Dulce et Decorum Est
In honor of the president’s recent speech attempt to prolong the Iraq War, I would like to share a poem written by a man named Wilfred Owen.
Wilfred Owen was born in England in 1893 and enlisted with England’s Manchester Regiment in 1917 at the height of World War I. Once he arrived on the western front, Owen lost all pretenses of romantic battle scenes and heroic wartime exploits. There was nothing glorious about the deaths of the young men who served in the army with him. They died brutally, painfully, and gruesomely.
The horrors of battle had a profound impact on Owen. He began to write poetry as a means of escape, documenting the senseless slaughter through a powerful and heartfelt language. While Owen might have become one of England’s most famous poets, he tragically perished during a skirmish that took place a week before the armistice agreement between the central and allied powers. Thankfully, his work has survived, even though he did not. It remains a powerful testimony to what war really means.
The title of this poem is an allusion to a line of verse written by an ancient Roman poet named Horace. It translates roughly as: “It is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country.”
Dulce et Decorum Est
WILFRED OWEN
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!-An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
A Man After My Own Heart
Gilbert Arenas, the starting point guard for the Washington Wizards, describes his ideal shoe commercial:
You know how I always throw my jersey into the stands after a game? In Washington, they just go crazy for it. So in this commercial, that’s what I’m gonna do with my shoes. I’ve just hit a game winner, and I throw these shoes. Everyone starts to react, and you see everything in slow motion. Everyone’s pushing, shoving, doing whatever it takes to try to get to these shoes. People from the 400 level, they’re jumping off the ledge, they’re missing the pile, hitting nothing but chairs, and you can just see in people’s faces like, Ooooh, that hurt. While all this stuff’s going on, one of the shoes pops out of the crowd, and a little girl gets it and she takes off. A couple of people see she has it, and they start chasing her, and she’s looking back running—and then she gets clotheslined by a kid in a wheelchair. So he picks the shoe up and says—he’s gonna have the only line in there—”They said I couldn’t get it. Heh. Impossible is nothing.” And then he rolls off.
How expensive is your weed?
Just fyi. From The Economist…
It’s not cool, because I posted it….
And Mozart said, “Lick me in the ass”
In his infinite genius, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed a canon in B-flat major called Leck mich im Arsch. Translated that means “Lick me in the ass”.
From Wikipedia:
A literal translation of the song’s title and lyrics into English would be “Lick me in the ass”, apparently a reference to anal-oral contact. A more idiomatic translation would be “Lick my ass”, “Kiss my ass”, or even “Get stuffed”. The scatological title and lyrics have been used as evidence to support the contention that Mozart had Tourette syndrome, although that conjecture is not widely supported by medical professionals.
The White Album Game
To pass the time on a long car ride this weekend, my friends and I came up with a fun conceptual game based upon The White Album.
Imagine you are John Lennon. You and the rest of The Beatles have just finished recording the album’s thirty songs, and you send a final copy (the one everyone knows) to your executive producer. After reviewing the material, he decides that the album is too long, and instructs you to cut half of the record’s tracks.
Yes, I know that part of the record’s charm is its rambling incoherence and the “throwaway” material. But for the sake of argument, if you were coerced into making this decision, which songs would you keep and which ones would you set aside for the anthologies?
First, we made a list of the White Album songs that everyone agreed were absolute keepers:
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Happiness is a Warm Gun
Blackbird
Rocky Raccoon
Julia
Mother Nature’s Son
Honey Pie
Next, we made a list of songs that everyone agreed we could cut without shedding any tears:
Glass Onion
Wild Honey Pie
Revolution 1
Savoy Truffle
Revolution 9
That left us with eighteen songs to fill eight spots left on our final cut:
Dear Prudence
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill
Martha My Dear
I’m So Tired
Piggies
Don’t Pass Me By
Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?
I Will
Birthday
Yer Blues
Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey
Sexy Sadie
Helter Skelter
Long, Long, Long
Cry Baby Cry
Good Night
This game ended up being fun because everyone had different choices for that final eight. Here are mine:
Bungalow Bill–I like the anti-animal cruelty message behind this one, and the children’s chorus adds a nice goofy twist.
Me and My Monkey–It’s kind of a throwaway, but the fun they’re having on this track makes it impossible to discard for me.
Helter Skelter–We can’t ignore the hardest rocking moment in Beatles history. I’VE GOT BLISTERS ON ME FINGERS!!!
Yer Blues–I can’t figure out if they’re kidding or not, but I love the unexpected content of this song. The Beatles are best when they are not themselves.
Cry, Baby, Cry–Lennon always trumps McCartney. It’s a rule. This isn’t my favorite song, but you can hear a little bit of Dylan in it and that goes a long way.
Piggies–Harrison is woefully underrepresented on this and all other Beatles albums. The man was a brilliant songwriter and this song is awesome. I especially like the harpsichord and the anti-classist sentiment.
