--My very first correction. I told you I was horrible with names. It
seems the name of the emcee for the “La Femme” show at the Gay
90’s is Morgan not Morty. Don’t know why I could have possibly thought that. And it’s not Deeliteâ€Â¦it’s D.Liscious. Pardon my drunken recollections and thanks to Mr. H. for setting me straight.

--Chuckle for the day
Talk about your tax dollars at work. I feel a large, hysterical burble
of laughter working its way up from my belly, into the vocal chords and
out of the mouth. Oops. There it went. It̢۪s ringing through the
office as I write. --How did he get this job?
Don̢۪t get me wrong. I enjoyed his comments and very much agreed with
them, but come on. You work in the State Department, the place where
they measure success by the number of ashtrays shuffled on the long
table at talks on this, that or the other, and not in actual signed
treaties and you said that ?

Way to go, but don̢۪t expect to have a job at the end of the month.

Unless, of course, this is Bush̢۪s and Powell̢۪s way of ratcheting up the pressure on the pipsqueak in Pyongyang?

Curious reply to the hubbub: “Bolton,
in a statement issued by his office, said: ``I am happy to play
whatever role the president and the secretary want me to play.’”
Naaaaah. Couldn̢۪t possibly be. We all know Bush is way too stupid to
ever make a surreptitious move like that. And we all know that Powell
would never be able to make a play like that because he̢۪s too busy
squirming feverishly in his chair and shouting down the house like
Arnold Horshack to be heard over Boom Boom Rice and Donald Barbarino.
They couldn̢۪t possibly have instructed an Undersecretary of State to
make a provocative statement bound to get Pyongyang off its ass and
into talks. They̢۪re not clever enough.
We all know that. --All the men(and possibly the women, too, you never
know) who are reading this are going to undoubtedly sigh monstrous
sighs of disappointment at this admission, but I just finally watched Patton
last night. Ok, yeah, I know. Stop right there. I̢۪ve seen the whole
pacing in front of the flag scene and that was the reason I never
followed through. Yeah, yeah. You thought it was the best scene in the
damn film. Ok. Great. I̢۪m happy for you. I was personally bored to
tears by it, and as a result never watched the rest of the film. Lucky
for you we came in late on it last night. Missed the flag pacing scene
entirely and was absorbed by the rest of it. The guy was a nutjob.
There̢۪s no getting around that fact. He was a megalomaniacal freak,
so we̢۪ll just skip right over it and simply say that it̢۪s nice that
in time of war there̢۪s always a place for everyone, no matter how
insane they are. Now, now, don̢۪t get all testy. I will freely admit
Patton was a brilliant tactician, the likes of which we haven̢۪t seen
since Hannibal marched his elephants through the Alps on his way to
plunder Rome, nor will see again until the human race gets comfortable
fighting in lines again (and have no fear, it will happen, and George
S. would probably agree with me). And he more than did his part to rid
us of the Nazis. Bully for him.
What I found interesting about the film was how relatively sympathetic
it was toward his actions and words. If he made a blunder in the press,
they showed him as misunderstood. If he didn̢۪t play politics as well
as he should have, they showed how tortured he was by his failure to do
so. If he showed admiration for the German army and Rommel, in
particular, it was because he simply admired
them, not because he sympathized with them. If he kept former Nazis on
the payroll, running the waterworks, it was because they were the only
ones who knew how to keep the water flowing. If he didn̢۪t want to
suck up to the Soviets, it was because he wanted to push them back
behind their borders while he still had an army to do the job. If he
backhanded a soldier who was hiding in a hospital because the shelling
was wearing on his nerves, it was because the man was a coward and
Patton couldn̢۪t stand the sight of him.
In other words, they showed his pragmatism.
You could tell that this film was made by people who remembered WWII
well because they had lived through it. There was no imagined hand
wringing or revisionist history. There was no imagining what would he be thinking?
They knew. They̢۪d lived through war and they didn̢۪t have to
imagine. They knew there were hard choices to be made by everyone
involved and that sometimes it just wasn̢۪t an option to worry about
what people would think of you if you did something that wasn̢۪t
popular or seen as ethical. You did the deed and you worried about it
later. Patton knew this instinctively. The people who made this film
knew this instinctively.
As a contrast, I read a novel a few years back titled The Runner
by Christopher Reich, who is a very good writer of international
thrillers. The story was set in post war Germany, Berlin, in the months
after the allies had divvied it up into the four sections. Reich
portrayed Patton in his novel as black without any diverting shades of
gray to him: it made him a better villain that way. Patton hired Nazis
because he agreed with them and thought them good people not because
they kept the water flowing. He admired the German Army because he
sympathized with their cause, not because he saw them as a capable foe.
And so on and so forth. The way Reich wrote it, Patton was
the villain in postwar Germany. Not the Nazis who̢۪d brought the world
crashing down on their people. Not the profiteers who took advantage of
the situation. And not the Russians who wanted to land grab as much as
their tsarist ancestors had. And you have to wonder, despite the fact
there are plenty of people who lived through WWII still around, how did
Reich get away with this thinking? I̢۪ll grant you it̢۪s a novel, but
to come to that sort of a deduction is quite beyond the pale. I suppose
it will sound naïve, but has revisionist history gone so far as to
completely ignore the realities of war and the people who lead us
through it? Particularly
this war. Are the shades of gray being ignored because black and white
are more comfortable resting places for the people of past eras?
It̢۪s a sad thought that someone like Patton, who was more than
comfortable with the idea of history judging the correctness or
incorrectness, of his actions, can̢۪t even get a fair shake sixty
years later.

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