My favorite canonical author, William Faulkner, had a phony war story to tell. While he was alive, biographers would say that Faulkner, born in 1897, left the US for Canada in 1916 because he was put off by Wilson's neutrality policy and wanted to get into the Great War. He trained in Canada to become a pilot in the RAF and spent some time flying in France before the war ended. That was what would now be known as "stolen valor." It begins with his misdescription of when he left the US and why. The precipitating cause wasn't eagerness to fight, it was romantic heartbreak. His family (and the family of his sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, prevented the two young'uns from marrying in 1918. Broken hearted, and aware of course that there was a war on, Faulkner tried to enlist. He was rejected by the US Army because he was too short. He entered Canada then, hearing that the height requirement there was one he met. He was never anywhere near the fighting. He did enlist in ...
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Spoiler Alert. Turn back if you want to see this movie without any ides of what will happen in it. Still here? Too late. The Oscar-winning movie 1917 follows the simplest and perhaps the oldest of plats. The protagonist and a companion have to cross forbidding terrain to get an indispensable job done. The companion dies during the course of the trip, and the protagonist is heartbroken, but he has to find it in himself to carry on. The job is done. The companion's death has not been in vain. Not plot novelties. But of course show business has never thrived on plot novelties. It thrives on the expenditure of its energies and talents on filling out and giving new twists to precisely the old familiar plots. One great thing about this movie is a brief scene where the two central characters are being chased by a low-flying airplane. Its a period-accurate biplane, of course but the scene still looks like a hommage to an analogous scene in a Hitchcock film.
Both Sean Spicer and Marine Le Pen have in recent days uttered claims that might well fit under the capacious tent of "Holocaust revisionism." Spicer has walked it back, and one can generously attribute his comments to gross maladroitness in the performance of ... well ... his job. Still: such events do give us the opportunity to observe that much of the crap that passes itself off these days as "Holocaust revisionism" traces itself back to Harry Elmer Barnes, a paid apologist and propagandist for Nazi Germany in real time. Barnes may have been atoning for his own war guilt. During the "Great War," 1914-18, Barnes was an enthusiast for the crusade against the Huns. When peace came, Barnes (like many at the time) wondered what it all had been about. He concluded not just that he had been overly enthusiastic, not just that he had been wrong in seeing the war as a matter of white hats versus black hats, but that in fact he had had the 'hats' t...
Am I violating someone's copyright? Heck, I'll live dangerously. The news it came out in the First World War The bloody Red Baron was flying once more The Allied Command ignored all of its men And called on Snoopy to do it again The Allied Co mmand has a rather low opinion of its own men. Snoopy's flying-ace fantasy on top of his doghouse was firmly established in the pop-cultural consciousness well before The Royal Guardsmen did this in 1967. But Snoopy always seemed to lose his imagined battles with the Red Baron. He'd go down in flames, shouting "Curse you!" That was the running gag. So how had the Allied Command developed its confidence in his ability to do "it again" -- if "it" means anything they should want done? Apparently, they were confident in his abilities because they had listened to an earlier Royal Guardsmen tune. But let's stick to this one. Was the night before Christmas and forty below When Snoopy went up in s...
Last week I quoted from a 1975 book by Adam Fergusson, WHEN MONEY DIES, about the Weimar era hyperinflation. One point the book makes that was new to me was that the Germans weren't the only ones hit. All three of the defeated powers (I say 3 because of course after the war Austria and Hungary were separate countries, no longer connected by Emperor or hyphen) were subjected to the ruinous war reparations demands of the victorious allies, and all three countries gave in to the temptation to gun up the printing presses. As to the consequences, I found this passage of great interest: Only the country people were surviving in Germany [in autumn 1922] in any comfort: anyone who lived off the land had the readiest access to real values. It was not surprising that even when they ensured that the money receipts for their goods were no more than equivalent in purchasing power than what they were used to, they were accused of extortion-- the more so if they del...
Jacques Barzun died last week, just a month short of his 105th birthday. I've written of Barzun before: here for example, and here . I had the honor of a long, though epistolatory, friendship with Prof. Barzun, and it now seems incumbent upon me to donate his letters to some appropriate scholarly repository. I do think that some of this correspondence will help shed some light on his thought, for future researchers. I'm certain that his reputation is bound to grow over the coming decades. Perhaps the definitive biographer, the one who can do for Barzun what Barzun did for Hector Berlioz , is still 81 years away. Berlioz, after all, died in 1869, and Barzun's two-volume work on his life and times appeared in 1950. And it did so in no small part because Barzun heard Berlioz's "Ballet of the Sylphs " performed when he was only four or five years, a memory that never left him. Perhaps we can best pay tribute to Barzun in his passing with some words h...