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Nov. 11th, 2019 08:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1.) The Lie of Little Women
Early in the recent BBC/PBS miniseries Little Women, the first significant adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel in 24 years, Laurie (played by Jonah Hauer-King) tells Jo (Maya Hawke)—the first March sister he falls in love with—how much he enjoys watching her family from his nearby window. “It always looks so idyllic, when I look down and see you through the parlor window in the evenings,” he says. “It’s like the window is a frame and you’re all part of a perfect picture.”
“You must cherish your illusions if they make you happy,” Jo replies.
The scene nods to an awkward truth: Little Women is the window tableau and we, its readers, are Laurie, peering in and savoring its sham perfection, or at any rate its virtuous uplift. During the 150 years since the novel’s publication, fans have worshipped Alcott’s story of the four March sisters and their indomitable mother, Marmee, who navigate genteel poverty with valiant acceptance and who strive—always—to be better. Detractors (notably fewer in number) have generally fastened on some version of that saga of gritty goodness too, irritated rather than awed.
But Alcott herself took a more skeptical view of her enterprise. She was reluctant to try her hand at a book for girls, a kind of writing she described later in life as “moral pap for the young.” Working on it meant exploring the minds and desires of youthful females, a dismal prospect. (“Never liked girls or knew many,” she wrote in her diary, “except my sisters.”) While writing Little Women, Alcott gave the fictional Marches the same nickname she used for her own tribe: “the Pathetic Family.” By the final chapter of Jo’s Boys, the second of two novels that followed Little Women, Alcott didn’t try to hide her fatigue with her characters, and with her readers’ insatiable curiosity about them. In a blunt authorial intrusion, she declared that she was tempted to conclude with an earthquake that would engulf Jo’s school “and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no [archaeologist] could ever find a vestige of it.”
The lie of Little Women is a multifaceted one. The book, a treasured American classic and peerless coming-of-age story for girls, is loosely inspired by Alcott’s own biography. Like Jo, she was the second of four sisters who grew up in Massachusetts under the watchful eye of an intelligent and forceful mother. Unlike Jo’s early years—in which her father is absent because, after losing the family fortune, he is serving as a chaplain in the Civil War—Alcott’s childhood was blighted by the failure of her religious-fanatic father, Bronson Alcott, to provide for his family. Stark deprivation, rather than the patchy poverty of the book, was a daily reality.
The four sisters, frequently cared for by friends and relatives, were itinerant and often obliged to live apart. Alcott’s sister Lizzie contracted scarlet fever while visiting a poor immigrant family nearby, much as Beth does in the novel. But Lizzie’s death at 22, unlike Beth’s around the same age, followed a protracted, painful decline that some modern biographers attribute to anxiety or anorexia. And while Jo was mandated by convention (and Alcott’s publisher) to pick marriage and children over artistic greatness, Alcott chose the opposite, relishing her newfound wealth and her success as a “literary spinster.”
For the first 80 or so years after Little Women was published, conflict scarcely arose over how to interpret it. Readers adored the book and its two sequels without probing for Alcott’s own feelings about them (curious though her fans were about her life). Not until 1950 did a comprehensive biography appear: Madeleine B. Stern dug into her subject’s fraught family history, and outed the grande dame of girls’ lit as the author (under a pen name) of sensationalist stories about murder and opium addiction. Then, from the 1970s onward, feminist critics began examining Little Women from a new perspective, alert to the inherent discord between text and subtext. As the literary scholar Judith Fetterley argued in her 1979 essay “ ‘Little Women’: Alcott’s Civil War,” the novel is about navigating adolescence to become a graceful little woman, but the story itself pushes back against that frame. The character who continually resists conforming to traditional expectations of demure femininity and domesticity (Jo) is the true heroine, and the character who unfailingly acquiesces (Beth) dies shortly after reaching adulthood.
