#181

Today marks the seventy-fifth year since the landing on the beaches of Normandy by the Allied forces in 1944, which is marked down as quite a moment. The situation is pretty hardcore if one lets the prevailing conditions factor in, if you get even a little subjective with the equation. It's some significant shit. It's not like any of those dudes didn't know exactly what the uncorrectable math was. If you were there, you would know for a cold hard fact that when the hull scraped the sand you were probably going to die screaming and hurting like a son of a bitch, breathing out your last far away from home too early in the morning and your mother would never see you smile again. If by some miracle you made it through, the math was again clear and irreducible: some of the dudes praying and vomiting next to you would not, and you were consigned to walk over their threshed bodies into however long you had to live on time they bought you. 

In addition, June 6 has the honor of hosting the Battle of Midway in 1942. That's just World War II. June 6 has a lot to its name. Extending just a shade, it is the date that Union forces seized Memphis from the Confederacy.

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Also, birth date of  Thomas Mann, Isaiah Berlin, and Paul Giamatti. Just to name the ones who are on my shelves or whose acting for the screen I have perceived and interpreted. Patrick Rothfuss gets an honorable mention since I only know him by reputation but a lot of people seem to like his book The Name of the Wind a lot. I'll get around to it. Have been meaning to get around to it.

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Oh, apropos of nothing, war is a shitty thing, and the people who fight it do shitty things. Crimes within crimes, and in secret, the truly unthinkable, the shit nobody knew about, the shit every living soul denies they would do when asked and yet happens every time there's a war on, and there is always a war on. There is no defense for the shit that soldiers do every time that soldiers do what soldiers do.

But it is mad low class and an extremely rude and off-base dis to trash soldiers. Get off of it. I've read Sartre, I know and consider cogent the case that it is always a choice not to be a soldier, that you are always free to not be a soldier, that all war is accomplished by cooperation and if no subject agreed to cooperate with war, then it could not be brought off; hence, each of us is responsible to the other to deny the soldiering contract. I always love how philosophers use freedom to try to force you to act how they think you should act. I always love when philosophers are indiscernible from politicians.

Well, it is my small and uneducated opinion that Sartre* didn't really understand Heidegger, who was a Nazi and a cuck and a living piece of shit but wrote more important books and he talked about something called a situation and if you're not in someone else's situation it is just my opinion that odds are good that you know precious little, probably little enough to amount to dick, about what freedom looks like to them. It is difficult for me to consider that you know enough to tell them what they should do with their freedom.

Look, I don't go around volunteering to go to war. I'm not that kind of person; my situation is not that. War happens, that's a situation, and there are always going to be a lot of people who have a stake in that situation and create a gravity around it. There is an accretion of war whose gravity would pull me into it whether I willed it or not; that is a change in situation. That there is no such accretion is because wars are fought and won without my cooperation for my benefit, a fact I am at both at peace with and unhappy about but a fact, which I must consider when I criticize war as a situation and consider the situation of the individuals who are in it. 

It seems to me like I get to sit on my biscuit and intellectualize about all this because other people died and are dying in order to grant me the privilege! Huh. I would feel like a real asshole if I didn't at least have the grace to keep silent on the matter, if I didn't feel like waxing poetic about glorious sacrifice. Maybe I do and maybe I don't. My own business, mostly.

At the end of the day, I feel the least you can do is recognize the situation, and respect the decision, and use the whole thing to get some perspective. 

Everyone has their reasons for doing what they do. It may be opaque to you, it may seem to amount to the same thing, but the why matters, and the why is different in every situation, for every subject.

Not being a soldier is not a decision that makes me any better or more correct than a person who made the decision to be a soldier. 


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Of course, this does not mean we do not hold individual soldiers accountable for their personal misdeeds. It never means that! It just means we do not consign every soldier as an individual to the horns of a demon nor the wings of an angel on the basis of current pop ideology heated by a feverish press. It just means that maybe you and I, dear reader, can perhaps slow down together and remember that even in the act of holding others accountable we may become greater hypocrites and monsters than those we would judge, must be on our watch for that always, must remember that the rush of righteous condemnation is one of the things that war is founded on, one of the things that breeds the iniquitous social organizations that give rise to warlike situations.

Just means that we can remember that in other shoes, we'd walk other paths.

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Got more to say on this subject and another I was thinking about yesterday which relates, but I am tired, and this has gone one quite long enough. It was a big day today.

Ok, real quick: I had absolutely stupendous sex. It was fricking superreal. It was healing.

Cool peace barely gonna make the deadline tonight haha


--JL

*it is my habit to be extra mean to Sartre but he's all right really dude just sucks

I have a few of his books though