A final comment on the furor raised by the previous

I have been occupied with other activities for a few days now and am overwhelmed to see the amount of material in response to my last two cents. Just so that you don’t mount a lynch mob, let me give the context I’m working in in a commentary on, Lord knows, my personal experience and let’s see if you find it pertinent. I hope so. It would at least appear that we have all bestirred ourselves. I guess that is something anyway.

As for “windbag” being ad hominem argumentation, it didn’t even occur to me in that in philosophy we tend not to be as kind as you theologians evidently are (notwithstanding your fame for odium theologicum, which I have indeed noted in the exchanges here) and this was the “technical term” we used to use openly for an approach involving form but lacking perceived content or reality concern. Sorry. I did not directly attribute this to the individual involved but stated the definition as I know it and if the shoe fits... Again, I must admit that in philosophy we are not notably kind in grounding our sentiments or in stating the issues that define them.

Now a little aside that may put this into a more coherent context. Please bear with me and I apologize for the apparent non sequitur this seemingly involves and trust that you will soon see its relevance.

Last night my wife and I went to see Spielberg’s new film, “Saving Private Ryan”. Having seen “Schindler’s List” I was expecting a careful treatment of the war and the forces defining it but found myself faced with a grotesque parody. For the first time in my recollection, I walked out in the middle of a movie.

I have done quite a lot of study of WWII in connection with my larger study of human character and its evident foundation in tyranny in expressing what Christians call Original Sin and what we call the Karmic Backlog. My favorite students of war are Winston Churchill, who’s six volume The Second World War gives an excellent blow by blow based on original documents, and Hanson Baldwin, who’s well conceived boil-down of the essentials in Battles Lost and Won is eminently readable; however, I have also looked at the careful studies by Chester Wilmot, Arthur Bryant as well as Shirer and Toland’s examinations of the Third Reich and Hitler and the original ideas themselves through my reading of Mein Kampf some time ago.

There have also been some wonderful studies produced for TV mostly by the BBC. One is a careful documentary series analyzing and breaking down the various war theaters into their constituent parts with the most recent I have seen being the closing campaign in Berlin showing the furious struggle of the Russians and the Germans et alia wherein 360,000 Axis soldiers lost their lives defending a bunker-bound Fűhrer.

There have been other documentaries showing the true horror of the pain-extraction administrations of Stalin and Mao tse-tung and yet another going into the unbelievable terror of Pol Pot. This one was devastating in that it was presented in commentaries by women from the Royal Dance Academy who described their experience in that nightmare during which 90% of their number were tortured and executed. They provided a powerful and irreducible statement on the character of tyranny. As they say, “Our men are so cruel. It was not the Vietnamese or anyone else who killed us, but Cambodians killing Cambodians.”

As a result, when confronted with the depiction of gong-show incompetence and syrupy sentimentality that Spielberg presented for the Normandy Theatre, I was so distressed by the evident insult to the honor of the men and their commanders in one of the greatest events of coordination and organization and intelligence and professionalism in all of history that I was forced to walk out in a kind of formal protest. My wife is not a student of war (though she shares my concern with the character of humanity as partially expressed in careful readings of the newspaper every day, which I describe as her interest in gossip but she holds to be relevant to something or other) so she stayed inside and I had a quarterpounder while I waited.

With all due respect and hoping I get around to a more complete viewing of our dispute soon,