Monday, November 30, 2009

The Naked and the Dead (12).

Norman Mailer. New York: The New American Library: A Signet Book. 1948.


Why read it? The thoughts of the enlisted man before and during the fighting. The antagonism of the enlisted man for the officer. The thoughts of the General who had complete power over the men under his control. The General, who finally suspected that he had had nothing to do with the victory.


Quotes/Ideas:

“With a sick fascination, he envisioned a factory, watched his bullet being made, packed into a carton.” p. 534.


“You carried it alone as long as you could, and then you weren’t strong enough to take it any longer…kept fighting everything, and everything broke you down, until in the end you were just a little goddam bolt holding on and squealing when the machine went too fast.” p. 548.


Polack swore: ‘The whole thing’s over, huh?’…. And we broke our ass for nothin’.” p. 549.


“…we’re stuck over here God knows how long, never knowing when you’re going to catch something, just waiting and sweating it out, and finding out things about yourself that, by God, it don’t pay to know.” p. 553.


“The General: For a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all t0 do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend.” p. 555.


“In the end the important thing was always to tote up your profit and loss.” p. 556.


“Certain things were SOP: The Japanese had set up many small hospitals in the last weeks of the campaign, and in retreating, they had killed many of their wounded. Americans who came in would finish off whatever wounded men were left, smashing their heads with rifle butts or shooting them point-blank.” p. 557.


The End.


Comment: A fitting end to war. RayS.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

The Naked and the Dead (11).

Norman Mailer. New York: The New American Library: A Signet Book. 1948.


Why read it? The thoughts of the enlisted man before and during the fighting. The antagonism of the enlisted man for the officer. The thoughts of the General who had complete power over the men under his control. The General, who finally suspected that he had had nothing to do with the victory.


Quotes/Ideas:

“He was functioning more like an animal now than a man.” p. 456.


“If he had to endure one more artillery shelling he might have collapsed; his terror always expanded in a situation where he could do nothing to affect it.” p. 456.


“A half-hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.” p. 469.


“For the first time he bridged the distance between his few contacts with Hearn and the last glimpse he had had of him, the bloody meaningless corpse.” p. 471.


“Listen, Polack, you think there’s a God? If there is, he sure is a sonofabitch.” p. 472.


“Each of them was fighting his private battle.” p. 486.


“…ever since the second ambush he had been feeling the apprehension of a man in a dream who knows he is guilty, is waiting for his punishment, and cannot remember his crime.” p. 497.


“Toward the end they had only a dumb wonder that they could abuse their bodies so mightily and have them still function.” p. 501.


“But it never occurred to him to quit [to die from his wound]…so many things he wanted to do.” p. 502.


“…they did not think of themselves as individual men any longer…were merely envelopes of suffering.” p. 512.


To be concluded.


Note: Blog will resume on Monday, November 30, 2009. RayS.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

The Naked and the Dead (10).

Norman Mailer. New York: The New American Library: A Signet Book. 1948.


Why read it? The thoughts of the enlisted man before and during the fighting. The antagonism of the enlisted man for the officer. The thoughts of the General who had complete power over the men under his control. The General, who finally suspected that he had had nothing to do with the victory.


Quotes/Ideas:

“If a man gets wounded, it’s his own goddam fault, Croft thought.”


“They looked at Wilson, watched the slow pulse of his bleeding…face had become blanched, almost white…looked unfamiliar…could not believe it was Wilson…just an unconscious wounded man.” p. 407.


“The night wind was cool, rustling the leaves in the trees…suggested rain, and the men mused idly of summer nights when they had sat on their porches at sundown, watching the rain clouds gather, feeling at ease because they were under cover….set off a long stream of wistful recollections, of summer and the sounds of dance music on Saturday nights…the smell of foliage…the excitement of driving a car on a country road, the headlights painting a golden cylinder through the leaves…they burrowed more deeply into their blankets.” p. 416.


