Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

Given this week’s assassination of the person who’s actions resulted in the invasion and occupation of two Middle Eastern countries, it’s probably a good idea to reflect on war. It’s of course a coincidence that the opportunity presented itself today, in the form of this story from the Awl, “The Last Two Veterans Of WWI.” It’s a good one. You should read it and come back.

It’s a story about the only living veterans of what was then called the Great War (or even more dramatically, the war to end war), so named, as you remember from social studies, because it was of a scale unseen in human history. Fleischer only needs to supply two numbers to indicate the extent of the damage: “Nearly 10,000,000 men were killed in the conflict, 65 million participated.” He goes on to quote some firsthand accounts of what the conduct of the war, in the literal trenches, was like. Which you should read, if you haven’t already. (It’s important, considering World War I is so often treated as a quick bridge between the Progressive Era and the Roaring Twenties in our history lessons. I learned a lot!)

I don’t have a ton to add, except to say that I think tracing the history of the last survivors of our wars is a pretty clever and effective way of telling the broader story of our wars. When we think of wars, we think of winners and losers, and we think of statistics, and we think of the big names. Washington and Lincoln and Grant and Lee and Roosevelt and Wilson and the other Roosevelt and Eisenhower and Patton and MacArthur and so on and so forth. We’re good at recognizing how the last war leads to the next one, but we’re not so good at thinking about how the last war lives on, in the lives of the people that survived it, and in the lives of the people that fought it.

That’s a shame, because the last man standing is never the general or the president or the prime minister. The last man standing is the grunt, the nurse, the ambulance driver. In short, the regular person who got pulled into war’s vortex (and usually a dumb kid who lied to get into the service). It’s important to keep that in mind, because when you get right down to it, war is about regular people: advancing their interests, protecting their ideals, defending them. Regular people fight the wars, and regular people bear the brunt of their carnage.

The sad and often unappreciated truth is that a lot of people had to die to get us to where we are. Some reflection isn’t a lot to ask. Or, as Fleischer writes:

[W]hen those of my generation place their centennial flag in the ground in 2084, 2085, 2086, and 2087 . . . it would be nice to bow out amongst our grandchildren knowing we stood tall enough to catch the lessons of the past—those things that threatened to entropy—and hand off a better past, that we made Walt Whitman’s job global, that every atom in me really did end up belonging to you, that we figured out how to do niceness and happiness in a smart, new, warm and lively way . . . [W]e don’t have to bray on about the responsibility of memory either (enough people have) but we just can’t walk underneath a sky as blue as this, as nice as this, and as sweet as this without nodding towards time’s cavernous past, too.

If you read only one story about mince pie today, make it this one. Seriously! Here’s a teaser:

Imagine, by way of analogy, that Americans abruptly and collectively lost their taste for cheeseburgers. Imagine the cheeseburger demoted to the same rank as eggnog, ritually consumed only on, say, July 4th. Suppose furthermore that the vestigial cheeseburgers served on America’s birthday were prepared without meat. Now suppose that a condition of cultural amnesia set in such that we all forgot, within the space of a decade or so, that cheeseburgers had ever been considered the iconic centerpiece of our nation’s diet.

Now go read about mince!

Sorry, guys

Right off the bat, I’m going to admit that this post is not about monkeys. Hail to the Chimp is just my favorite fake Simpsons movie, and I needed a vaguely presidential-sounding title for this post.

My buddy Nick, the Official Philadelphia Correspondent for Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, is a teacher, and today expressed to me a concern that he didn’t have the knowledge of our nation’s presidents befitting a professional who could be asked a random executive-related question by an inquisitive young mind at any time. Thus was born the Presidential Challenge. Basically, we both agreed to grab a piece of paper, number it 1 to 44, and try to put all of the U.S presidents in order. No time limit, but no cheating! It was an eye-opening experience, to say the least.

Eh? Eh?

You can view my list to the right. I scored a 33 out of 44 presidents. That’s 75 percent! I think that’s pretty good, but I feel like a made a series of unforgivable errors along the way that unnecessarily hampered my progress. Here they are, in ascending order of egregiousness.

1) I forgot Benjamin Harrison. This isn’t terrible in itself, since all of those Reconstruction-era presidents are pretty forgettable. However, comma, I feel like as an American, it’s the least I can do to be able to name all of the presidents.

2) I forgot John Quincy Adams. I remembered Andrew Jackson, but not his mortal nemesis. And you’ll notice that I forgot the grandson of a president, and the son of a president. I probably couldn’t tell you one of either of those guys’ policies, but I should have remembered them as answers to trivia questions.

3) I forgot Grover Cleveland. Born in Caldwell! New Jersey’s president! The only president elected to non-consecutive terms! How could I not remember! I was seriously considering not even posting my list, because I didn’t want the whole wide Internet world to know that I forgot that Grover Cleveland even existed. But I’m bigger than that, precious reader. You deserve to know.

And because I love you, here’s that chimp I promised.