Why Don’t We Do it in the Road?–Just because we’re paring this album down doesn’t mean we have to entirely eliminate the throwaway tracks. I just couldn’t bear to part with this short but sweet moment of brilliance.
Good Night–I think that ending an album properly is very important. How else could we end this album but with Ringo’s off-key warbling?
Armando Iannucci is amazing…
This is from the british PM debates from a few years ago. Armando Iannucci is the man who produces some of the best comedy on british television, if you’ve ever heard of Alan Partridge, you’ll know what I mean… Just watch this… Takes a bit, but you’ll see by the end…
O……k……
Brilliant Answer…
From an interview just posted on GQ online…
.
.
GQ:Your hero General George Marshall, when he was secretary of state, oversaw the creation of amazing new institutions and doctrines—NATO, the Marshall Plan—to deal with the global threat posed by Soviet Communism. Now that we’re faced with new global threats, what type of creative responses would he and his wise men be devising?
Colin Powell: To some extent, he faced a more dangerous threat, and it was an easier one to work with. There was one identifiable enemy that was on the other side of an identifiable terrain feature. It was state versus state. They were able to put in place state-based structures.
GQ:Isn’t the new global threat we face even more dangerous?
Colin Powell: What is the greatest threat facing us now? People will say it’s terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves. So what is the great threat we are facing?
I would approach this differently, in almost Marshall-like terms. What are the great opportunities out there—ones that we can take advantage of? It should not be just about creating alliances to deal with a guy in a cave in Pakistan. It should be about how do we create institutions that keep the world moving down a path of wealth creation, of increasing respect for human rights, creating democratic institutions, and increasing the efficiency and power of market economies? This is perhaps the most effective way to go after terrorists.
The rest of the interview is great as well… Colin Powell continues to make me like him even after he was involved in all this bullshit…
.
.
GQ: Do you feel responsible for giving the U.N. flawed intelligence?
Colin Powell:I didn’t know it was flawed. Everybody was using it. The CIA was saying the same thing for two years. I gave perhaps the most accurate presentation of the intelligence as we knew it—without any of the “Mushroom clouds are going to show up tomorrow morning” and all the rest of that stuff. But the fact of the matter is that a good part of it was wrong, and I am sorry that it was wrong.
.
.
That first part might not be totally wrong, but Powell must have had some doubts as to the authenticity of the info the was being presented, both to him and to the American people. Most of the info we were using was years old (think pre-2000), and involved fellows we were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to a month (which falls in the same line of reasoning as torture; you’re just gonna get told what they think you want to hear). One of our main sources on Iraq told us, and I’m quoting a Knight Ridder correspondent off the top of my head, “The Iraqi special forces final test is being dropped into a muddy puddle and being forced to kill a dog with their bare hands.” he also told us that “Iraq has built a scale model of a US battleship on a man-made lake deep in the heart of Iraq, that they use to practice hijackings.” I can tell you that is some bullshit, without even having to look at satellite images to do it (although if I were working for the CIA, I would).
While this isn’t the first time someone from the inside said it (the intelligence) was wrong… But I believe that is the first time I’ve heard someone from the inside say they were *sorry* it was wrong…
Ron Paul on O’Fuckly Factor…
This is from last night (09/10/07)…
“I do understand the history of that region”… No you do not Bill… At all…
.
“…next on the rundown, will Americans start to rebel against…” and I assume he said “the far left wackos” or something to that effect.. (of course he has Tim Robbins and Rosie up there, just so you know who the wackos are) This just keeps getting sillier and sillier. Bill seems to have no concept of what happens when a “Christian” nation (as he would refer to us and as many Muslims view us) occupies and attempts to start up a democracy in a region of the world that has never been capable of doing “democracy”.
We are creating the situation that currently exists on the ground in Iraq, simply by being in Iraq. The people continuing to push this awful bloody war upon us seem to me to be the people who don’t want to reverse their position. They don’t want to reverse their position, simply because they don’t want to have to agree with the “far-left” (I don’t agree that the majority of anti-war Americans are “far-left”, that was simply what these war-hawks feel). Even the people who are saying, “Well, we shouldn’t let this leaving or staying be decided by polls”, and I can see a point to that, but it is no longer about polls, strategies on the ground, or “terrorists”. It is about more Americans (and Iraqis) dying day after day, to accomplish what, in the end, will be our withdrawal from that country. Anyone who thinks we are going to “stay the course”, which by anyones estimates will be from 10-20 years of occupation, are insane. The American people will stand up, and tell whoever is president a year and 4 months from now to remove our young men and women from that country.
I say this, as I can’t see GWB actually pulling the troops, and the Democrats (more like Republicrats if you ask me) may keep talking about “no more war”, but their votes don’t actually match up with that, at all. Pelosi, Reid, et al.. (or at least a majority) seem to want to keep giving this president funds for this mess, and we shall see in the next few weeks whether the representatives voted into office by the people of the USA are willing to do what they were, essentially, elected to do.
I don’t think they will.
