European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - January 09, 1991, Darmstadt, Hesse A. Us Quot 1 4- it or so -?vv\.v. Crusade therapy rather than brute violence. It was a precise Means of attaining ends with carefully graduated. Responses surgical air strikes systems. Analysis and highly trained elite forces such As the Green berets. Good War would be free of the sort of racism we showed toward the japanese we now have a prudery of violence and among the people that a clan a James q. Wilson Calls Quot the chattering classes Quot War has come to be seen not so much As wicked but As vulgar like professional wrestling or Deer Hunting a another reason for the popularity of air Power death from a lofty distance. A in the Middle �?T80s, Fred Downs a. Decorated Vietnam infantry officer lectured an infantry class about killing and was told afterwards by a High ranking army officer that the word Quot killing Quot had been replaced by Quot servicing the nowadays no Liberal senator could say that he had joined up Quot to get myself a Jap Quot As Illinois Paul Douglas once said. A Oscar Wilde predicted Quot As Long As War is regarded As wicked it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon As vulgar it will cease to be popular Quot. On the other hand when it is looked upon As vulgar the vulgar thumb their. Noses the Way they thumb their noses at other upper class prud eries. Hence the popularity of the sort of to shirts you see in army Navy stores with slogans such As Quot kill Emall let god sort pm the. Educated cult of cultural relativism gets summed up in Quot join the army travel to Distant lands meet interesting people and kill them Quot. Another shirt shows a phone company slogan bpm of the age of feelings Quot reach out and touch the words Are under a telescopic Rifle sight. The lower a classes maybe be lower in class but not in their part the upper classes have a responded by remembering the Vietnam War a bad one As a period when they had to wean Bloodthirsty rednecks away from Slaughter to cure them of a sort of mental illness. In fact this is one of the big lies about Vietnam a the other being that Blacks died in. Numbers vastly out of proportion to their numbers in the . Population a bit of propaganda that has been revived in the debate Over the persian Gulf. As for support a look at six years of polling from 1965 to 1971 shows that the College educated supported the War far More than the High school and Grade school educated. A a when i sent a Book to the Printer with a graph Sho Wing that they called up and. Said that i must have gotten the labels reversed Quot says Wilson. Quot people can t. Believe e. Now in the age of feelings the publicly. Accepted Way of talking about War deals with emotions rather than blood among Vietnam veterans its their Post traumatic stress syndromes rather than their missing legs that excite our pity and fascination. In dispatches Michael Herr wrote his famous passage about coming under fire in Vietnam Quot. working like strobes free falling All the Way Down to the essences and then flying out again in a Rush to focus like the first Strong twinge of tripping after an infusion of Psilocybin reaching in at the Point of Calm and springing All the Joy and All the dread Ever a known the feeling you a had when you were much much younger and undressing a girl for the first time Quot. How different from a Marine in the Pacific half a Century ago saying i just want to spit in a dead Jap s nowadays newspaper and reads Quot its not the desert heat. Its not Saddam Hussein. Its wondering if you a ,.a is also taboo to wept to kill the enemy leaders tins is new in Vav or id. War ii. The. Final Trammo film in Frank Capra s series. 1 i Why to ii it showed pictures of the Naze. Hierarchy while a voice Sudi a if you Ever a see one of these Mem kill him1 p War heroes have gone the Way of John / Henry Defeated by the steam Hammer of the machine gun the tank/theb-52,. A missiles nuclear w weapons All of which survival in combat far More a matter of Chance than of skill. Only the Oliver norths of this would go to War Lor glory. P. The army soldiers with a pitch that makes it sound like a combination of an encounter group and a Junior College be All that you can we continue to talk about Saddam Hussein in the language of psychobabble a he in t getting our signals we re failing to a. Communicate he does t understand our feelings. Perhaps Saddam Hussein has a a different definition of the Good War. Does he wonder what kind of War we can fight when we talk about it As if it s a combination of corporate management and psychotherapy. The intellectual celebrities of America a supported world War ii a Archibald. Macleish John Steinbeck and Carl Sandburg helped Lead the american. Propaganda Effort for instance. Instead of being vulgar rednecks our soldiers were the Salt of the Earth Bill Mauldin a Willie and Joe. Quot in a no hero in a just a Guy i just want to get this thing Over and go Home Quot a said William Bendix in one movie. But this came at the end of More than a decade of a intellectuals Celebration of the common Man. A a. After world War ii american Art turned to the International language of abstraction. Dwight Macdonald warned of the tackiness of mid cult America Joseph Heller published catch-22 just As our advisers were moving into Vietnam Kurt becoming a literary hero to the Young and the myth of the Good War started to look a. Little Moth War in the persian Gulf would come at the end of a decade of Flag waving Rocky movies Arnold Schwarzenegger movies f a and re Agate patriotism even if it fakes the Peculiar Post apocalyptic form of a Singer such As Lee Greenwood getting onto a stage with awoke s Worth of stubble on his face looking like a who while he. Sings that he a proud to be an american and Quot at least i know i m Good War bad War. It s hard to Tell which is which. a few years ago War particularly the Good War was looking impossible. Quot War today is a luxury that Only the weak and the poor can afford Quot said Zbigniew a Brzozwski who was National Security adviser to Jimmy Carter. A. War has fallen upon Haid limes Quot wrote Ai my intelligence analyst Robert l. O Connell in 01 Anns he wont on a two centuries of increasingly pointless financially disastrous and above All lethal conflicts culminating in the disco void and proliferation of nuclear weapons have rendered this venerable institution virtually incapable of performing., any of the roles classically assigned to it Quot with any kind of Luck of All in the persian Gulf to will not find out if to s right a january 9, 1991 the stars and stripes a a a Page 15
