Thursday, February 25, 2010

V Was for Victory.... (8)


Politics and American Culture During WWII (8). John Morton Blum. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1976.

Why read it? Perspective from the Home Front in World War II. The effects of American propaganda on the American people. A completely different view of a war from our more recent wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Ideas:
“The President, deliberately avoiding talk about grand post-war plans, concentrated on victory first and almost exclusively.” p. 68.

“But all I want to do is beat these Nazi sons-of-bitches so we can get at those little Jap bastards.” p. 69.

Ernie Pyle: “You don’t fight a Kraut by Marquis of Queensbury rules.  You shoot him in the back, you blow him apart with mines, you kill or maim him…with the least danger to yourself and he does the same to you…and if you don’t beat him at his own game, you don’t live to appreciate your own nobleness.” p. 69.

Billboard over Tulagi harbor: “Kill Japs; kill more Japs; you will be doing your part if you help to kill those yellow bastards.” p. 69.

“German reporting stressed the bravery of military groups rather than individual soldiers.” p. 71.

To be continued.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

V Was for Victory.... (7)

Politics and American Culture During WWII (7). John Morton Blum. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1976.


Why read it? Perspective from the Home Front in World War II. The effects of American propaganda on the American people. A completely different view of a war from our more recent wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.


Ideas:

“…war reporting continually discriminated against those Americans who had grown up outside of the dominant culture.” p. 63.


John Hersey: “But what I really wondered was whether any of them [soldiers] gave a single thought to what the hell this war was all about.” p. 66.


“Did these men, who might be about to die, have any war aims?” p. 66.


“What were they fighting for, anyway?” p. 66.


“Jesus, what I’d give for a piece of blueberry pie.” p. 66.


“To get the goddam thing over and get home.” p. 66.


“Most regard the war as a job to be done and there is not much willingness to discuss what we are fighting for.” p. 67.


Ernie Pyle: “We see the war from the worm’s eye view, and our segment of the picture consists only of tired soldiers who are alive and don’t want to die…of shocked men wandering back down the hill from battle….” p. 68.


To be continued.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

V Was for Victory.... (6)

Politics and American Culture During WWII (6). John Morton Blum. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1976.


Why read it? Perspective from the Home Front in World War II. The effects of American propaganda on the American people. A completely different view of a war from our more recent wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.


Ideas:

“Whether consciously or inadvertently, the reporters tended to find in the young men they described the traits that Americans generally esteemed.” p. 55.


“ ‘These Are the Generals,’ a series of articles published during 1943 in the Saturday Evening Post, linked athletic prowess, academic mediocrity and success in command.” p. 57.


“American boys were ex-grocery boys, ex-highway laborers, ex-bank clerks, ex-school boys, boys with a clean record…not killers.” p. 59.


“Perhaps because they were by the 1940s so dominantly an industrial and urban people, Americans selected their heroes disproportionately from the ranks of country boys.” p. 59.


“The habit of joyful hard work, one ingredient of the cult of success, had always beguiled the Saturday Evening Post, which built its circulation…upon continual publication of updated Alger stories.” p. 60.


To be continued.

Monday, February 22, 2010

V Was for Victory.... (5)

Politics and American Culture During WWII (5). John Morton Blum. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1976.


Why read it? Perspective from the Home Front in World War II. The effects of American propaganda on the American people. A completely different view of a war from our more recent wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.


Ideas:

“In war time, as Vice President Henry Wallace once wryly remarked a coordinator was only a man trying to keep all the balls in the air without losing his own.” p. 45.


“The comic strips depicted the Japanese as teeth and spectacles, a subhuman species… ‘murderous little ape-men’ ” p. 46.


English author Nevil Shute depicted the Germans as ‘…deadly, serious, efficient, arrogant…. They never seemed to laugh…except when they killed.” p. 50.


Archibald MacLeish: “…his reminder to his countrymen that Christian doctrine called upon man to hate the sin but to forgive the sinner.” p. 50.


“The stories…gave the impression that any American could lick any twenty Japs.” p. 54.


To be continued.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

V Was for Victory.... (4)

Politics and American Culture During WWII (4). John Morton Blum. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1976.


Why read it? Perspective from the Home Front in World War II. The effects of American propaganda on the American people. A completely different view of a war from our more recent wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.


