Greater Love Blah Blah Blah

Leave a Comment / By Paul Hughes / November 11, 2023

Do we doubt locals thanked them for their service?

I’m not equating the two. They were wrong; glad we crushed them.

Only noting it’s likely they thought as much about such things as we do, which is to say not much. German citizens who believed their leaders, loved their country, watched their sons get on trains … they were patriotic, too. Worried and feared and grieved. Thanked them for their service. There’s something to be said, as well, for the ways all soldiers are used as literal cannon fodder for the deadly desires of rancid Reichs. It has in fact been said, and by good military men.

A young man who did time in the Army and is related to me by progeniture said once that if people wanted to thank veterans for their service, they could do things a little differently when said veterans need actual help.

Gratuitous expressions of gratitude are as vague and performative on Armistice Day as ‘we should get coffee’ is on any other.

The statement is like so many words we say — more for us than for the other.

They do nothing, but boy do we feel … whew! … better.

Maybe we ‘mean’ it, whatever that means. So why not find something of substance to say or even — and this is going to sound insane and possibly illegal — do.

Image:
Wikipedia

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Recent

Coyotes and Christians

I am not saying Christians are like coyotes. [For that, some could cut caustically to coyotes are like Christians — tricksters, roaming in the dark, feeding on the dead … ] Simply noticed — somewhat in passing, as it’s said, having attained, apparently … achieved? … some kind of state where nearly anything I hear,

And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’

Short answer: he did not. Neither did Prince Myshkin, that we know of. Likely both believed it. Beauty — in the person of Christ — will do so. And clearly D wrote of M in The Idiot to explore art and beauty and ugliness and salvation. But did he say it, and did he believe that

What I Recalled Watching Netflix

[Television is educational.] One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain

Seeking the King

A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do

Random

Christians and Atheists

Christians create atheists when we do evil in God’s name. (props to Dennis Prager, who wrote: “Nothing creates atheism as much as evil done in God’s name.”)

Not Free

During the Cold War there was a list of countries and their level of freedom. It still exists but we pay less attention to it. I recall three categories — very free, free, not free — and I remember ratings were based on politics, economics, and so on. So too in man. We are very free, free,

Make No Mistake

When I played baseball in 10th grade, our coach was forever admonishing us to Give 110% — often prefaced by a forlorn C’mon fellas … [In 11th grade, the coach would line us up against the chain link fence in front of the dugout and hit baseballs at us. He said this was to train our

Murder, Inc.

In Season One’s “Ransom for a Dead Man” Columbo tells a story about his cousin Ralph. He’s flying in Leslie Williams’ plane and she’s been talking about her husband, whom she’s murdered. By the story he tells after they’ve landed, he enters the murderer’s mind — with a significant stopping point: “I have this cousin, Ralph,

Related

Being That Guy

Once after one of my MFA professors had said the work we were reading was neither good nor original, the student who’d produced the pages wailed, But … but this actually happened! So what? He said. * I think François Truffaut said everyone in fiction is crazy, and the problem is to render this craziness

Trouble and Strife

Septic tank is Cockney rhyming slang for “Yank” which may suggest what trouble and strife is slang for. But it’s not fair of course, and good men, and most men some of the time, know she’s not only that. Upon noting once how, yes, “children are a bother,” Dallas Willard made the important philosophical distinction

Pieta

I don’t think next year will be so different from this year. Which after all was not so different from the one before. But I think you can be different from last year and I can. Which after all may be true for you as it was also for me.

Just Win Baby

If Tim Tebow never plays another down as an NFL Quarterback it won’t be because he can’t. It will be because they say he can’t. I don’t even say “because they think he can’t,” since thinking — actually assessing the data they have in front of them — hasn’t been much involved here. And the bottom line