proteanme

Reposting my 2010 Veterans day entry. Also, thinking of my dad’s friends, are now my friends, and are who are vets too. Vietnam vets. I bet anything, Joe goes out to visit Dad’s grave today. That’s the kind of stand up thing he would do.

An excerpt from Chris Hedges’ War is the Force that Gives Us Meaning:

I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by myth makers -historians, war correspondents, filmmakers novelists and the state-all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death. Fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place on the planet are laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks just below the surface within all of us.