Ideas:

“…a new agency with clear, central authority…the Office of War Information, in the spring of 1942.” p. 30.


“The new policy-making post was to go to Elmer Davis, a veteran newspaperman and radio newscaster whose dry voice and sparse style symbolized reportorial accuracy and integrity.” p. 30.


“Yet Davis had to proceed with the authority only of a coordinator.” p. 32.


“As [Milton] Eisenhower put it directly to MacLeish, ‘Our job is to promote an understanding of policy, not to make policy.’ ”


“Confident that the American people could take bad news, Davis wanted to tell them more about casualties and losses than did the armed forces, who prevailed.” p. 36.


To be continued.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

V Was for Victory.... (3)

Politics and American Culture During WWII (3). John Morton Blum. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1976.


Why read it? Perspective from the Home Front in World War II. The effects of American propaganda on the American people. A completely different view of a war from our more recent wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.


Ideas:

“The wartime function of the movies is to build morale, and morale is… education… inspiration… confidence.” Hollywood Writers Mobilization for Defense. p. 25.


“…every picture, romantic or dramatic or funny, would ‘involve consciousness of war.’ ” p. 25.


“The forthright facts…would depress people to the point of suicide.” p. 28.


“MacLeish could not…feel comfortable with the prospect of suburban love and life as the objective of the war.” p. 28.


“MacLeish was caught…as others had been before him, in the clash of competing bureaucracies in Washington.” p. 30.


“The result, as he [MacLeish] put it to Roosevelt, was a Tower of Babel.” p. 30.


To be continued.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

V Was For Victory.... (2)

Politics and American Culture During WWII (2). John Morton Blum. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1976.


Why read it? Perspective from the Home Front in World War II. The effects of American propaganda on the American people. A completely different view of a war from our more recent wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.


Ideas:

“The President, confident that the public mood resembled his own, was comfortable in that confidence, and tough.” p. 13.


“…to use bonds to sell the war, rather than vice versa.”


“Sixty percent of the reason that I want…[the bond program] is…to give the people an opportunity to do something…to make the country war-minded.” p. 17.


“Advertisers had long maintained that they exposed demands rather than creating them.” p. 19.


“Advertisers traded upon basic human desires, upon appeals to sex, envy, anxiety and they related the satisfaction of those desires to the acquisition of commercial artifacts.” p. 19.


Ad campaign: “…War bonds…mean bullets in the bellies of Hitler’s hordes.”


The Office of Facts and Figures under the leadership of Archibald MacLeish: “Policy was to make public ‘the maximum of information on…matters concerning the war, which can be revealed without giving aid and comfort to the enemy.’ ”


To be continued.

Monday, February 15, 2010

V Was for Victory (1)

Politics and American Culture During WWII (1). John Morton Blum. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1976.


Why read it? Perspective from the Home Front in World War II. The effects of American propaganda on the American people. A completely different view of a war from our more recent wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.


Ideas:

T. Roosevelt: “God save you from the werewolf and from your heart’s desire.” p. xii.


“Forty months passed, each month forever.” p. 3.


“Americans away from home, from the home where they wanted to be and where their wives and sweethearts and parents wanted them—felt their guts twist any day when they were surprised by a metaphor or a memory, one they had almost suppressed.” p. 5.


“…the emotions engendered by Wilson’s crusading rhetoric and the collapse of mood that accompanied the broken—indeed the unattainable—promises of that rhetoric.” p. 8.


“During WWII the President tried to prevent his rhetoric from whipping up emotions he could not control.” p. 8.


“He [President Roosevelt] would have preferred to employ no propaganda at all, and the little he endorsed for home consumption spoke more to the dangers of defeat than to the opportunities of victory.” p. 8.


To be continued.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

V Was for Victory....

V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During WWII . John Morton Blum. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1976.


This next book to be reviewed is the story of American propaganda during World War II. If you want an example of this propaganda, all you have to do is rent a copy of the DVD, Buck Privates, with Abbott and Costello. The film says that the American soldier is the luckiest man alive because he is being fed and trained for war by his fellow Americans from the greatest country in the world: "You're a lucky fellow, Mr. Smith" is the theme song sung by the Andrews Sisters. The movie demonstrates how men of the armed forces, supported by their women in uniform, must act as a team in order to win the war. Some of Abbott and Costello's funniest gags are incorporated into the film. But it is pure propaganda. Ray S.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

The Once and Future King (15).

