|
Versagi Voice |
Life |
|
The Greatest Generation? Visitors include veterans of WWII, Korea, Vietnam and their families. Those visitors who make the connection between seeing the same name on my museum volunteer badge and on one of the exhibit labels want to chat. Vets want to compare experiences; their families are pleased to learn some things which hadn't emerged from previous conversations. For the families there is the added satisfaction of seeing their vet become energized talking with a fellow vet among all those displays which themselves are emotionally stirring. A common characteristic of the couple dozen conversations so far is that there is almost no discussion of the horrors of combat. Between vets who have experienced firefights, the descriptions are sanitized by talk of humorous events or encounters with inexperienced new officers ((90-day Wonders") or "the time I saw General Patton." There is a lot of generalized talk about terrain and weather and intensity of the opposition; about where we ended up in Europe while waiting to be outfitted for transfer to the Pacific. "I ended up in Linz. You had it better landing in Salzburg." What is missing for listeners to those conversations is that there is no way for them to visualize the same images or to feel the now-subdued emotions those images elicit in the conversing vets. There is an occasional awkward moment at the museum. One such moment resulted from the reaction of the wife who accompanied her Vietnam veteran-husband to the museum. When he and I began joshing about the old argument of the relative discomfort of warm, buggy jungles and cold European forests, his wife angrily "defended" what she perceives as the much tougher time that he had. I sensed from her a resentment, not shared by her husband, toward the universal approval of Americans about the Second World War. Not in anger but in disappointment have been the statements of two or three Korean veterans about what they see as "the forgotten war." And there was the good-natured complaint that the exhibits contain nothing about the Coast Guard. All of which makes me think about this "Greatest Generation" thing. I may try to put some of those thoughts in writing. Separately, the presentation and contents of the overall exhibit have been highly praised by Clarkston-based Michael Bylen, a board member of the The Official World War II Museum located in New Orleans. He will be following up by reaching out to Bill Barr, whose loan of official and contemporary pictures of Pearl Harbor set in motion the creation of the successful Historical Society effort. Barr served on the U.S.S. Enterprise, which was out-to-sea when the Japanese attacked. Veterans bring history to life at the World War II exhibit. The museum is open 1 to 4 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. The WWII Exhibit runs through 19 March 2011. -- 04 Jan 2011
Jewish,
Israeli, Hebrew?
Good-natured joking aside, hateful bigotry aside, this helps explain why goyim (gentiles) remain uncertain about whether to think of Jews as members of a religion, a race, a nationality, or a transnational culture. In a practical sense, of course, it shouldn't matter in our country whether we think of a person as an "American Jew" (religiously equivalent to an "American Catholic") or a "Jewish American" (equivalent by nationality to an "Italian-American"). The matter becomes clouded politically when Israel becomes part of the discussion. Then "Zionist" enters the dialogue along with Jew, Jewish, Hebrew., and Israeli. Food for thought.
Sort-of-Related to the above -- We have: the United Negro College Fund . . . the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People . . . the National Association of Black Social Workers -- to which I add the Congressional Black Caucus. Are all those terms, comfortably used by dark-skinned people themselves, made inappropriate by the newest "African-American" ? Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice belittles that term in her just-published book, "Extraordinary, Ordinary People".
Come on, when wasn't the nation polarized?
Bring it to the state level and think of Milliken, Williams, Engler, Granholm Personally, don't all of us have friends, family, colleagues with whom we have fundamental political differences? Yet we maintain loving or cordial relationships with them. There may be topics we simply don't discuss with each of them, but political polarization rarely disrupts a relationship. When Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were fierce political opponents, the France-lovers and Britain-lovers were at such odds that they would cross the street to avoid having to exchange even civil greetings. That was polarization. -- Nov 2010Thoughts re:
Immigration "Until now. "Over the last half-decade, the money that migrants send to their native countries started to tell us something different: The United States is fast losing its monopoly as a prized destination. Meanwhile, surprising countries such as Malaysia and South Africa are becoming the hottest new places to go to work. The long tail of remittances points, as never before, to a new story: the unequivocal rise of the rest". -- Foreign Policy, Jan/Feb 2010 Imagined/made-up
mental disorders By 1994, DSM-IV, 106 had risen to 297. DSM-V, being prepared for 2013 publication, is expected to introduce a new model in which two or more existing diagnoses may be combined and named differently that either. Quality of life has measurably improved over the decades. Have we really become more mentally and emotionally troubled or has this particular trade union (sorry, "association") come up with a ploy to increase business? -- 22 Feb 10
19th Century characterizations We seem to have gone on very well for thousands of years
without this rolling thing. Your father carried burdens on his back. The
king is content to be borne on men's shoulders. The high priest is not too
proud to do the same. Indeed, I question whether it is not irreligious to
attempt to shift from men's shoulders their natural burdens. Then, as to its
succeeding -- for my part I see no chance of that. How can it go up hill? Then there is this from the same period's
William Makepeace
Thackeray: A something had occurred in his life, which had cast a tinge
of melancholy over all his existence. He was not unhappy -- to those about
him most kind, -- most affectionate, obsequious even to the women of his
family, whom he scarce contradicted; but there had been some bankruptcy of
his heart, which his spirit never recovered. He submitted to life, rather
than enjoyed it, and never was in better spirits than in his last hours when
he was going to lay it down. I encountered these insightful, even delightful,
characterizations while resampling my copy of McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic
Reader. -- FJV
Are some people born pessimistic? Roman intellectuals bemoaning the decline of their civilization "centuries before" the Vandals" sacked Rome. . . . Spain's recovery after its intellectuals had about given up after the defeat of their Armada. . . . The certainty of both Left and Right intellectuals that France and Germany had failed beyond the point of recovery after World War I. Sticking with only our nation, Herman mentions several time when pessimists seemed right: really bad economic times in1873, then again 1893; the 1929 Depression era; post-Vietnam; stagflation in the 1970s. Going abroad again, we have the 1968 Paul Erlich misfired Population Bomb; 1971' s The Closing Circle by Barry Commoner; the 1972 Club of Rome's Limits of Growth. Somewhere in the piece, Herman mentions an 1893 prediction that planet Earth would be extinct by 2025 -- a prediction with which Al Gore would agree. (See The world is coming to an end -- again.) For artist- and philosopher-types, the predicted death of the physical world isn't as catastrophic as is the mental universe going to hell. Our own Ralph Waldo Emerson is quoted as lamenting, "Life is no longer a contest of great minds for great ends, but a pot house squabble." Oh, well. I asked:From Ed Sullivan through Como and Crosby and Dinah Shore, soloists sang -- and were heard -- without holding a microphone in front of their face. Is there something about today's technology which makes hand mics necessary, or is there some aesthetic component which escapes some of us?
Brian McCollum, music writer for the Detroit Free Press, replied:
Nature or Nurture: What
makes us who we are? Such dominant individuals raise the question: Was he born that way or did his early environment form his personality? In the world arena, the equivalent argument has been whether the times make the man or the man shapes the times? Think of every one from Alexander the Great through Charlemagne, Napoleon, and Hitler. Back to Patton.
|
On this page Why singers hide thier face with the mike Are some people born pessimistic? 19th Century characterizations still hit the mark When wasn't the nation polarized? Other pages "Merry Christmas" is offensive? How many youth groups do we need?
|