[lit-ideas] Re: Al Pacacino
- From: Andy <mimi.erva@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 3 Aug 2008 20:29:47 -0700 (PDT)
It's nice to hear from the resident contrarian. Seems to me that if the
European part of WWII isn't a classic case of the operation was a success but
the patient died, then what is? WWI took all the horrific civilizational
failures of WWI and put them on steroids. The 'good guys' in WWII bombed and
fire bombed civilians and forests and anything they could drop a bomb on, in
addition to which they saved absolutely no concentration camp victims. So
where was the success?
I haven't read the book so I'm willing to be persuaded that Japan needed
military intervention, but even there the overkill of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
speaks to a downright glee in all the killing. I'm not sure about the Russian
theater either. Seems to me that if it's okay for the Russians to defend their
homeland, why is it not okay for the Palestinians to defend theirs? For that
matter, we defended our homeland, didn't we, from the Japanese?
The really sad part IMO is that the U.S.'s superpower status came from this
unmitigated barbarism called WWII, after which we went to Vietnam and dropped
the equivalent of 280 atomic bombs on a country the size of Montana. There is
no return worth that kind of investment, but we got no return whatsoever and
just walked away like it never happened. Baker subtitles the book WWII and the
End of Civilization, but in WWI we jumped in pretty much after that bout of
barbarism had almost burned itself out and kept it going. What does that say
about our civilized tendencies? I think an argument can be made that humans
never had any civilization throughout their sorry history. Certainly, our
whole economy today is one big war machine.
Also, after WWII the Russians were devastated and in no position to fight a
Cold War. We the big ole U.S. pushed them into a Cold War because we define
ourselves by our enemy. The SU fell apart, and we started the war on terror,
which we then proceeded to weave into our economy. Think we might need to
define civilization?
--- On Mon, 8/4/08, Paul Stone <pastone@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
From: Paul Stone <pastone@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Al Pacacino
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Monday, August 4, 2008, 2:15 AM
> Okay, that's it, enough fun. Here's a must listen from Charlie
Rose with
> author Nicholson Baker. The book is titled Human Smoke. Baker argues
that
> fighting WWII militarily was counterproductive and exactly the wrong thing
> to do:
Who fucking cares. Nicholson Baker is a librarian [not that there's
anything wrong with that, I'm a qualified librarian myself] who writes
sometimes really good erotica (the Fermata) sometimes really lame
erotica (Vox), sometimes very weird autobiographical stuff (U & I) and
sometimes terribly paranoid, catering, pandering shit (Checkpoint), I
couldn't give a care what he thinks about wwii.
chiming in on alpaca's back
p
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