Guess who’s not getting any government help soon...

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Ads are poison. If you could kill the Western world you'd end up with something that would look like the bloated corpse of Napoleon – its hair riddled with arsenic.

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(Siegfried Loraine Sassoon ; 8 September 1886 – 1 September 1967)

Ah, this is good:

“The first ever online collection of the manuscripts, photos and letters of Siegfried Sassoon, launched this Armistice day, focuses on his war poetry.”

Not just good because Sassoon is now perhaps most famous for his ‘declaration against the war’, which he wrote in April 1917 in England, during his recovery from a sniper wound:

“I believe that this war, on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them.”

Written a few wars back but how many of our soldiers and their families would not be willing to co-sign this declaration, with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in mind?

Still, more meaningful – and hopefully enduring – perhaps is what Sassoon wrote after the war, in November, 1918.

He who had fought three years in the trenches, who had witnessed and described and survived the foulest horrors, could also write this poem, the same month that the last shot of the war had been fired:

Reconciliation

When you are standing at your hero’s grave,
Or near some homeless village where he died,
Remember, through your heart’s rekindling pride,
The German soldiers who were loyal and brave.

Men fought like brutes; and hideous things were done;
And you have nourished hatred harsh and blind.
But in that Golgotha perhaps you’ll find
The mothers of the men who killed your son.

So, perhaps there still is some hope for our species left. Here’s the link to that online collection.

 

(And HERE is a very interesting clip about WWI and the war poets)

All in all, life's not too bad.

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 (This is an as of yet unpublished blog post. I just noticed, by the way, that we don't have a non fiction category here for art or literature...)

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I went to a professional conference yesterday. I am a white-collar worker bee in an industry I consider superfluous and, at times, representing the worst excesses of capitalism. We are suffering along with everyone else in this economy so the theme of yesterday's conference was "Rising Above" and so forth.

Breakfast, 7:30 a.m. Tired and my face hurts from fake smiling already. The head of the conference organizer spoke, some sponsors spoke, some local industry leaders spoke. They all said the same things, things about hope and hard work and how each person was "just really really" something-pleased, honored, excited-to be at the conference and how each person was sure that, together, we could be "just really really impactful."

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Hi all!

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I'd like to think that a Harvard MBA is likely to know more about management, motivation and money than a teenager reading Econ 101. They should, I figure, be above such simplistic drivel as "you get what you pay for".

Some stories test the limits of that faith.

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Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee

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It's harder to be funny than it is to be tragic. Wit requires intelligence, timing and a sense of the absurd which implies, I suppose, a sort of distance from the matter at hand. Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro is a perfect comic opera. There is cross-dressing, mistaken identities, role reversals, servants smarter than their masters, and endless plots and tricks woven by almost all the characters for the purpose of, at the very end, illuminating the truth of things. As in King Lear, a fool or a clown can challenge even a King. And there's no fool like love's fool, yes?

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My husband naturally wakes up and starts his morning at five each day. I like to stretch my blanket cuddle till 5:35 and that is after I've hit the snooze button at least twice. Moving from my dream world to reality comes in parallel intervals until the sounds converge as one. Tuesday,  I heard the  usual click of toenails on hardwood. I incorporated the sound to be my 120 pound Shepherd trying to rouse my body for my daily exercise with one of the over 40 and fabulous  gals on channel 12. At the same time my conscience level was saying,"The dance of this animal next to your bed is not familiar."  Simultaneously my husband is calling my name in a whisper as he stands in the hall turning the light on. I open my eyes to see I am nose to nose with a beautiful fawn colored dog,  his chin laid on my mattress as if we've known each other forever. I didn't even think about the comfort of my bed, I suddenly felt like a child on Christmas morning. I gave the precious visitor a loving hello and he returned my greeting with the jiggle of his tail.

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