I received a book in the mail entitled What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech and Song, edited by Amy and Leon Kass, and Diana Schaub. ISI Books, 2011.
The table of contents is amazing. It has in it many pieces you don't usually see in literary anthologies, especially writings that reveal or induce pride in America. There is Patton's address to the American troops of the Third Army before D-Day. There is Calvin Coolidge's Speech on the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The Battle Hymn of the Republic. My country Tis of Thee, and God Bless America. It's got different kinds of rhetoric in it than the sort of defeatist nonsense we normally read in contemporary literary anthologies.
Here's a piece from Patton's address:
"I don't want to get any messages saying, 'I am holding my position.' We are not holding any Goddamned thing. Let the Germans do that. We are advancing constantly and we are not interested in holding anything, except the enemy's balls. We are going to twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all of the time ...
We are not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we're going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We are going to murder those lousy Hun cocksuckers by the bushel-fucking basket. War is a bloody, killing business. You've got to spill their blood, or they will spill yours. Rip them up the belly. Shoot them in the guts. When shells are hitting all around you and you wipe the dirt off your face and realize that instead of dirt it's the blood and guts of what once was your best friend beside you, you'll know what to do!" (326).
The text is not all blood and guts, although it's about 98% blood and guts.
Blood and guts have always been part of the Judeo-Christian tradition back at least to the book of Numbers. Joshua and Caleb took on far larger armies and won. The horizon on all side was filled with the bodies of the dead. The only thing still moving were the carrion.
Patton is clearly in that line of thought, as is the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
"As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
As God goes marching on."
The idea was to flatten the enemy. Today because of multiculturalism we are supposed to try to understand the enemy. This will lead to Judeo-Christian extinction. I think some of the Jews in Weiner's former district woke up and understood this point, and gave the district to the Republican as a result for the first time since 1923. People everywhere are starting to wake up.
In Calvin Coolidge's amazing address he traces the history of American liberty and the doctrine of inalienable rights back to 18th century preachers such as Samuel Wise. Wise wrote in 1710, "Democracy is Christ's government in church and state." Coolidge writes, "Here was the doctrine of equality, popular sovereignty, and the substance of the theory of inalienable rights clearly asserted by Wise at the opening of the eighteenth century, just as we have the principle of the consent of the governed stated by Hooker as early as 1638" (687).
I'm enjoying this fine assemblage of texts which reconstitutes a bandwidth of American history and rhetoric which has largely been censored if not outright banned by the multicultural elite. They don't want us to be proud of America or of its heritage. They want us to be ashamed of our entire history and to flatten all of our heroes including Jefferson (he slept with a slave, as if that's the only thing he ever did) and even including Lincoln (he was gay, and never really cared about the slaves). No one takes someone like Calvin Coolidge seriously any more. But he's always been my favorite president. No one would think that a general like Patton could speak with such brilliant rhetorical passion (his invective was used to fire up the crazy qualities of a soldier and unleash their fiery passions -- compare Obama's tepid lucubrations that are bridges out of nothing to nowhere).
Blurbs on the back of the book are from George Will and William Kristol.
"All hail the editors of What So Proudly We Hail! They've put together an anthology worthy of study by free men and brave citizens, from the dawn's early light to the twilight's last gleaming." -- William Kristol.
If you were bothered not so much by the attack on the WTC and the rhetoric of the left (Ward Churchill's comparison of the citizens inside to Hitler's assassins and accomplices and the tacit acceptance and corroboration of this rhetoric by his peers), or if you were stirred by the men on board the plane that took out the kreeps on board the plane headed for the White House (let's roll!), then maybe this anthology can help us clarify what the nation was built on: what Protestant ideals this country was founded on, and why we are still a light to the world, in spite of every attempt by the Marxists to destroy our Christian underpinnings, and obscure the hope for change we once represented, and will always represent. When I returned from Finland in 2000 I saw how dispirited the country was, and watched the Towers crumble, and was moved by firemen and the police -- seemingly the only persons who still understood America. Some of my colleagues laughed with Churchill, and thought we deserved it. I heard Bush compared to Hitler at least ten thousand times online in Marxist literary circles. It's time we join the spirit of the firemen and the police, and rebuild the country starting with our ideals. It's going to be a long hard job, and it's going to mean a fight with the lousy left.
In this kingdom we will have to fight for the laws of our country as if they are its walls. Otherwise, we will be breached, and destroyed. We represent an oasis of civilization surrounded by mindless wilderness. We are already infiltrated by a massive enemy that would be happy to see every last American turn French, or who would at least do nothing but be passive in the face of their Europeanizing and globalizing verbiage.
2 comments:
My dad was a professor of clinical psychology for four years. He only supervised one dissertation, but that dissertation turned into a book called And The Flag Was Still There. It was about gays in the military, so it talked about The Flag, not Our Flag, mind you, because everybody knows that there aren't any gay soldiers or sailors in Our military. So the book was based on the former student's experience counseling prisoners, mostly in and around Oakland, CA and the Bay Area, on advice she'd given the Canadian government, which apparently had lots of gay sailors and soldiers, and on the writings of Wittgenstein and Lyotard. She was a big fan of post-modernism and she studied with my dad at a time when post-modernism was not yet a permissible topic in the American academy, which was sort of like the military in that there weren't any gays in American universities then. If you wanted gay academics then, you had to go to Germany or France, maybe because the Europeans were accustomed to having their nuts twisted by people acting on orders from George Patton.
My two favorite English teachers in high school were gay men. Later, in college, most of the professors in the humanities were gay. I studied with Ginsberg and Burroughs later on in the late 1970s. Kenward Elmslie was also at Naropa Institute.
I think there have been gay men and women in American academia for a great long time. At least as long as I have been alive.
They're often extremely witty and devoted teachers.
Some of my male teachers in high school who were straight were just plain brutes: beating kids with paddles and fists and screaming at us.
The gay men weren't doing this. I was grateful to them. I still don't know what made them gay.
The gay women in college were very prominent at Evergreen State in the mid-70s (one of them slept with at least a dozen students a year), and later on in graduate school in the early 90s there were gay men and women at the UW in Seattle.
I just don't know what you mean by this Craig.
If you go clear back to the beginning of western civilization you get gay men or their equivalent. Plato and Socrates were quite interested in gay sex.
Even back in the days of Homer Achilles seems to have been bisexual going after all kinds of women and having something of some kind going on with Patroclus, as well.
It's probably always been a tendency. It's quite a bit more discouraged and condemned in the Jewish and Islamic traditions. Leviticus is fairly clear, as is Romans (written by a Jewish writer). Jesus seems to think marriage is for a man and a woman.
He, too, was Jewish.
But in many Greek texts you get homosexual texts long before the 1970s.
I think they always existed, but just weren't too out about it.
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