The blossoming of feminist criticism finally gave Little Women the thoughtful, rigorous analysis it deserved. Exploring the internal tug-of-war between the novel’s progressive instincts and the era’s prevailing constraints revealed a book that was far from pap. And yet Little Women continues to be sidelined in the American canon. Its reputation as fictional fare for and about girls and women prevents it, even now, from achieving the status of, say, Huckleberry Finn. Many male readers feel, as G. K. Chesterton put it, like “an intruder in that club of girls.” At the same time, the domestic setting and sermonizing that irked Alcott herself can strike contemporary female readers as bland and restrictive: The book’s popularity shows signs of waning among a younger audience. But the fascination with Little Women endures among writers and filmmakers, as a current surge of adaptations attests. Inspired by the challenge of bridging the gap between Alcott’s life and Alcott’s writing, efforts to renew and expand its power help illuminate complexities in a novel whose literary stature is ripe for reevaluation.
***
The wealth of adaptations of Little Women over the past century is proof of its durability, and also its malleability. As Anne Boyd Rioux writes in Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, stage and screen versions of the novel have reflected the eras they were made in. Early ones offered morally and socially wholesome entertainment in the presumed spirit of the original text. During the Great Depression, when audiences were consoled by the idea of simpler times, theatrical performances of Little Women were popular across America. By 1949, when Mervyn LeRoy directed the fourth film adaptation, this one with an all-star cast (Janet Leigh as Meg, June Allyson as Jo, Margaret O’Brien as Beth, and Elizabeth Taylor as Amy), consumerism had become a patriotic duty. So the movie’s writers invented a new scene in which the March sisters go on a Christmas spending spree with money from Aunt March.
Rioux’s astute examination of the long life of Little Women in American culture is itself, fittingly enough, very much of its era: She draws particular attention to the problematic paternal shadow looming over Alcott’s enterprise. Rioux, a professor at the University of New Orleans, delves into Alcott’s background, emphasizing that the young Transcendentalist—who grew up in a circle that included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau—saw writing as a more practical and less lofty endeavor than her male peers did. As for Bronson Alcott, “the only occupations that did not compromise his principles were teaching and chopping wood,” Rioux writes of the radical education reformer, whom she characterizes as flaky at best and unstable at worst. His family, forbidden to eat animal products or wear anything but linen, often starved and froze in New England’s fierce winters. (At Fruitlands, a utopian community he co-founded in the 1840s, root vegetables were initially outlawed because they grew in the direction of hell.)
For Alcott, who shared her father’s creativity but lacked his zealotry, writing was both a path to realizing her literary ambitions and a means of feeding her family. After publishing a couple of stories in The Atlantic, she met with a colder reception from the magazine’s new editor, James T. Fields, who in 1862 gave her $40 to open a school instead—which she did, although it soon failed. She returned to writing sensational stories, which she described as “blood and thunder tales,” published in weeklies, some under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard, and featuring passionate, assertive female characters who scheme and adventure their way to prosperity. While she didn’t want her father or Emerson to know she was stepping into the literary gutter, she seems to have enjoyed the “lurid style,” and thought it suited her “natural ambition.” The money she earned was also crucial. “I can’t afford to starve on praise, when sensation stories are written in half the time and keep the family cozy,” she wrote in her journal.
2. Harriet Tubman's Final Escape Mission
For nearly a decade, Harriet avoided capture as she went back into the lion’s den to rescue friends and family. She never lost a fugitive to illness or capture, an accomplishment that reminded Harriet of her own strength and of God’s power. Now in her late thirties, Harriet’s body began to show the signs of ruthless wear and tear, making recovery from illness more and more difficult and prolonged. In addition to her rescue work, she had other stressors. With her new home, she carried a large financial responsibility that required her to tour across New England speaking out against slavery, work that was relentless and never secure.
With the federal crackdown following the raid on Harpers Ferry, many of Harriet’s friends and family members advised her to return to Canada and to move about New England and upstate New York only when necessary and with the greatest of caution. Headstrong, Harriet didn’t listen. There was one more dire mission to complete; she had to return to Maryland and try once again to rescue her sister Rachel and her two children, Angerine and Ben. With the exception of these three people, Harriet had pulled her entire immediate family that remained in Maryland away from slavery’s hold. The thought of her sister languishing on the farm without any family support must have been torturous, not only for Harriet but also for her parents and brothers. Harriet was compelled to make one last trip to Dorchester County to rescue the last of her family members.
