Fight the Good Fight

Pearl Harbor must seem like yesterday to those who lived through it. The Japanese precision surprise military attack will always excite people's imagination. By contrast, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Tokyo, Hamburg, or the 9/11/2001 attacks are too horrible to absorb or comprehend. When civilians are tageted en masse from the air, a line has been crossed. Or has it? The Japanese confined their December 7 Pearl Harbor attacks to the naval forces; of 2,403 Americans killed, 63 were civilians, and most of them, from what I've read, were accidentally killed by American counter-fire against Japanese warplanes. All the other named air attacks intentionally sought to kill men, women and children outright. And they succeeded. Way to go, human race! We can do better -- or can we?

December 7 is also Tom Waits' birthday (1949). He rivals Marianne Faithfull in the gravelly voice department. A crafty English instructor in Chapel Hill played an early Tom Waits record in the one composition class I ever took at UNC. "Now that's poetry, man," he said. I liked it. We had to write a response after a few songs. He also made us look up the roots of words in the massive Oxford English Dictionary (OED), another clever "activity" designed to torment static thinking and apathy. Fomenting cognitive dissonance, as it were. Now I teach composition and history using the same kinds of tactics. Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards, Tom's new 3-CD anthology, was released in November 2006.

Other birthdays today include:

Willa Cather (1873-1947): "There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before."

Eli Wallach (b. 1915): "One bastard goes in and another bastard comes out." (as Tuco)

Noam Chomsky (b.1928): "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged."

Ellen Burstyn (b. Detroit, 1932, as Edna Rae Gillooly): "Just remember, beautiful, everything gets old if you do it often enough. So if you wanna find out about monotony real quick, marry Duane." (as Lois Farrow)

Today's Rune: Separation (Reversed).

Hasta La Vista!