“…he reeled into unconsciousness, his mind seeming to revolve over and over beneath his closed eyelids.” p. 418.


Cummings [the General] was bothered by the suspicion, very faint, not quite stated, that he had no more to do with the success of the attack than a man who presses a button and waits for the elevator.” p. 435.


“The best things, the things worth doing in the last analysis, had to be done alone.” p. 438.


“…at the moment he was living on many levels at once.” p. 440.


“Not since he had been a young man had he hungered so for knowledge.” p. 444.


“Cummings [the General] had once said, ‘You know, Robert, there really are only two kinds of liberals and radicals…the ones who are afraid of the world and want it changed to benefit themselves…and…the young people who don’t understand their own desires…want to remake the world, but they never admit they want to remake it in their own image’ ” p. 451.


“Rely on the blunder factor, sit back and wait for the Fascists to louse it up.” p. 456.


To be continued.

Monday, November 23, 2009

The Naked and the Dead (9).

Norman Mailer. New York: The New American Library: A Signet Book. 1948.


Why read it? The thoughts of the enlisted man before and during the fighting. The antagonism of the enlisted man for the officer. The thoughts of the General who had complete power over the men under his control. The General, who finally suspected that he had had nothing to do with the victory.


Quotes/Ideas:

“He was unhappy because he felt continually betrayed.” p. 349.


“Like the others, Red was wondering if this patrol would be the one where his luck ran out.” p. 349.


“Croft always despised a platoon leader who made efforts to have his men like him…goddam platoon’ll go to hell, he told himself.” p. 355.


Martinez had the suppressed malice, the contempt, and the anxiety of a servant who knows he is superior to his master.” p. 360.


“…but personally I think a Jew is a Jew, because he suffers.” p. 376.


“We [the Jews] have suffered so much that we know how to endure.” p. 376.


Red: “Listen, boy, forget about it, you ain’t gonna get out of the Army, aint’ any of us gonna get out.” p. 389.


“About them the hills shimmered in the noon heat, and a boundless nodding silence had settled over everything…whirring of the insects was steady and not unpleasant…it brewed vague warm images of farm lands in summer heat, quiet and bountiful, stirring only in the fragile traceries a butterfly might make against the sky…drifted through a train of memories, idly, as if they were sauntering down a country road, seeing again the fertile roll of the fields, smelling in the musty damp germination of the earth after the rain, the ancient redolent odors of plowed land and sweating horses.” p. 393.


“…but all these discomforts were minor, almost unnoticed in the leaden stupor of marching….” p. 393.


“…the anesthesia of exhaustion.”


To be continued.

Friday, November 20, 2009

The Naked and the Dead (8)

Norman Mailer. New York: The New American Library: A Signet Book. 1948.


Why read it? The thoughts of the enlisted man before and during the fighting. The antagonism of the enlisted man for the officer. The thoughts of the General who had complete power over the men under his control. The General, who finally suspected that he had had nothing to do with the victory.


Quotes/Ideas:

Red: “If they get ya to hate ‘em enough, you’ll crack a nut before you’ll go to ‘em and that way they keep you on the line. A guy dies now and then, but what the hell’s another guy to the Army. You’d think we weren’t men.” p. 292.


The General: “The men who would land at Botoi would be in the enemy rear without any safe way to retreat, and their only security would be to drive ahead and meet their own troops…would have to advance.” p. 300.


“It was basically a superstition: Dalleson believed that if he could make his own small unit function perfectly the rest of his division would follow his example.” p. 305.


“In the final analysis there was only necessity and one’s reactions to it.” p. 316.


“Life’s a hard thing, and nobody gives you nothing; you do it alone, every man’s hand is against you, that’s what you also find out.” p. 319.


“…there is, and it’s very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works.” p. 323.


“From Webster’s [Dictionary]: hatred, n. ‘strong aversion or detestation; settled ill will or malevolence’…a thread in most marriages.” p. 330.


“He looked surprisingly old…but, then, all the veterans did.” p. 335.


