Memorial Day: Death's Annual three day holiday

My mother’s name was Smith. Her father, Pete Smith, was killed in the First World War so, of course I never met him. I’m not even sure I saw a picture of him. There was a medal, but that’s all I remember.
He was Canadian so I tried to look him up at the Imperial War Museum in London. There was a guy at the computer doing his own checking and I asked him if he’d be long. “No, it doesn’t take long,” he said, “unless the name is Smith”. All the main characters in the 1969 film “Oh what a lovely war” were named Smith. That’s also the name Orwell gave to his tragic hero of “1984” Winston Smith. That’s because he is Everyman, symbolized by the most common English name. The end of the film is as powerful and poignant as any anti-war movie. Young Private Smith follows a red ribbon through the signing of the Armistice , past his now all-female family picnicking to lie down in the grass alongside other young men—the last soldier to die in WWI. But not the last young man to die in battle. There is a large sign in the Imperial War Museum that says: Over 100 million people died in war in the 20th Century.
One of my favorite poets, Phillip Larkin, wrote;
…Courage is no good: it means not scaring others.
Being brave lets no one off the grave:
Death is no different whining at than withstood.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave. I confess to being very cowardly about this. I can’t even look at the hopeful young faces on the Honor Roll of the dead at the end of the PBS News Hour. To me, they’re all Smiths.

Tobasco sauce made them do it.

I’m not into conspiracy theories but there is something sinister behind all these men behaving badly. Dr. Drew says it’s narcissism, a standard response for the daytime tv audience. Perhaps I’m reading too much into this but it does come from the CIA report on bin Laden’s pad. There was plenty of damning evidence, including porn DVD’s, but the thing that caught my eye was the fact that bin Laden did not allow Tobasco sauce in his home. Why Tobasco sauce? Because he knew it was an addictive aphrodisiac that drove middle-aged men crazy. Remember, he was out to destroy the Western world and what better way than driving important men to self-destruction. If you got a search warrant for the residences of Arnold, Charlie Sheen, ex Senator Ensign, Tiger and now Mr. IMF, I’ll bet you’d find a stash of Tobasco sauce. “She just came in to clean my hard drive”, Monsieur IMF said of the hotel maid. Why, because your third wife isn’t handy with tools? “Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” That’s Sir Walter Scott’s poetic warning to guys who think that sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Weird, perverse, lethal, vulgar, stupid

Of course I’m talking about the internet. I saw a link to Stephen Hawking this week where he stated there was no heaven. It took me to an AOL site called Weird which seems to be a perennial beat. It wasn’t Hawking that was weird , it was all the things on the same screen with his view of the Universe. “Any tweethearts out there?” A large ad for Argosy University which has as much value as a degree from Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge, Behold the Jesus fish stick. May is zombie awareness month.
This is an example of the great symbol drain noted by Neil Postman. Such sacred or serious symbols such as the flag, Jesus, Lincoln and Hawking are juxtaposed next to Donald Trump, Dennis Rodman and fish sticks.
Just as advertising has decimated the narrative on television it is now over-distracting the message on the laptop.
And speaking of the medium is the message: McLuhan! Thou shouldst be living at this hour: We hath need of thee. He predicted this as the waning of the literate print world was giving way to the acoustic, tribal visual world . Perhaps he wouldn’t even be surprised by Facebook and Twitter. After all, he coined the term “the global village”.
Where does that leave us in a world that won’t leave us alone
Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Leave your privacy at the door. Join a chat room and have a stranger call you names and insult you. Run a classified on Craigslist and have someone come over and kill you. Bump into a porn site and leave the house in handcuffs
There seems very little that is humane or rational on the web. It’s now all gossip or links to dubious commercial destinations. It trivializes the human condition but you can’t spoof a tsunami, or water down a flood or send up a plane crash. One of Dwight MacDonald’s prime examples of “Masscult” , the dumbing down of culture, was the new, simplified version of the King James Bible, robbed of its majestic language and reading like a press release. This was 60 years ago. What can we look forward to for the functionally illiterate high school graduate of the future: The King Jimmy Bible?

Revenge is sweet

Osama bin Laden in dead. Great news for everyone, although I do have reservations about the crowds screaming USA, USA. This isn’t the Miracle on Ice. Still, as one who was caught up in the joyous celebrations for both VE Day and VJ Day I can understand the emotion. It’s a victory to be savored. I have no idea how our Special Ops did it (we’ll have to wait for the Bruce Willis movie to see) but it was quite brilliant. Also clever was the burial at sea. No pilgrimages, no burial site, no monuments. He’s gone. George Orwell wrote that he couldn’t really hate Hitler because he saw so much pain in his face. This didn’t win him any friends in England but it was a personal, human reaction. Looking into bin Laden’s history we see that he was using our Stinger missiles to help drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan . He was in our good books then. But when he returned to Saudi Arabia he was disgusted with our deal with the oil rich royal family there. He then became a sort of Arabic Che Guevara and turned from a gentle (the papers description of him) and idealistic young man into a murderer. I hark back to Mary Shelley’s famous novel “Frankenstein”. It has nothing to do with Boris Karloff but is a morbid story warning about the dehumanization of art and the corrupting influence of science. The final lines are chilling and apropos of bin Laden’s ending: The Monster said, “my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds” .He sprung from the cabin window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.