As I have been tending to my ailing father, I've avoided the news, because there is only so much misery I can take in a 24 hour period. However, I've been reading Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy; I've liberated Africa and I'm about to liberate Rome.
Atkinson writes with a sort of Homeric flair, and he pulls it off. But he does his best work at describing the misery, fear and meat-grinding carnage infantrymen faced in the Mediterranean Theater. Reading his description of Churchill's dogged determination to attack Italy and then Anzio is to lower one's estimation of the man. Churchill was as eager to expend young men's blood at Anzio as he was at Gallipoli in World War I. This cavalier attitude toward slaughter weighed on the generals and lower ranking officers whose orders sent men to their death.
I was thinking about that as I considered the emotionally retard meatpuppet we have as our current president. On the one hand, you have the sort of rank incompetence up and down the administration that would be shocking if it weren't so commonplace. Failure to book a hotel for the G-20. Mistaking the name of China. Basic literacy.
Churchill and Roosevelt were not gods. They made horrible mistakes and miscalculations. But they were men steeped in history and knowledgeable about the world they lived in. And they still blundered into killing fields and made decisions that slaughtered millions.
What chance do we have in North Korea? Sure, militarily, we will win the war eventually. But the dead will pile themselves upon themselves, all because we elected an incurious manchild to be our king and savior, because the competent lady had poor email standards.
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