Red: “The goddam officers…a bunch of college kids who think it’s [the war’s] like going to a football game.” p. 347.


“What the hell is it to the General if we get knocked off…just an experiment that got fugged-up.” p. 347.


To be continued.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

The Naked and the Dead (7).

Norman Mailer. New York: The New American Library: A Signet Book. 1948.


Why read it? The thoughts of the enlisted man before and during the fighting. The antagonism of the enlisted man for the officer. The thoughts of the General who had complete power over the men under his control. The General, who finally suspected that he had had nothing to do with the victory.


Quotes/Ideas:

The General: “The average man always sees himself in relation to other men as either inferior or superior.” p. 254.


The General: "I’ve been trying to impress you, Robert, that the only morality of the future is a power morality, and a man who cannot find his adjustment to it is doomed. One thing about power…it can flow only from the top down; when there are little surges of resistance at the middle levels, it merely calls for more power to be directed downward, to burn it out…. You can consider the Army, Robert, as a preview of the future.” p. 255.


“He [Hearn] liked very few people and most men sensed it uneasily after talking to him for a few minutes.” p. 258.


“…regular-fellow ethic borrowed from more exclusive eastern prep schools: you do not lie… you do not cheat… you do not swear… you do not screw… and you go to church.” p. 262.


Hearn makes himself a schedule which charts everything down to the fifteen minutes he can allow himself to read the comic pages on Sunday morning and the movie he can see on Saturday night. p. 265.


“They argue for an hour and Hearn listens to the names…. Few are familiar to him, Ibsen and Shaw and Galsworthy, but he has never heard of Strindberg, Hauptmann, Marlowe, Lope De Vega, Webster, Pirandello…and he tells himself desperately that he must read.” p. 267.


Hearn: “It seems to me you just do the thing that seems best at the moment, and worry about the rest of it later….” The General: “That’s bourgeois morality….” p. 270.


“One play he never quite forgets: a ball carrier on the opposing team breaks through a hole in the line, is checked momentarily, and is standing there stock upright, and helpless, when Hearn tackles him…has charged with all his strength and the player is taken off the field with a wrenched knee…. I’m sorry. Only he knows he isn’t. There had been an instant of complete startling gratification when he knew the ball carrier was helpless, waiting to be hit.” p. 271.


“Everything is crapped up, everything is phony, everything curdles when you touch it.” p. 275.


“He thought of the war, which would stretch on forever….after this island there’s gonna be another one and then another one. There’s no future in the whole goddam thing.” p. 280.


To be continued.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

The Naked and the Dead (7).

Norman Mailer. New York: The New American Library: A Signet Book. 1948.


Why read it? The thoughts of the enlisted man before and during the fighting. The antagonism of the enlisted man for the officer. The thoughts of the General who had complete power over the men under his control. The General, who finally suspected that he had had nothing to do with the victory.


Quotes/Ideas:

“The sun had been up for only an hour and the morning still had a fine clear youth…. Gallagher thought vaguely of early summer mornings when he set out for work, and the pavements were still cool and fresh from the summer night.” p. 206.


Roth [referring to Gallagher who has received the news of his wife’s death in childbirth]: “He’s an ignorant fellow, no education, he probably doesn’t have so many feelings.” p. 226.


“What’s the use of all that education when you can’t remember it?” p. 227.


“You look out for everything, he thought, and you still get hit from behind.” p. 235.


“The General at the front, noting that the men were settling in: Once they halted and stayed in one place long enough for it to assume familiar connotations, it was immeasurably harder to get them to fight again.” p. 237.


“…he [the General] was suffering the amazement and terror of a driver who finds his machine directing itself, starting and halting when it desires.” p. 237.


The General: “They liked their bivouacs…. There were methods of fixing that; tomorrow, there could be a general troop movement to one side or another, adjustments of a few hundred yards with new fox holes to be dug, new barbed wire to be laid, new tents to be put up.” p. 250.


