Resistance moon: Empty joy

I have a bad feeling about the events of the past week. The Kleptocrat’s son-in-law (known around the Web as the Secretary of Everything) toured military installations in Iraq in Ray-Ban® Wayfarers and a Kevlar vest over his navy blazer, and the Kleptocrat himself learned that if he wants to raise his abysmal approval ratings, all he has to do is fire off a few Tomahawk missiles at an empty “enemy” air base.

After all, it won’t be his sons and son-in-law who’ll get any closer to shots being fired than a canned big-game “hunt” or a photo op. Nor will the children of those lickspittle Repugnants in Congress be in harm’s way. No—it’ll be other people’s babies doing that clean-up work.

Well, on the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, I think revisiting the poetry of World War I is in order. Siegfried Sassoon is one of the pre-eminent British war poets—an enthusiastic volunteer in 1914 who came to view war in general, and this one in particular, as an appalling venture. And he spoke out about it. It was only his family’s prominent position in society and his own valorous war record that saved him from court martial.

“Suicide in the Trenches” was written in 1917, published a year later. It reminds me a lot of the ways Vietnam changed boys I knew in school, and how the various Middle East adventures over the past 25 years have affected the men and women who put on body armor for a reason, not a photo op, and faced sand and scorpions instead of mud and lice in support of national policy.

It also reminds me of cummings’ “next to god of course america”.

“Suicide in the Trenches”

I knew a simple soldier boy

Who grinned at life in empty joy,

Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,

And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,

With crumps and lice and lack of rum,

He put a bullet through his brain.

No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home and pray you'll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.

I wish to God someone in the White House would pick up a book of poetry—or a history book—and read it.