[lbo-talk] Dulce et Decorum Est

[eric dorkin]

Owen's own life is quite telling....he joned to fight, then a zealot, and then soured soon thereafter when he saw the death and wrote (some of) the greatest anti-war verse (Dulce is my favorite poem ever).....look, you have a nation, on a very large scale, that still denies evolutionary theory in favor of biblical creationism...there faith in country is nothing next to their primitive faith in the potency of religion (paraphrasing a line from Judge Traynor "primitive faith in the potency of language;" my favorite legal line)

andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> but the solemn joy thousands of Americans seem to be taking in
burying their 18-year-olds, their children home via body bag and they're
GLAD! It makes them happy, it makes them proud, something I find so
profoundly tragic and wasteful it brings tears to my eyes. It brings home
the point, I suppose, that most Americans really do believe this is a good,
just war, worth expending their kids for

* * * 

, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen 

The Latin tag means: Sweet and proper it is to die for one's country.

It _is_ strange, and yet I think it is the deaths that in fact vindicate the war, that show them that that it was worth it, make it impossible to recoinsider, you can't go back now; that would dishonor the dead. They cannot have died for nothing or worse for something wicked.

jks

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