The General: “And if they started laying duck walks again, and improving their latrines, there could be still another movement…. The American’s capacity for real estate improvement: build yourself a house, grow fat in it, and die.” p. 250.


The General: “The fear, the respect his soldiers held for him now was a rational one, an admission of his power to punish them, and that was not enough. Other kind of fear was lacking, the unreasoning one in which his powers were immense and it was effectively a variety of sacrilege to thwart him.” p. 251.


The General: “The longer you tarried with resistance, the greater it became; it had to be destroyed.” p. 251.


To be continued.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

The Naked and the Dead (5).

Norman Mailer. New York: The New American Library: A Signet Book. 1948.


Why read it? The thoughts of the enlisted man before and during the fighting. The antagonism of the enlisted man for the officer. The thoughts of the General who had complete power over the men under his control. The General, who finally suspected that he had had nothing to do with the victory.


Quotes/Ideas:

The General: “…to make an army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder…. Army functions best when you’re frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates…. The hate just banks in them, makes them fight a little better…. …can’t turn it on us, so they turn it outward.” p. 139.


The General: “The machine techniques of this century demand consolidation, and with that you’ve got to have fear, because the majority of men must be subservient to the machine, and it’s not a business they instinctively enjoy.” p. 140.


The General: “The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.” p. 140.


The General: “…in the Army the idea of individual personality is a hindrance…. I work with grosser techniques, common denominator techniques.” p. 143.


Red: “Don’t kid yourself…. A man’s no more important than a goddam cow.” p. 157.


“Very deep inside himself he [Red] was thinking that this [corpse] was a man who had once wanted things, and the thought of his own death was always a little unbelievable to him…had had a childhood, a youth, and young manhood, and there had been dreams and memories…realizing with surprise and shock, as if he were looking at a corpse for the first time, that a man was really a very fragile thing.” p. 171.


“Where is the beauty we lost in our youth?” p. 182.


“Ya lose whatever you want when you start goin’ for it.” p. 182.


“But if you stop and quit moving you die.” p. 185.


“Red thought of the mother Wyman would have to support if he married his girl, and he had a quick elliptic knowledge of everything that would contain—the arguments, the worries over money, the grinding extinction of their youth until they would look like the people who walked by them in the park….” p. 203.


To be continued.

Monday, November 16, 2009

The Naked and the Dead (4).

Norman Mailer. New York: The New American Library: A Signet Book. 1948.


Why read it? The thoughts of the enlisted man before and during the fighting. The antagonism of the enlisted man for the officer. The thoughts of the General who had complete power over the men under his control. The General, who finally suspected that he had had nothing to do with the victory.


Quotes/Ideas:

Martinez’s terror developed in a void; the moment he had to lead men, his courage returned.” p. 113.


“…but there was a part of his mind that drove him to do things he feared and detested.” p. 114.


“…the trail was a treadmill and they no longer concerned themselves with where they were going.” p. 115.


“His ears were keyed to all the sounds of the night, and from long experience he sifted out the ones that were meaningless.” p. 118.


“…he could not have said at that moment where his hands ended and the machine gun began….” p. 122.


“In the light of the flare, the bodies looked as limp and unhuman as bags of grain.” p. 122.


“A consignment of fresh meat came in, and headquarters company’s ration of it was divided equally. Half went to the one hundred and eighty enlisted men…and the other half went to the thirty-eight officers in officers’ mess.” p. 131.


“Stupid ass, he thought, and immediately afterward, with a shock, he realized the trace of contempt he was beginning to feel for an enlisted man—slight, barely apparent, and yet it was there.” p. 133.


The General: “We have the highest standard of living in the world and, as one would expect, the worst individual fighting soldiers of any big power. They’re comparatively wealthy, they’re spoiled…the reverse of the peasant, and I’ll tell you right now it’s the peasant who makes the soldier….”


Hearn: “So what you’ve got to do is break them down….”


The General: “Every time an enlisted man sees an officer get an extra privilege, it breaks him down a little more.”


