Despite my obsession with answering the comments that have poured in, I have to say something about December 7.
I have taken a vacation from watching TV because it was part of my duties as a political pro. So this year’s vacation has included a lot of DVDs (in case you think I’m getting sophisticated on you) and little use of cable TV news.
But I watched on November 22 and I am going to watch tonight.
November 22 was a day of Blessed Silence.
For forty years, every November 22 was dedicated to St. John The Kennedy. It was the day he was shot in 1963.
The media went Shakespearian on us:
“OH, for the Glorious Days of Camelot, when a fresh-faced young man from the Northeast led the march into the Inevitable Future of Liberalism!”
Forty years of that gets a bit tiresome.
The silence this year was wonderful.
On December 7 the group that modestly calls itself The Greatest Generation pays people to slap them on the back and talk about how they Saved The World by turning a third of the world over tot eh tender mercies of Mao-Tse-Tung and Our Hero and Glorious Comrade, “Uncle Joe” Stalin.
They found a world where the white man strode the world like a colussus and left a world in which white males are required to ditry their diapers and grovel. And they expected not only lifelong benefits, but worship for that.
And they got it.
I have listened to those clowns slapping themselves on the back for sixty years. But as they die out the sound of the paid-for slapping gets fainter, and I long for blessed silence there, too.
#1 by Anonymous on 12/07/2005 - 4:28 pm
About four hundred years ago, an anonymous theologian published an article arguing that mankind will receive another divine revelation sometime before the year 3120. He reasoned that by that time, the Resurrection of Christ itself will have taken place so long ago that mankind will have completely forgotten about it, thus necessitating a new miracle.
#2 by Derek on 12/07/2005 - 6:11 pm
Wow. I am a young person so I have only had to hear 20 years of it. My grandfather fought in Okinawa and got two purple hearts. I don’t think that he ever would have wanted to go if he had known what the consequences were.
Do you have as much disdain for WWI? It was always my thought that WWI caused WWII.
JFK was another one I had to hear about. The old “Ask not what your country can do for you” crap got real old growing up. I thought that we weren’t supposed to have an allegiance to our government – they were to have one to us. Thank God JFK JR. was a real screw-up politically or else my generation would have had another guy’s ego to burden us for the rest of our lives.