T.H. White. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 1939.


Why read it? Merlyn teaches King Arthur the art of leadership. Part of his training was in learning to live with the animals and gain their perspective. Finally, he founded the Round Table. Merlyn is a most amazing character. A delightful and imaginative tale of what was to become known as Camelot. And a great deal of wisdom.


Ideas:

“Now this king had an idea, and the idea was that Force ought to be used, if it were used at all, on behalf of justice, not on its own account…thought that if he could get his barons fighting for truth, and to help weak people, and to redress wrongs, then their fighting might not be such a bad thing as once it used to be.” p. 628.


Arthur: “I am giving you the candle now [the legacy of the Round Table]—you won’t let it burn out?” p. 629.


“The fantastic thing about war was that it was fought about nothing—literally nothing.” p. 630.


“If people could be persuaded to read and write, not just eat and make love, there was still a chance….” p. 631.


“The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop, although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea.” p. 631.


The end.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

The Once and Future King (14).

T.H. White. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 1939.


Why read it? Merlyn teaches King Arthur the art of leadership. Part of his training was in learning to live with the animals and gain their perspective. Finally, he founded the Round Table. Merlyn is a most amazing character. A delightful and imaginative tale of what was to become known as Camelot. And a great deal of wisdom.


Ideas:

“Man had gone on, through age after age, avenging wrong with wrong, slaughter with slaughter.” p. 623.


“It was as if everything would lead to sorrow, so long as man refused to forget the past….” p. 623.


“We cannot build the future by avenging the past.” p. 624.


“Perhaps the great cause of war was possession.” p. 624.


“Ideal advice, which nobody was built to follow, was no advice at all.” p. 625.


“Advising heaven to earth was useless.” p. 625.


“Everybody wants to fight…but nobody knows why.” p. 627.


To be concluded.

Monday, February 8, 2010

The Once and Future King (13)

T.H. White. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 1939.


Why read it? Merlyn teaches King Arthur the art of leadership. Part of his training was in learning to live with the animals and gain their perspective. Finally, he founded the Round Table. Merlyn is a most amazing character. A delightful and imaginative tale of what was to become known as Camelot. And a great deal of wisdom.


Ideas:

“The bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards.” p. 609.


“ ‘Now that the guns have come,’ said Arthur, ‘the Table is over.’ ”


“Arthur had been taught by Merlyn to believe that man was perfectible: that he was on the whole more decent than beastly.” p. 621.


“The service for which he [Arthur] had been destined had been against Force, the mental illness of humanity…but the whole structure depended on the first premise: that man was decent.” p. 621.


“He [Arthur] had conquered murder, to be faced with war.” p. 622.


“Why did men fight? Was it the wicked leaders who led innocent populations to slaughter, or was it wicked populations who chose leaders after their own hearts?” p. 622.


To be continued.

Friday, February 5, 2010

The Once and Future King (12).

T.H. White. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 1939.


Why read it? Merlyn teaches King Arthur the art of leadership. Part of his training was in learning to live with the animals and gain their perspective. Finally, he founded the Round Table. Merlyn is a most amazing character. A delightful and imaginative tale of what was to become known as Camelot. And a great deal of wisdom.


Ideas:

Arthur: “It is a king’s business to prevent bloodshed if he can, not to provoke it.” p. 542.


“Nowadays the law was his [Arthur’s] chief interest, his final effort against Might.” p. 543.


“Mordred, glaring at his father [Sir Agravine] with blazing eyes announced without preamble: ‘We came to tell you what every person in this court has always known: Queen Guenever is Sir Lancelot’s mistress openly’ .”


Arthur: “When I was a young man, I did something which was not just, and from it has sprung the misery of my life; do you think you can stop the consequences of a bad action, by doing good ones afterwards? …I don’t…have been trying to stopper it down with good actions, ever since, but it goes on in widening circles…will not be stopped.” p. 570.


“She knew that they had reached a crisis of some sort.” p. 604.


To be continued.

