If Bush, who brags about being a non-reader, had paid better attention during his "Ivy League" education, he might have taken more seriously the lesson that history and literature teach: War is by nature destructive, senseless and almost always futile. War is death and devastation, not "shock and awe" as televised in murky blue shadows on flickering cable TV screens.
Our blissfully ignorant president obviously failed to read or understand the major antiwar poems found in almost every high school and college literature anthology.
Stephen Crane's "War is Kind" (1893) is one such poem. . . .
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3 comments:
thanks for this link...
I'd like to think so, too, though I'm a little less sanguine about the humanities these days: Eliot's anti-semitism, Pound's Fascism.
The antiwar poem that has stayed in my mind all these years is Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner".
Sublibrarian: Yes. I am struck by that poem, too.
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