December 18, 2005

Losing the War I'm not exactly sure what this article is about, I haven't finished reading it - but I thought it was worth an FPP because it's somehow excellent already. It's about war, Hitler, Wagner, the author's dad, and the American public's perception of combat overseas.

My father owned a gorgeous porcelain tiger about half the size of a house cat. He kept it on a shelf in our family den, where for years when I was a kid it roared down at us--unappeasably furious (or so I always thought) at being trapped up there on its high perch, with no company except some painted beer mugs and a set of purple glass swizzle sticks. Then one day it got broken; I don't remember how. Probably my brother and I were having a skirmish and a shot went wild. I thought my father would be furious, but he didn't say a word. Carefully, almost reverently, he wrapped up the tiger and the shards of its shattered leg and put them away in a box in the basement. So it starts. I'm betting the tiger shows up again, but I've got 4 more pages to go . . .

posted by petebest 18 years ago
  • Oh I got it from a link in the blue, fwiw
  • My god man, you Godwin'd yourself in the FPP. That takes balls.
  • Powerful stuff! I hope he'll extend it to later wars, because I think WWII was the last of a kind, at least for the US, and at least in our time. Maybe because the wars the US has fought in since were in smaller venues. Maybe because simple patriotism didn't affect the view of what we were doing. Maybe because the patriots of WWII lost their innocence, and passed cynicism down to the following generations, however silently. After all, the tiger was a souvenier of a very different war I think.
  • The Korean thing was a Police Action -- that was the weaselword of the day, as I recall.
  • Yeah, but it appears that his father thought of it as a war.
  • If I recall aright, long after the fighting was over, Congress finally got around to calling it a war so that veterans of it could get some benefits. Aye, 'tis magic! And it's all done with paper! And of course hot Washington air.
  • Which I suppose ought to bring the thread to a contemplation of paper tigers
  • Paper tiger burning bright In the war-rooms of the night What immoral hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
  • A: Japanese PM and origami champion Junichiro Koizumi.
  • actually the last section deals with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - it really is a fascinating take that isn't "Monstrous war crime" nor "necessary war end". And the end does return to the tiger, but the conclusions aren't laid out for the reader, they just became obvious over the course of the essay. Sometimes I didn't know where he was going with it, but it was great just the same for a lot of those "wow, I didn't know that" things.
  • great post, thanks!
  • Kind of like current war news, I couldn't take it in all at once. I had to spread the reading over several days to be able to fully process it. Thanks for bringing us a great story. Easier to see now how the world since then has been shaped by those events.