Conscientious Objection

If brave Olaf "whose warmest heart recoiled at war" were alive today, would he tell the President With His Head Up His Ass what e.e. cummings once had him tell a West Point colonel? "I will not kiss your fucking flag."

It would be unfeeling at the least, given the stunning 5-column photo on the front page of this morning's New York Times and the accompanying story of a young soldier killed, of others wounded, on a foot patrol in Iraq.

Besides, the absence of a military draft and the use of an all-volunteer force for making war tend to neutralize the very idea of Olaf the C.O. If you're a conscientious objector, what are you doing in the military in the first place? (Pace Pablo Paredes, the sailor who refused to deploy to Iraq, filed a C.O. application and -- surprise! -- avoided prison time.)

Still, Olaf certainly would not say "DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI," the famous words of the Roman poet Horace that are etched above the west entrance of the amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery. (Translation: "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.")

Olaf didn't believe in patriotic gore. And when saying so got him beaten up and reamed with a hot bayonet, he made it even plainer, "There is some shit I will not eat."

Would that all of us were as brave as Olaf.

May 23, 2007 11:15 AM |

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Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by Straight Up | published on May 23, 2007 11:15 AM.

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