Hearn: “They’d hate you more.


The General: “They do, but they also fear us more.” p. 138.


To be continued.

Friday, November 13, 2009

The Naked and the Dead (3).

Norman Mailer. New York: The New American Library: A Signet Book. 1948.


Why read it? The thoughts of the enlisted man before and during the fighting. The antagonism of the enlisted man for the officer. The thoughts of the General who had complete power over the men under his control. The General, who finally suspected that he had had nothing to do with the victory.


Quotes/Ideas:

“The jungle was hushed, ominous, with a commanding silence that stilled his breath…and abruptly the utter vacuum was broken and he was conscious of all the sounds of the night woods—the crickets and frogs and lizards thrumming the bush, the soughing of the trees.” p. 91.


Sgt. Brown: “If you fire without seeing anything to aim at, you just give away the position of your hole and they’ll throw a grenade in on you.” p. 92.


Wyman was sitting on his pack, and when he closed his eyes and let the rumble of the truck shake through him he felt as if he were in a subway.” p. 97.


“He had been through so much combat, had felt so many kinds of terror, and had seen so many men killed that he no longer had any illusions about the inviolability of his own flesh.” p. 98.


“He knew he could be killed; it was something he had accepted long ago, and he had grown a shell about the knowledge so that he rarely thought of anything further ahead than the next few minutes.” p. 98.


Red: “There ain’t a good officer in the world…. They’re just a bunch of aristocrats, they think” p. 102.


“Once or twice a flare filtered a wan and delicate bluish light over them…in the brief moment it lasted, they were caught at their guns in classic straining motions that had the form and beauty of a frieze.” p. 106.


“In the darkness, distance had no meaning, nor did time.” p. 106.


“Somewhere deep inside himself was a wonder at the exhaustion his body could endure.” p. 107.


“But he had always imagined combat as exciting, with no misery and no physical exertion.” p. 107.


To be continued.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

The Naked and the Dead (2).

Norman Mailer. New York: The New American Library: A Signet Book. 1948.


Why read it? The thoughts of the enlisted man before and during the fighting. The antagonism of the enlisted man for the officer. The thoughts of the General who had complete power over the men under his control. The General, who finally suspected that he had had nothing to do with the victory.


Quotes/Ideas:

“What the General had was an almost unique ability to extend his thoughts into immediate and effective action.” p. 62.


“The General had many different types of speech; when he spoke to enlisted men he swore slightly, made his voice a little less precise; with his officers he was always dignified and remote, his sentences always rigidly constructed.” p. 65.


“The General might even have been silly if it were not for the fact that here on this island he controlled everything…. As long as Hearn remained with him, he could see the whole process from the inception of the thought to the tangible and immediate results the next day, the next month.” p. 69.


Cook: “When it’s smokin’, it’s cookin’; when it’s burnin’, it’s done.” p. 70. “


“And now his tent was lost, his clothing and writing paper were sopping, his gun would probably rust, the ground would be too wet for sleeping.” p. 80.


“He had the kind of merriment a man sometimes knows when events have ended in utter disaster.” p. 80.


“It took Americans to stand something like this and laugh about it, he decided.” p. 81.


“Everything in him was functioning for one purpose, and from experience, with a confident unstated certainty, he knew that when demanded of him all this information would crystallize into the proper reactions.” p. 85.


“It would be a question of throwing up his rifle, pressing the trigger and a particular envelope of lusts and anxieties and perhaps some goodness would be quite dead…all as easy as stepping on an insect, perhaps easier.” p. 86.


“The night had broken them into all the isolated units that actually they were.” p. 87.


To be continued.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

The Naked and the Dead (1).

Norman Mailer. New York: The New American Library: A Signet Book. 1948.


Why read it? The thoughts of the enlisted man before and during the fighting. The antagonism of the enlisted man for the officer. The thoughts of the General who had complete power over the men under his control. The General, who finally suspected that he had had nothing to do with the victory.