Just as she had done in the past, Harriet began the work of collecting funds for what was certain to be a dangerous trip. Dangerous because although eleven years had passed since she first escaped from Maryland, there was still a bounty on her head ranging upward of $12,000. Also, it was increasingly difficult for Harriet to keep a low profile; she was now a famous woman among antislavery circles, and her notoriety was a liability. On occasion, she would use pseudonyms, and the most famous abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, referred to her simply as a “colored woman of the name Moses.” But even these precautions were not fail-safe. Nonetheless, throughout the summer of 1860, she continued with speaking engagements across New England, collaborating with antislavery societies and abolitionists.
Despite her intense efforts, by the end of the summer, Harriet realized that she was still too short on cash to fund this last rescue and reached out to her friend and famed abolitionist Wendell Phillips. She asked him to make good on an earlier promise to assist her and to send money to a mutual friend in Philadelphia who would make certain it would find its way to Harriet. We don’t know if she ever received the money.
With or without the necessary funding, she would press forward. Political events in the country left her no choice. As autumn of 1860 approached, the axis of the nation appeared to shift during a messy presidential election season and the South’s mounting and heated response to Lincoln’s candidacy.
Harriet quietly slipped into Dorchester County, Maryland, to rescue her loved ones. She knew this might be the last opportunity to free her remaining family members from bondage before the nation split in two. With a deep sense of urgency, Harriet stuck to the byways and the roads that she knew by heart and arrived safely on the Eastern Shore. When she arrived, her heart almost shattered. Shortly before Harriet reached the Eastern Shore, Rachel died, leaving her children separated on different farms without a parent. The details regarding Rachel’s death are unknown, but the fact that the logistics didn’t come together in time to save her sister must have been a wound Harriet lived with for the rest of her days. Too late to help Rachel, she now turned her attention to Angerine and Ben and to devising a rescue plan for the children.
Her last escape mission left Harriet exhausted and in dire need of recuperation.
When the time came, Harriet went to an agreed upon location to meet the children. She waited and waited for them, and even spent the night in the woods, constantly surveying her surroundings, praying to see the shadows of the two remaining family members. A November snowstorm blanketed the Eastern Shore of Maryland that night, leaving Harriet alone and in the cold. She took shelter behind a tree, but still the blinding snow and raging wind pummeled her small frame. Warrior that she was, she ignored the bone-chilling temperatures and the accumulating snow. But when morning came, Angerine and Ben were nowhere in sight.
Harriet knew that slave-patrollers would soon resume their work. She had to leave the children behind. This, one of her few failures, could be attributed to lack of funds. Whether she was short of enough money to convince an accomplice to assist her, or to pay a watchful overseer to momentarily turn his back, or reasons we cannot fathom, the lack of money proved to be an insurmountable obstacle. True to form, she made certain that her trip was not in vain by whisking away a small group of runaways, including the Ennals family. They reached Delaware by the first of December, and while it took a bit more time than usual, they finally arrived in Canada by the end of the month. The runaways would celebrate New Year’s Day of 1861 as free people but in Harriet’s eyes, the mission was a failure.
Her last escape mission left Harriet exhausted and in dire need of recuperation. She traveled back to upstate New York to rest and tend to her frost-bitten feet, but her stay was brief as slave-catchers were spotted in and around the Auburn area. Their presence was a reminder of the intense sectarian crisis that had spun out of control and fractured the nation. While Harriet was busy on her last trip to Maryland, Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States, an event that prompted a furious response from Southern states. The Kentucky-born lawyer won the election of 1860 with only 40 percent of the popular vote, sending Southern Democrats into a tailspin. Even though the Supreme Court had ruled in their favor by protecting slavery, Southern states saw Lincoln’s victory as a threat to their existence and immediately began to discuss plans for secession.
3. Trigger - the life and times of Willie Nelsen's guitar
4. In the elevator on the way to work..
Co-worker: Happy Veterans Day!
