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Write for the world....
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Categorize >> Nonfiction/Politics
Guess who’s not getting any government help soon...
(From tripping shoes to ripping off libraries…)
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.
(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)
(NB: Life can be perfectly serendipitous. I had these two quotes that I wanted to use for something but had my doubts about being able to do so in one post... and then I open my online newspapers and find I can use both as quite appropriate 'bookend' lines for this following column.)
This first:
“Working almost exclusively on this mammoth project for five years, Crumb has rendered the entirety of Genesis in comics panels. “The first book of the Bible graphically depicted! Nothing left out!” brags a banner on the cover.”
June 25th, 2009 
Not in an erotic way. This isn't that kind of blog. Nor is this a personal hygiene issue, except perhaps in a moral sense. I feel a crawling of the skin, an itching of the scalp, but I don't think a long hot shower is going to help. This is a dirt of the soul.
 As we all know, one of the function of fairytales is to teach children some basic truths about life. That it can be tough and scary. That things are not always what they look like and that you need to be smart and resilient to survive.
It could just be political theatre, but that’s no fun and leaves me nothing to think about. So I assume that those who are objecting strongly to Judge Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court are doing so out of genuine concern for the state of America and its legal system. I shall consider them uneducated, not hysterical. I shall consider them good-hearted, in that they do not want to believe that brown people lead different lives as against white people and that women lead different lives as against men. While it is crude and inaccurate to say that all brown people think or speak with a single voice or share a single experience, it is not crude or inaccurate to tease out those experiences that many if not most do share that are not shared by whites. Surely we can have this discussion sans hand-wringing and howling eschatology concerning the downfall of America.
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