[lit-ideas] Re: Seriously/SLAM

  • From: Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:09:33 -0400



On 6/10/2010 5:38 PM, John Wager wrote:
Now it seems the point is to document how bad you are, how much of a "jackass" (recent TV show) you are.

Read Teddy Roosevelt's _The Rough Riders_ a while ago. The comparison with today's attitudes was vertiginous and a bit nauseating.

Gatling guns in those battles too. The Spanish had the advantage of home ground, provisions, and the latest weaponry. While the Spanish had smokeless rounds, the terribly disorganized Americans had old Civil War equipment -- smoke from gunshots giving away one's position -- and hardly any food.

Particularly interesting was TR's account of the Spanish snipers, who deliberately killed doctors and ministers attending the wounded -- the single moment in the narrative where TR drops his calmly balanced style and expresses outrage. He assembled a group of backwoodsmen, sheriffs, and "Harvard hunters". They were sent out to hunt the snipers and in three days had killed them all without suffering any casualties. It's a moment of satisfaction actually, since snipers are "supposed" to shoot soldiers, particularly officers, but to shoot doctors and chaplains, in the sensibility established by the narrative, is so far outside the bounds of manly conduct in war as to seem inhuman. How quaint! (Sixty years later nuclear missiles aimed at all major population centers.)
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