I'm After A Snake And Please God

Someday, I Have No Doubt, The Dead From Today's Wars Will Be Seen With A Similar Sense Of Sorrow At Needless Loss And Folly As Those Millions Of Men Who Lie In The Cemeteries Of France And Belgium - And Tens Of Millions Of Americans Will Feel A Similar Revulsion For The Politicians And Generals Who Were So Spendthrift With Others' Lives.

Many Of The Principle Weapons That The Nazis Used During World War Ii Had Their First Trial In Combat In Spain - The Messerschmitt 109 Fighter Plane For Example, The Stuka Dive Bomber, The 88 Millimeter Artillery Piece, Which Could Be Used Both For Antiaircraft Purposes And Also Shelling On The Ground. And American Soldiers Were The Victims Of These Things In Spain, American Volunteers. So This War Was Really A Testing Ground For Hitler. And He Learned A Great Deal From It About The Strengths And Weaknesses Of These Different Weapons.

One Of My Favourite Contemporary Fiction Writers Is A Texan, Ben Fountain. His Extraordinary Novel, Billy Lynn's Long Half-time Walk, All Takes Place Within The Half-time Show At A Dallas Cowboys Football Game. No One Has Better Summed Up The American Appetite For Spectacle, The Link Between Sports And Politics, And The Absolute Madness Of George W. Bush's Iraq War.

And Yet The World We Live In-its Divisions And Conflicts, Its Widening Gap Between Rich And Poor, Its Seemingly Inexplicable Outbursts Of Violence-is Shaped Far Less By What We Celebrate And Mythologize Than By The Painful Events We Try To Forget. Leopold's Congo Is But One Of Those Silences Of History.

Things Have Gotten Openly More Extreme In The Last Few Years. I Was Lecturing In Hungary, Whose Prime Minister, Victor Orban, Is An Example Of This Trend. All Over Budapest, Statues Have Been Replaced, Museum Exhibits Have Been Redone, To Turn Ethnic Hungarians, Not Jews, Into The Prime Victims Of The Germans During World War Ii. Five Years Ago, Who Would Have Thought This Possible?