ME: Uh, Happy isn't exactly the word I'd use.
Russian Co-worker (laughs).
Co-worker: Have a good Veterans Day?
Yes, we get Columbus Day off, Election Day off, but alas, not Veterans Day. The Irish/Italian Union fell down on the job -- just saying.
Being a Veteran means you enlisted and served in the military and most likely a War, it was started after WWI, on the final day of WWI, November 11.
Flying Veterans to Memorials on Veterans Day
The Story of 75th Division - my Great Uncle's Division and Where He Served During WWII
And...the story he told me years later...among others.. Combating Evil: WWII Stories and Folk Tales From Veterans Long Dead
Early in the recent BBC/PBS miniseries Little Women, the first significant adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel in 24 years, Laurie (played by Jonah Hauer-King) tells Jo (Maya Hawke)—the first March sister he falls in love with—how much he enjoys watching her family from his nearby window. “It always looks so idyllic, when I look down and see you through the parlor window in the evenings,” he says. “It’s like the window is a frame and you’re all part of a perfect picture.”
“You must cherish your illusions if they make you happy,” Jo replies.
The scene nods to an awkward truth: Little Women is the window tableau and we, its readers, are Laurie, peering in and savoring its sham perfection, or at any rate its virtuous uplift. During the 150 years since the novel’s publication, fans have worshipped Alcott’s story of the four March sisters and their indomitable mother, Marmee, who navigate genteel poverty with valiant acceptance and who strive—always—to be better. Detractors (notably fewer in number) have generally fastened on some version of that saga of gritty goodness too, irritated rather than awed.
But Alcott herself took a more skeptical view of her enterprise. She was reluctant to try her hand at a book for girls, a kind of writing she described later in life as “moral pap for the young.” Working on it meant exploring the minds and desires of youthful females, a dismal prospect. (“Never liked girls or knew many,” she wrote in her diary, “except my sisters.”) While writing Little Women, Alcott gave the fictional Marches the same nickname she used for her own tribe: “the Pathetic Family.” By the final chapter of Jo’s Boys, the second of two novels that followed Little Women, Alcott didn’t try to hide her fatigue with her characters, and with her readers’ insatiable curiosity about them. In a blunt authorial intrusion, she declared that she was tempted to conclude with an earthquake that would engulf Jo’s school “and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no [archaeologist] could ever find a vestige of it.”
The lie of Little Women is a multifaceted one. The book, a treasured American classic and peerless coming-of-age story for girls, is loosely inspired by Alcott’s own biography. Like Jo, she was the second of four sisters who grew up in Massachusetts under the watchful eye of an intelligent and forceful mother. Unlike Jo’s early years—in which her father is absent because, after losing the family fortune, he is serving as a chaplain in the Civil War—Alcott’s childhood was blighted by the failure of her religious-fanatic father, Bronson Alcott, to provide for his family. Stark deprivation, rather than the patchy poverty of the book, was a daily reality.
The four sisters, frequently cared for by friends and relatives, were itinerant and often obliged to live apart. Alcott’s sister Lizzie contracted scarlet fever while visiting a poor immigrant family nearby, much as Beth does in the novel. But Lizzie’s death at 22, unlike Beth’s around the same age, followed a protracted, painful decline that some modern biographers attribute to anxiety or anorexia. And while Jo was mandated by convention (and Alcott’s publisher) to pick marriage and children over artistic greatness, Alcott chose the opposite, relishing her newfound wealth and her success as a “literary spinster.”
For the first 80 or so years after Little Women was published, conflict scarcely arose over how to interpret it. Readers adored the book and its two sequels without probing for Alcott’s own feelings about them (curious though her fans were about her life). Not until 1950 did a comprehensive biography appear: Madeleine B. Stern dug into her subject’s fraught family history, and outed the grande dame of girls’ lit as the author (under a pen name) of sensationalist stories about murder and opium addiction. Then, from the 1970s onward, feminist critics began examining Little Women from a new perspective, alert to the inherent discord between text and subtext. As the literary scholar Judith Fetterley argued in her 1979 essay “ ‘Little Women’: Alcott’s Civil War,” the novel is about navigating adolescence to become a graceful little woman, but the story itself pushes back against that frame. The character who continually resists conforming to traditional expectations of demure femininity and domesticity (Jo) is the true heroine, and the character who unfailingly acquiesces (Beth) dies shortly after reaching adulthood.
