Where have all the war poets gone?

I saw some lines in a magazine this week that were from the very first poem I remembered from WWII.
"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth/And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings."They were from "High Flight", written by a 19 year old volunteer named John Magee of the Royal Canadian Air Force who was killed in 1941.
I remember this because I had a cousin in the RCAF who was also killed in 1941 (and a maternal grandfather killed on the Western Front in the Great War.) We don't seem to have anything today that a school child can memorize or can be recited by Katie Couric. Where are the bittersweet but beautiful lines from Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" (1917)..Not in the hands of boys But in their eyes Shall shine the holy glimmers of good bys" No Rupert Brooke (1915) "That I should die; think this of me, that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England". In 1939 Yeats wrote "An Irish Airman Forsees his Death" and in that same year Auden wrote his mordant "September 1, 1939". Robinson Jeffers in 1941 wrote, "Locked lips of boys too proud to scream". But what do we have today? Afghanastan was done by Kipling. And so we come to the Age of McChrystal, the 4 Star Grunt, up at 4 am jogging around his compound like some exercise video, when he should be reading Marcus Aureleus. Or better yet, George Orwell's tribute to a young soldier fighting for Republican Spain in 1936:
"But the thing I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit."

Welcome back to Mad Men...my favorite TV show

It was Andy Warhol who said, "Success is a job in New York". It certainly seemed that way to me in 1960 when I was just coming up in the advertising business. The only trouble was that I was stuck in Vancouver BC, an advertising backwater if there ever was one. So I just had to watch Bobby Morse sing his way through "How to Succeed in Business without really trying". I had to sit on the edge of my seat through "West Side Story". Meanwhile I was hounding my boss for a raise (the one I got was $25 a month). I knew I had to leave. So we went to Toronto first but that was a lateral move to appease my Canadian soul. I was fired and went job hunting in NY and Detroit and got a job offer at big agencies in both places on the same day and took the one in Detroit (NY could always come next). After the Detroit riots of 1967 I got the job of International Creative Director which meant I flew to Europe through NY. And so it came to pass that I was in Manhattan for a layover when the doyenne of advertising head hunters, Judy Wald, invited me to a VIP cocktail party in the Pan Am building. There I was among the elite of the ad world...the Don Drapers of the world...when all of a sudden I stepped out of the circle with Jerry Della Femina, Mary Welles, Whit Hobbs et al. and said, "Gosh, I have to go!" "Where", they asked. "I have to get up to the roof so I can catch my helicopter to JFK and make my flight to Amsterdam." Andy Warhol's statement that we would all be famous for 15 minutes comes to mind but for me it lasted about 20 seconds. I'm the only one in my family who has never lived or worked in NY. My revenge was 5 years in London, Zurich and Amsterdam. No Mad Men there but plenty to drink and smoke. Besides, I never worked with anyone as cool as Don Draper...what a pleasure to watch that agency!

The most beautiful words in the English language

For Henry James, it was two: "summer afternoon". For L'il Abner it was also two: "Daisy Mae". For Phillip Larkin it was a single verb: "unbutton" For me, it's a whole lexicon: Peggy, Alison, Tony, London, jazz, Gatsby, Berkeley, Red Wings. I also have a few from other tongues: Che Bella Giornata, Chic, La Meme Chose, and my favorite Russian word, "Nichevo". It doesn't translate exactly but means something like, "so what?" You can hear it sung by Jackie Cain in a cynical love song called "So It's Spring?". Nichevo!

C'est vrai. Je suis Le Pink Panther!

It all began over double espressos. I was with M. X, a noted flaneur from Arizona, a criminal state if ever there was one. After putting a sachet of Sweet n Low in our cups I noticed him take a handful of the petite pink pouches and put them in his pocket. He winked at me,that evil, conniving wink, and said, "This is the one thing you'll never have to buy again". I had no comment at the time but what with the collapse of Lehmann Bros., the housing bubble that burst in my face and my stock portfolio ahchored to AIG, I began my one-man crime wave. At first I took just a few packets from Starbucks, never too many,and never the blue or yellow packets. Jamais!
Can I ever go straight? I have withstood the disgust of my wife and daughter and Inspector Cluzot is after bigger fish. I expect some friendly waitress could dissuade me or I could be arrested on the spot by an ambitious busboy. Why do I continue? As Willy Sutton said when he was asked why he robbed banks, "That's where the money is". Well, for me,that's where the coffee is.

More money down the drain.

Here we go again. It is a universally-acknowledged fact that the agents are smarter than the owners in pro sports. LeBron James is making the rounds, with his agent of course, to see which NBA team will give him the most money and the best contract. I have no idea what he will do but I do have a hunch it won't lead to any chumpionship er, championship. The Lakers don't need him, nor do the Celtics, or any self-respecting contender. I saw this with my own eyes when Mo Vaughn left the Red Sox for $60 million to play for the Angels. He really couldn't be bothered and he did nothing for them. They paid him off and he's now living in the lap of luxury. The same thing happened when the Vancouver Canucks hired Mark Messier for three years. "He never broke a sweat," said a disgusted Trevor Linden. Needless to say the Canucks never went anywhere, but Messier cashed the checks all the same. We don't live in a world where Ted Williams can push back his $125,000 salary check, and say he was only worth $90,000. There is a statement I like from the late Syd Abel, a member of the famous Detroit Production Line of Lindsey, Abel and Howe: "Sure we played for money, but we would have played the Toronto Maple Leafs for free."

Christopher Hitchens: an appreciation

In his NY Times column (July 2)David Brooks writes generously and warmly about Christopher Hitchens, in my opinion, one of the leading public intellectuals of the day. Brooks points out that Hitchens' worldview was formed strongly by George Orwell. He is the voice of Orwell that we need in this troublesome century. Hitchens wrote a book called: "Why Orwell Matters" and we need one now titled: "Why Hitchens Matters". I came to Orwell when I lived in London in the 1960's and '70s. I didn't start with 1984 or even Animal Farm but with two early short pieces: "A Hanging", where Orwell's deep human sympathy is first expressed and "Shooting an elephant" which exposes the ignorance and folly of empire building. I wish people in the Pentagon would read things like this, but they never do. One of Hitchens' close friends is Salman Rushdie. Once upon a time Salman was a pal of mine, too. We worked at a big advertising agency in Mayfair. He was a junior copywriter and I was the International Creative Director. He would pop into my office from time to time to speak with great authority on politics, history, literature and the cinema, never campaign strategy. Then one day he was gone. He couldn't write an ad to save himself so he left to become one of the world's most famous authors, leaving me to write the deathless prose for 3M and Dow Chemical. We have to march to our own drummers, don't we? Hitchens is now undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. I wish him good health, and, to paraphrase one of Orwell's poems from the Spanish Civil War: " No bomb that ever burst can shatter your crystal spirit."