > >I think Ken Burn's documentary should be followed by a 12-hour >documentary of sobbing mothers. Rational, my left foot!!! What >fathers might call rational, mothers may call psychotic. Justify it >as you might, rationality is a myth. > >Marsha Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