The blossoming of feminist criticism finally gave Little Women the thoughtful, rigorous analysis it deserved. Exploring the internal tug-of-war between the novel’s progressive instincts and the era’s prevailing constraints revealed a book that was far from pap. And yet Little Women continues to be sidelined in the American canon. Its reputation as fictional fare for and about girls and women prevents it, even now, from achieving the status of, say, Huckleberry Finn. Many male readers feel, as G. K. Chesterton put it, like “an intruder in that club of girls.” At the same time, the domestic setting and sermonizing that irked Alcott herself can strike contemporary female readers as bland and restrictive: The book’s popularity shows signs of waning among a younger audience. But the fascination with Little Women endures among writers and filmmakers, as a current surge of adaptations attests. Inspired by the challenge of bridging the gap between Alcott’s life and Alcott’s writing, efforts to renew and expand its power help illuminate complexities in a novel whose literary stature is ripe for reevaluation.
***
The wealth of adaptations of Little Women over the past century is proof of its durability, and also its malleability. As Anne Boyd Rioux writes in Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, stage and screen versions of the novel have reflected the eras they were made in. Early ones offered morally and socially wholesome entertainment in the presumed spirit of the original text. During the Great Depression, when audiences were consoled by the idea of simpler times, theatrical performances of Little Women were popular across America. By 1949, when Mervyn LeRoy directed the fourth film adaptation, this one with an all-star cast (Janet Leigh as Meg, June Allyson as Jo, Margaret O’Brien as Beth, and Elizabeth Taylor as Amy), consumerism had become a patriotic duty. So the movie’s writers invented a new scene in which the March sisters go on a Christmas spending spree with money from Aunt March.
Rioux’s astute examination of the long life of Little Women in American culture is itself, fittingly enough, very much of its era: She draws particular attention to the problematic paternal shadow looming over Alcott’s enterprise. Rioux, a professor at the University of New Orleans, delves into Alcott’s background, emphasizing that the young Transcendentalist—who grew up in a circle that included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau—saw writing as a more practical and less lofty endeavor than her male peers did. As for Bronson Alcott, “the only occupations that did not compromise his principles were teaching and chopping wood,” Rioux writes of the radical education reformer, whom she characterizes as flaky at best and unstable at worst. His family, forbidden to eat animal products or wear anything but linen, often starved and froze in New England’s fierce winters. (At Fruitlands, a utopian community he co-founded in the 1840s, root vegetables were initially outlawed because they grew in the direction of hell.)
For Alcott, who shared her father’s creativity but lacked his zealotry, writing was both a path to realizing her literary ambitions and a means of feeding her family. After publishing a couple of stories in The Atlantic, she met with a colder reception from the magazine’s new editor, James T. Fields, who in 1862 gave her $40 to open a school instead—which she did, although it soon failed. She returned to writing sensational stories, which she described as “blood and thunder tales,” published in weeklies, some under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard, and featuring passionate, assertive female characters who scheme and adventure their way to prosperity. While she didn’t want her father or Emerson to know she was stepping into the literary gutter, she seems to have enjoyed the “lurid style,” and thought it suited her “natural ambition.” The money she earned was also crucial. “I can’t afford to starve on praise, when sensation stories are written in half the time and keep the family cozy,” she wrote in her journal.
2. Harriet Tubman's Final Escape Mission
For nearly a decade, Harriet avoided capture as she went back into the lion’s den to rescue friends and family. She never lost a fugitive to illness or capture, an accomplishment that reminded Harriet of her own strength and of God’s power. Now in her late thirties, Harriet’s body began to show the signs of ruthless wear and tear, making recovery from illness more and more difficult and prolonged. In addition to her rescue work, she had other stressors. With her new home, she carried a large financial responsibility that required her to tour across New England speaking out against slavery, work that was relentless and never secure.
