Every year on Veteran’s Day, there’s a flyover of WWII-era planes at Forest Lawn. \u00a0 Since they’re hangared at the Van Nuys Airport, they always fly over our house on the way to and from the cemetery. \u00a0 I always go out and watch them fly over, when I can.<\/p>\n
This year there weren’t as many planes as there were last year. \u00a0 I wonder if that’s because they are being flown by WWII era vets, or if it’s just that the planes themselves are coming to the end of their useful life?<\/p>\n
I don’t think there is a person alive today whose youth wasn’t shaped by a war of some kind. \u00a0 My maternal great-grandfather was in the Boer War and was killed in WWI, commanding a cavalry charge against Germans with tanks. \u00a0 My grandmother was only 15 when he died. \u00a0 My paternal grandfather never had to serve in the military, but he lived through WWI and WWII and Korea and Vietmam and all the other conflicts that raged between 1888 and 1970. \u00a0 My dad was in the Army in WWII and my mom and her mother got out of France one step ahead of Hitler.<\/p>\n
F’zer and I, of course, came of age during the Vietnam war and we are apparently two of a very small number of our generation who remember that the people who are tub-thumping for war in Iraq these days are the same people who helped make a royal mess of Vietnam (Henry Kissinger, Dante reserved a circle just for you, and may you rot there forever once you’re gone).<\/p>\n
Bush’s Folly aka Gulf War One happened when my kids were in grade school. \u00a0 And now Bush’s Folly II is in progress and their cousin narrowly escaped being slaughtered over there in Shrub’s cement-headed attempt to one-up his daddy.<\/p>\n
The people who tub-thumped for Bush Folly One kept bringing up the specter of Hitler and appeasement to justify trying to pound Saddam. \u00a0 They got it wrong, of course, because they knew nothing of history. \u00a0 Not even recent<\/em> history, at the time the fighting started. \u00a0 Saddam’s so-called “elite” army had had its butts whupped for seven years by the Ayatollah’s ragtag band of schoolboys and grandfathers, but they were presented to us as some kind of fearsome menace and nobody remembered anything to correct that bilgewater propaganda<\/em> (and shame on this nation for that, shame). \u00a0 The correct comparison was not to Hitler’s armies, but to the army of Nicholas II, biggest in the world–which meant absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things.<\/p>\n November 11 was originally called Armistice Day, to commemorate the day when the “war to end all wars” ended and the armies laid down their arms. \u00a0 I wish we could focus on that, and really support our troops by not sending them off to die for a bunch of old men’s egos and a perennial frat boy’s perennial desperate futile need to prove he’s got a pair.<\/p>\n In Flanders fields the poppies blow We are the Dead. \u00a0 Short days ago Take up our quarrel with the foe: Every year on Veteran’s Day, there’s a flyover of WWII-era planes at Forest Lawn. \u00a0 Since they’re hangared at the Van Nuys Airport, they always fly over our house on the way to and from the cemetery. \u00a0 I always … Continue reading In Flanders Fields<\/h3>\n
\nBetween the crosses, row on row
\nThat mark our place; and in the sky
\nThe larks, still bravely singing, fly
\nScarce heard amid the guns below.<\/p>\n
\nWe lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
\nLoved and were loved, and now we lie
\nIn Flanders fields.<\/p>\n
\nTo you from failing hands we throw
\nThe torch; be yours to hold it high.
\nIf ye break faith with us who die
\nWe shall not sleep, though poppies grow
\nIn Flanders fields.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"