Going to War with Gary Cooper

“War monuments have never stirred me,” wrote author, historian and World War II Pacific combat veteran William Manchester in his memoir Goodbye, Darkness. “They are like the reconstructed buildings at Colonial Williamsburg, or elaborate reproductions of great paintings; no matter how deft the execution, they are essentially counterfeit.

“In addition, they are usually beautiful and in good taste, whereas combat is neither. Before the war I thought that Hemingway, by stripping battle narratives of their ripe prose, was describing the real thing. Afterward I realized that he had simply replaced traditional overstatement with romantic understatement.

“War is never understated. Combat as I saw it was exorbitant, outrageous, excruciating and above all tasteless, perhaps because the number of fighting men who had read Hemingway or Remarque was a fraction of those who had seen B movies about bloodshed. If a platoon leader had watched Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Errol Flynn, Victor McLaglen, John Wayne or Gary Cooper leap recklessly about, he was likely to follow his role model.

“In crises, most people are imitative. Soldiers received ‘Dear John’ letters copied from those quoted in the press. The minority who avoid Hollywood paradigms were, like me, people who watched fewer B movies than we had read books. That does not mean we were better soldiers and citizens. We certainly weren’t braver. I do think that our optics were clearer, however — that what we saw was closer to the truth because we weren’t looking through MGM or RKO prisms."

What's Wrong With Being a Libertarian

So what’s wrong with the political philosophy of libertarianism? This. 

“The philosopher Charles Taylor explains in his book, ‘The Ethics of Authenticity,’ that the search for self-actualization is a noble and important enterprise in life,” wrote David Masciotra. “Authenticity is important, and people should not compromise their principles or passions to placate expectations of society. Taylor complicates the picture by adding the elemental truth of individuality and community that personal freedom is empty and meaningless without connections to ‘horizons of significance.’ That beautiful phrase captures the essentiality of developing bonds of empathy and ties of solidarity with people outside of one’s own individual pursuits, and within a larger social context.”

“Competitive individualism, and the perversion of personal responsibility to mean social irresponsibility, is what allows for America to limp behind the rest of the developed world in providing for the poor and creating social services for the general population.

“It also leads to the elevation of crude utility as a measurement of anything’s purpose or value. Richard Hofstadter observed in his classic ‘Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,’ that many Americans are highly intelligent, but their intelligence is functional, not intellectual. They excel at their occupational tasks, but do not invest the intellect or imagination in abstract, critical or philosophical inquiries and ideas. If society is reducible to the individual, and the individual is reducible to consumer capacity, the duties of democracy and the pleasures of creativity stand little chance of competing with the call of the cash register.”

“Opposition to any conception of the public interest and common good, and the consistent rejection of any opportunity to organize communities in the interest of solidarity, is not only a vicious form of anti-politics, it is affirmation of America’s most dominant and harmful dogmas. In America, selfishness, like blue jeans or a black dress, never goes out of style. It is the style. The founding fathers, for all the hagiographic praise and worship they receive as ritual in America, had no significant interest in freedom beyond their own social station, regardless of the poetry they put on paper. Native Americans, women, black Americans and anyone who did not own property could not vote, but ‘taxation without representation’ was the rallying cry of the revolution. The founders reacted with righteous rage to an injustice to their class, but demonstrated no passion or prioritization of expanding their victory for liberty to anyone who did not look, think, or spend money like them.”

Fox, the Fear Factory

Fox News peddles constant propaganda, and as many factual lies as it can get away with.

William Manchester: Recalling the Red and Ragged

“War is literally unreasonable,” wrote the author, biographer and historian William Manchester in his 1979 memoir Goodbye, Darkness.

“Today’s youth cannot understand it; mine, I suppose, was the last generation to believe audacity in combat is a virtue. And I don’t know why we believed it. The mystery troubled me and baffled me, for some of my actions in the early 1940s make no sense to me now.

William Manchester

“On Okinawa, on Saturday, June 2, 1945, I suffered a superficial gunshot wound just above my right kneecap and was ship back to a field hospital. Mine was what we called a ‘million-dollar wound.’ Although I could hear the Long Toms in the distance, I was warm, dry and safe. My machismo was intact; I was simply hors de combat.

“The next day I heard that my regiment was going to land behind enemy lines on Oroku Penisula. I left my cot, jumped hospital, hitchhiked to the front and made the landing on Monday.

“Why had I returned to terror? To be sure, I had been gung ho at the outbreak of war. But I had quickly become a summer soldier and a sunshine patriot. I was indifferent toward rank, and I certainly sought no glory. ‘We owe God a death,” wrote Shakespeare. So we do, but I hoped God would extend my line of credit indefinitely. I was very young. I hadn’t published a short story, fathered a child or even slept with a girl. And because I am possessed, like most writers, by an intense curiosity, I wanted to stick around until, at the very least, I knew which side had won the war.