Thursday, February 4, 2010

The Once and Future King (11)

T.H. White. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 1939.


Why read it? Merlyn teaches King Arthur the art of leadership. Part of his training was in learning to live with the animals and gain their perspective. Finally, he founded the Round Table. Merlyn is a most amazing character. A delightful and imaginative tale of what was to become known as Camelot. And a great deal of wisdom.


Ideas:

“…the faculty to look short life in the face….” p. 461.


Guenever…it was her part to sit at home, though passionate, though real and hungry in her fierce and tender heart…no recognized diversions except what is comparable to the ladies’ bridge party of today…no occupation---except Lancelot.” p. 462.


The Round Table: “There had been the first feeling, a companionship of youth…the second, of chivalrous rivalry growing staler every year…until it had nearly turned to feud and empty competition…the enthusiasm of the Grail…now the maturer or the saddest phase had come, in which enthusiasms had been used up for good.” p. 468.


“If you achieve perfection, you die.” p. 468.


“Arthur, reserved and unhappy in the new atmosphere which had begun to pull away from him instead of with him….” p. 469.


“Nowadays, when a point of justice is obscure and difficult, each side hires lawyers to argue it out; in those days [the days of King Arthur] the upper classes hired champions to fight it out—which came to the same thing.” p. 470.


To be continued.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

The Once and Future King (10)

T.H. White. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 1939.


Why read it? Merlyn teaches King Arthur the art of leadership. Part of his training was in learning to live with the animals and gain their perspective. Finally, he founded the Round Table. Merlyn is a most amazing character. A delightful and imaginative tale of what was to become known as Camelot. And a great deal of wisdom.


Ideas:

Arthur: “I ought to have rooted Might out altogether, instead of trying to adapt it.” p. 423.


Lionel: “Give me a moral man who insists on doing the right thing all the time, and I will show you a tangle which an angel couldn’t get out of.” p. 432.


“…the world was beautiful if you were beautiful, and…you couldn’t get unless you gave…you had to give without wanting to get.” p. 453.


“He paused, still doubtful, half recognizing the moment as a cross-road of his life.” p. 454.


Lancelot: “Jenny, I have all my life been in another sin, the worst of all…pride that made me try to be the best knight in the world.” p. 455.


To be continued.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

The Once and Future King (9)

T.H. White. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 1939.


Why read it? Merlyn teaches King Arthur the art of leadership. Part of his training was in learning to live with the animals and gain their perspective. Finally, he founded the Round Table. Merlyn is a most amazing character. A delightful and imaginative tale of what was to become known as Camelot. And a great deal of wisdom.


Ideas:

“Now, in their love, which was stronger, there were the seeds of hatred and fear and confusion growing at the same time: For love can exist with hatred, each preying on the other, and this is what gives it its greatest fury.” p. 375.


“Arthur was hoping to weather the trouble by refusing to become conscious of it.” p. 379.


“But it is always embarrassing to be loved.” p. 402.


“He disliked Mordred irrationally, as a dog dislikes a cat….” p. 417.


Arthur: “Unfortunately we have tried to establish Right by Might, and you can’t do that.” p. 422.


To be continued.

Monday, February 1, 2010

The Once and Future King (8)

T.H. White. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 1939.


Why read it? Merlyn teaches King Arthur the art of leadership. Part of his training was in learning to live with the animals and gain their perspective. Finally, he founded the Round Table. Merlyn is a most amazing character. A delightful and imaginative tale of what was to become known as Camelot. And a great deal of wisdom.


Ideas:

“Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the Commandments, without difficulty.” p. 368.


“Thank God for the aged/ And for age itself, and illness and the grave/ When we are old and ill, and particularly in the coffin/ It is no trouble to behave. p. 368.


“Youth: A chaos of the mind and body—a time for weeping at sunsets and at the glamour of moonlight—a confusion and profusion of beliefs and hopes, in God, in Truth, in Love, in Eternity—an ability to be transported by the beauty of physical objects—a heart to ache or swell—a joy so joyful and a sorrow so sorrowful….” p. 368.


“If there is one thing I can’t stand, it is being treated like a possession.” p. 371.


Lancelot: “It was not enough for me to conquer the world—I wanted to conquer heaven too.”

To be continued.