"Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight."
--James Ellroy, American Tabloid
Dr. Menlo: censored by China, Blogsnob and "The Lefty Directory"
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Copeland said...
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Wilfred Owen's words (January, 19, 1917--from Edmund Blunden's 1931 Memoir)
- 12:14 PM
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Copeland said...
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I meant C. Day Lewis (who wrote the introduction to the Collected Poems), not C.S. Lewis. I'm tired today, sorry.
- 12:25 PM
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Copeland said...
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I read somewhere that the creation of the FED, during the Wilson presidency, was a vehicle intended to gin up war profiteering and was designed to finance US entry into World War One.
- 12:55 PM
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Anonymous said...
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Aww, thanks for stopping by Copeland, damn sorry I missed ya, we rarely get comments here, so I don't bother to check to see if there are any. Interesting thoughts, thanks...
- 7:30 AM
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Uncle $cam said...
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Grrr, that was moi above..
- 7:31 AM
Post a Comment"GAS.
It was only tear-gas from a shell, and I got safely back (to the party) in my helmet, with nothing worse than a severe fright! And a few tears, some natural, some unnatural" [...] "Coal, water, candles, accommodation, everything is scarce. We have not always air! When I took my helmet off last night--O Air, it was a heavenly thing!...They want to call No Man's Land 'England' because we keep supremacy there. It is like the eternal place of gnashing of teeth; the Slough of Despond could not be contained in one of its crater-holes; the fires of Sodom and Gommorah could not light a candle to it--to find the way to Babylon the Fallen." [...] "No Man's Land under snow is like the face of the moon, chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness. To call it 'England'! I would as soon call my House (!) Krupp Villa, or my child Chlorina-Phosgena..."
C.S. Lewis notes the rapid maturing seen in Owen's letter writing, from a year earlier when traveling through Etaples transit camp, compared to letters written later:
"On all the officers' faces there is a harassed look that I have never seen before, and which in England never will be seen--out of jails. The men are just as Bairnsfather has them--expressionless lumps." (January 14, 1917)
Wilson was campaigning for re-election on the slogan, "He kept us out of war." And to the present day, the banksters and insurance firms, and the financial-black market-military conglomerate have upped the ante, and can wage a war on their own terms against sovereign states and the mass of the people.