Quotes/Ideas:

“All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead.” p. 7.


“After a time Red had that feeling of sad compassion in which one seems to understand everything, all that men want and fail to get.” p. 15.


“Why, when I think of my wife fooling around probably right this minute, while I’m lying here sweating out tomorrow…. p. 17.


“Red’s shoulders were beginning to numb under the weight of his full pack, and his rifle muzzle kept clanging against his helmet….” p. 22.


“A shell sighed overhead, and unconsciously Martinez drew back…, He felt naked.” p. 23.


“The puff their bombs threw up looked small and harmless and the planes would be almost out of sight when the noise of the explosions came back over the water.” p. 25.


“…his mind empty, waiting for what events would bring.” p. 27.


“…lone machine gun rapping in the distance.” p. 27.


“Perhaps he felt the explosion before a piece of shrapnel tore his brain in half.” p. 34.


Roth: “Did you notice how they treated the officers…slept in staterooms when we were jammed in the hold like pigs…to make them feel superior, a chosen group….” p. 43.


To be continued.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

The Making of the President 1960 (9).

Theodore H. White. New York: Pocket Books, Inc. 1961/1962.


Why read it? The strategies used by John Kennedy and his associates and by Richard Nixon and other candidates in the presidential election of 1960.


Sample ideas:

“He [JFK] had always acted as if men were masters of forces, as if all things were possible for men determined in purpose and clear in thought….” p. 458.


JFK: “While the so-called religious issue is necessarily and properly the chief topic here tonight, I want to emphasize from the outset that I believe that we have far more critical issues in the 1960 election: the spread of communist influence, until it now festers only ninety miles off the coast of Florida—the humiliating treatment of our President and vice-president by those who no longer respect our power—the hungry children I saw in West Virginia, the old people who cannot pay their doctor’s bills, the families forced to give up their farms—an America with too many slums, with too few schools, and too late to the moon and outer space.” Houston, “Tex., Sept. 12, 1960. p. 468.


JFK: “So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again—not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me, but what kind of America I believe in.” p. 468.


JFK: “But let me stress again that these are my views—for, contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for President, I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic.” p. 471.


JFK: “But if this election is decided on the basis that 40,000,000 Americans lost their chance of being President on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser….” p. 471.


The End.


Next: The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer.

Monday, November 9, 2009

The Making of the President 1960 (8).

Theodore H. White. New York: Pocket Books, Inc. 1961/1962.


Why read it? The strategies used by John Kennedy and his associates and by Richard Nixon and other candidates in the presidential election of 1960.


Sample ideas:

“The Democratic philosophy, usually unspoken, but quite clear nonetheless, is that government is there to be used as an instrument of action.” p. 433.


“The Republican philosophy…is the belief, deep down, that each citizen bears a responsibility in private life and in community life as great or greater than the responsibility of government to shape that life and community…. The Republican tragedy in recent years has been the inability of its thinkers to articulate this philosophy clearly enough to draw political conclusions and programs from it.” p. 433.


“…the President of the United States has power to educate the people of America, to draw new battle lines.” p. 437.


“Woodrow Wilson…failed in the end to make lasting peace because he could not cause the American political system to follow him.” p. 437.


“Yet one man must make them [the issues] all clear enough for American people to vote and express their desire.” p. 437.


“Whether a man is burdened by power or enjoys power; whether he is trapped by responsibility or made free by it; whether he is moved by other people and outer forces or moves them—this is the essence of leadership.” p. 438.


“For there is no apprenticeship a man can serve for the Presidency, no book nor any guide…no instructive analysis or an office bound and defined….” p. 439.


“In the world of the Presidency, giving an order does not end the matter…nothing gets done except by endless follow-up…coaxing, endless threatening and compelling.” p. 439.


“But a President governing the United States can move events only if he can first persuade.” p. 443.


“The problem, he [JFK] insisted, was inertia.” p. 450.


To be concluded.