“So, craftily, I became the least intrepid of warriors, a survivor, not a hero, more terrier than lion. If there was a coward’s way, I took it. The word hero, to me, is redolent of Nelson Eddy in his Smokey Bear hat, with Jeanette McDonald shrieking in his ear, or of John Wayne being booed in a Hawaiian hospital by an audience of wounded Marines from Iwo Jima and Okinawa, men who had macho acts, in a phrase of the day, up their asses to their armpits.

“To be sure, I was not an inept fighter. I was lean and hard and tough and proud. I had tremendous reserves of stamina. I never bolted. I was a crack shot. I had a shifty, shambling run, and a lovely eye for defilade — for what the Duke of Wellington called ‘dead ground,’ that is, a spot shielded from flat-trajectory enemy fire by a natural obstacle, like a tree or a rock — coupled with a good sense of direction and a better sense of ground. To this day, I check emergency exits immediately after registering in a hotel, and in bars you will find me occupying a corner table, with my flanks secure.

“But that was the sum of my military skills. I had walked through the valley of the shadow of death and had been terribly frightened. Afterward, those few of us in my unit who had survived received a document from Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal citing us for ‘gallantry,’ ‘valor,’ ‘tenacity’ and ‘extraordinary heroism against enemy Japanese forces,’ but those shining words didn’t really apply to me. Indeed, at times it seemed that they applied to no one except the dead. I agreed with Hemingway: ‘Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the number of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.’

“For us, they had been Buna and Suribachi; the Kokoda Trail and Tarawa; the First Marine Division and the Eleventh Airborne; the Kumusi and the Asa Kawa; December 7, 1941, and V-J Day. I honored them while hating the whole red and ragged business of war.”

J'onn J'onzz: The Secret Superhero from Space

DC Comics’ Martian Manhunter initially operated in secret for four years in the 1950s. A back-up feature for Batman, he was a super-police detective, “John Jones,” rather than a public superhero. His powers were exhaustive: telepathy, telekinesis, intangibility, shape shifting, super strength, super speed, super vision, super hearing, super breath and more.

But in a story by artist Joe Certa and writer Jack Miller in Detective Comics 273 (Nov. 1959), while in combat with the Martian menace B’rett, the extraterrestrial “J’onn J’onzz” was exposed to the public when he got a dose of a Martian anti-crime formula that prevented Martians from using their other super powers while invisible. I always presumed DC did that simply so he could become a founding member of the JLA as a public figure. After the Great Superhero Extinction of the late 1940s, DC might have had a little trouble putting a team together otherwise — especially since somebody decided that Superman and Batman should be downplayed on the team.

With Gort and Gary Cooper

Patricia Neal with the robot Gort in 1951's science fiction classic 'The Day the Earth Stood Still.'

Without a contract at Warner Brothers, deep into her four-year, now-public affair with the very married Gary Cooper, and recovering from an abortion that would haunt her for three decades, Patricia Neal faced a challenging year in 1951.

“I was no longer the young darling of Hollywood,” she recalled in her autobiography, As I Am. “I was the unsympathetic side of a triangle. Gary sensed my increasing anxiety and grew more tender toward me. Actually, he was under as much tension as I was. I could see it in his face, feel it in his body. But of course, he did not talk about it. I did not know he was becoming very ill.”

Luckily, Neal secured a three-film deal at Twentieth Century Fox.

“My first film of the new Fox contract was going to be a science fiction thriller called ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still.’ I was not encouraged in the least, but I did not want to begin my career at Fox by going on suspension. The director was Robert Wise, who had been good to me in the past. He believed in the project and wanted me to do it. I am very glad I said yes. I worked with an old friend, Hugh Marlowe, and a new one, Michael Rennie.

“I do think it’s the best science fiction film ever made, although I admit I sometimes had a difficult time keeping a straight face. Michael would patiently watch me bite my lips to avoid giggling and ask, with true British reserve, ‘Is that the way you intend to play it?’

“The press was relentless now. They followed me everywhere, even onto the set, but I would not speak to them. The publicity department made up responses for me to their questions about Gary. So in print, I could be vague (‘We’re just good friends’) or cute (‘If I were in love with him, I’d be silly to advertise it. After all, he is a married man.’) or even haughty (‘I do wish people would find something else to talk about’).

“Dear Michael, who was as exasperated as I was, thought I should honor their questions with my favorite line from the film.

“ ‘Miss Neal, did you break up Gary Cooper’s marriage?’

“’Klaatu barada nikto!’” 

The Small Face of War

“They were not only photojournalists, they were essayists and artists,” recalled the Paris-based CBS newsman David Schoenbrun in his book On and Off the Air.

“Dr. Huxley asked Chim (David Seymour) to do a special study of the children of Europe who had lived through the war. He did a photo album that was shown at exhibits around the world, winning critical acclaim everywhere.”

“One was a shell-shocked little girl of about 10, who had lived through savage bombings. She was asked to do a drawing of the war. Chim’s picture showed her staring wildly at the camera, her hair tossled, while behind her on the blackboard was her ‘drawing,’ a tangled, mad scrawl of squiggles and clashing lines going every direction with no form or shape. It was a powerful portrait of the deeply disturbed mind.”

And that, my friends, illustrates why the term “war of choice” is more obscene than any expletive.