While Brave Men Die

“Eleven years later. Numbers have dehumanized us. Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 Americans dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.

An equation: 40,000 dead young men = 3,000 tons of bone and flesh, 124,000 pounds of brain matter, 50,000 gallons of blood, 1,840,000 years of life that will never be lived, 100,000 children who will never be born.

Do we scream in the night when it touches our dreams? No. We don’t dream about it because we don’t think about it; we don’t think about it because we don’t care about it. We are much more interested in law and order, so that American streets may be made safe while we transform those of Vietnam into flowing sewers of blood which we replenish each year by forcing our sons to choose between a prison cell here or a coffin there. ‘Every time I look at the flag, my eyes fill with tears.’ Mine too."

Dalton Trumbo, 1970. Read the full piece on LA Taco.

Poster at Berkeley, captured by ivangonecrazy

In August 1939, Dalton Trumbo published the American anti-war book of the century, Johnny Got His Gun. Days later Germany invaded Poland and such pacific perspectives were forgotten. Trumbo writes the narrative of a "deadman-who-is-alive", a World War I soldier who has lost his arms, legs, ears, eyes and most of his face. This darkest night of the soul speaks a tragic and bitter journey of realisation, despair and attempted suicide that culminates in a rallying cry against the lies, cruelty and foolishness that buries men- and worse- in the name of liberty.

"And all the guys who died all the five million or seven million or ten million who went out and died to make the world safe for democracy to make the world safe for words without meaning how did they feel about it just before they died? How did they feel as they watched their blood pump out into the mud? How did they feel when the gas hit their lungs and began eating them all away? How did they feel as they lay crazed in hospitals and looked death straight in the face and saw him come and take them? If the thing they were fighting for was important enough to die for then it was also important enough for them to be thinking about it in the last minutes of their lives. That stood to reason. Life is awfully important so if you've given it away you'd ought to think with all your mind in the last moments of your life about the thing you traded it for. So did all those kids die thinking of democracy and freedom and liberty and honor and the safety of the home and the stars and stripes forever?

You're goddamn right they didn't.

They died crying in their minds like little babies. They forgot the thing they were fighting for the things they were dying for. They thought about things a man can understand. They died yearning for the face of a friend. They died whimpering for the voice of a mother a father a wife a child They died with their hearts sick for one more look at the place where they were born please god just one more look. They died moaning and sighing for life. They knew what was important They knew that life was everything and they died with screams and sobs. They died with only one thought in their minds and that was I want to live I want to live I want to live.

He ought to know.

He was the nearest thing to a dead man on earth."

Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun, 1939. An online excerpt can be found here.

The Fog of War- Marlene Dumas

I finally took time to stop and read this poem; part of an art installation by Marlene Dumas. It hangs in a cultureless corridor filled with art, that I'd passed dozens of times on the way to my office. I wonder if I'm the only person whose stopped to read it, and if any others did whether they too shivered at the realisation of the vacuum surrounding them.

Rodney Smith: Surreal

Skyline, Hudson River, New York, 1995.

More elegant Rodney Smith surreality at the John Clearly Gallery.

A Sidenote on the Emotions of Materialism

"A theory is not an unemotional thing. If music can be full of passion, merely by giving form to a single sense, how much more beauty or terror may not a vision be pregnant with which brings order and method into everything that we know. If you are in the habit of believing in special providences, or of expecting to continue your romantic adventures in a second life, materialism will dash your hopes most unpleasantly, and you may think for a year or two that you have nothing left to live for. But a thorough materialist, one born to the faith and not half plunged into it by an unexpected christening in cold water, will be like the superb Democritus, a laughing philosopher.

His delight in a mechanism that can fall into so many marvellous and beautiful shapes, and can generate so many exciting passions, should be of the same intellectual quality as that which the visitor feels in a museum of natural history, where he views the myriad butterflies in their cases, the flamingoes and shell-fish, the mammoths and gorillas. Doubtless there were pangs in that incalculable life, but they were soon over; and how splendid meantime was the pageant, how infinitely interesting the universal interplay, and how foolish and inevitable those absolute little passions."

Sidenote: Positive emotions proper to materialism.
The Life of Reason, by George Santayana, 1905.



Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, closes a conference on science, religion, reason and survival. 2006.

Self Scrutiny: A need for Democracy

"The democratic culture is nurtured by the aspiration that all individuals shall have the opportunity to progress steadily toward increased measures of freedom. It must keep itself under constant scrutiny. It can never afford to become careless on this score: nor dare it become callous. Where men aspire to freedom they are obligated to create the conditions from which there may emerge a continuing stream of citizens who understand its meaning. Habit-ridden individuals will not do. Nor will fearful individuals. The case rests with individuals who have gained the ability to think- however awesome the problem- and who, equally, have gained the courage to deal with ideas- however strange they seem.

No school is quite good enough for a culture that prizes the free man if it uses anything less than all the ingenuity of those who are responsible for its character in its effort to solve the problem of how to make critical thought prevail in all the aspects of its activities. Nor can any school give itself fully to its proper work when the culture as a whole, or any portion of it, place a checkrein upon its effort. The role played by those who are concerned with education in a democratic culture is therefore vital to the strength of that culture.

All of this is of particular significance for the educator. The very nature of his culture makes him the guardian of it. When he fails to help each individual find his special strength and capacity, the culture is the poorer in consequence. When he fails to help each individual gain in ability to deal with ideas critically, and with relative calm, the culture is weakened."

"Reflective Thinking: The Method of Education", G. Hullfish and P.G. Smith, 1964.

The blossom tree

The blossom tree
Brett Whiteley
1971 – 1982
oil, silk flowers, branch, wood, canvas, nails and electricity on board
186 x 194.5 x 25.6 cm
Link