Joe
I read the piece with interest this morning, after finding my first
reference to it in a reply to a note I haven't found yet. It was an
interesting piece, but I think you've caught the aspect that bothered
me too. Her concern for those she teaches is fine, but,yes, her seeming
lack of concern that her charges are going off to fight an immoral &
illegal war in a country where the country they serve has destroyed
both hundreds of thousands of its people and much f=of its
infrastructure as well as created millions of refugees, for a set of
lies ddid bother me.
Thanks for pointing that out so clearly....
Doug
On 30-Sep-07, at 5:42 PM, Joseph Duemer wrote:
> Here is my comment on the article, from my
> weblog<http://www.sharpsand.net/>
> :
>
> That is what Elizabeth D. Samet appears to have written in her
> forthcoming
> book, excerpted
> here<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/magazine/30WestPoint-t.html?
> ex=1348804800&en=1295af93deef8a15&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss>i
> n
> the
> *NY Times Magazine*. I find her her eerie coolness about the Iraq War
> deeply
> unsettling. I suppose it is a good thing that the young officers she
> describes carry Wallace Stevens or Andrew Marvell into the gibbering
> moral
> idiocy of Baghdad with them. A tolerance for ambiguity of the sort one
> learns from poetry might also serve as a kind of restraint against the
> military culture of certitude, I suppose. Samet's accounts are full of
> budding *noblesse oblige*, but all the Stevens & Marvell in the world
> doesn't change the truth, as Tim O'Brien (an infantryman) put it in
> "How to
> Tell a True War Story" — "Send young men to war and they come home
> talking
> dirty."
>
>
>
> --
> Joseph Duemer
> Professor of Humanities
> Clarkson University
> [sharpsand.net]
>
>
Douglas Barbour
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