With the federal crackdown following the raid on Harpers Ferry, many of Harriet’s friends and family members advised her to return to Canada and to move about New England and upstate New York only when necessary and with the greatest of caution. Headstrong, Harriet didn’t listen. There was one more dire mission to complete; she had to return to Maryland and try once again to rescue her sister Rachel and her two children, Angerine and Ben. With the exception of these three people, Harriet had pulled her entire immediate family that remained in Maryland away from slavery’s hold. The thought of her sister languishing on the farm without any family support must have been torturous, not only for Harriet but also for her parents and brothers. Harriet was compelled to make one last trip to Dorchester County to rescue the last of her family members.
Just as she had done in the past, Harriet began the work of collecting funds for what was certain to be a dangerous trip. Dangerous because although eleven years had passed since she first escaped from Maryland, there was still a bounty on her head ranging upward of $12,000. Also, it was increasingly difficult for Harriet to keep a low profile; she was now a famous woman among antislavery circles, and her notoriety was a liability. On occasion, she would use pseudonyms, and the most famous abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, referred to her simply as a “colored woman of the name Moses.” But even these precautions were not fail-safe. Nonetheless, throughout the summer of 1860, she continued with speaking engagements across New England, collaborating with antislavery societies and abolitionists.
Despite her intense efforts, by the end of the summer, Harriet realized that she was still too short on cash to fund this last rescue and reached out to her friend and famed abolitionist Wendell Phillips. She asked him to make good on an earlier promise to assist her and to send money to a mutual friend in Philadelphia who would make certain it would find its way to Harriet. We don’t know if she ever received the money.
With or without the necessary funding, she would press forward. Political events in the country left her no choice. As autumn of 1860 approached, the axis of the nation appeared to shift during a messy presidential election season and the South’s mounting and heated response to Lincoln’s candidacy.
Harriet quietly slipped into Dorchester County, Maryland, to rescue her loved ones. She knew this might be the last opportunity to free her remaining family members from bondage before the nation split in two. With a deep sense of urgency, Harriet stuck to the byways and the roads that she knew by heart and arrived safely on the Eastern Shore. When she arrived, her heart almost shattered. Shortly before Harriet reached the Eastern Shore, Rachel died, leaving her children separated on different farms without a parent. The details regarding Rachel’s death are unknown, but the fact that the logistics didn’t come together in time to save her sister must have been a wound Harriet lived with for the rest of her days. Too late to help Rachel, she now turned her attention to Angerine and Ben and to devising a rescue plan for the children.
Her last escape mission left Harriet exhausted and in dire need of recuperation.
When the time came, Harriet went to an agreed upon location to meet the children. She waited and waited for them, and even spent the night in the woods, constantly surveying her surroundings, praying to see the shadows of the two remaining family members. A November snowstorm blanketed the Eastern Shore of Maryland that night, leaving Harriet alone and in the cold. She took shelter behind a tree, but still the blinding snow and raging wind pummeled her small frame. Warrior that she was, she ignored the bone-chilling temperatures and the accumulating snow. But when morning came, Angerine and Ben were nowhere in sight.
Harriet knew that slave-patrollers would soon resume their work. She had to leave the children behind. This, one of her few failures, could be attributed to lack of funds. Whether she was short of enough money to convince an accomplice to assist her, or to pay a watchful overseer to momentarily turn his back, or reasons we cannot fathom, the lack of money proved to be an insurmountable obstacle. True to form, she made certain that her trip was not in vain by whisking away a small group of runaways, including the Ennals family. They reached Delaware by the first of December, and while it took a bit more time than usual, they finally arrived in Canada by the end of the month. The runaways would celebrate New Year’s Day of 1861 as free people but in Harriet’s eyes, the mission was a failure.
Her last escape mission left Harriet exhausted and in dire need of recuperation. She traveled back to upstate New York to rest and tend to her frost-bitten feet, but her stay was brief as slave-catchers were spotted in and around the Auburn area. Their presence was a reminder of the intense sectarian crisis that had spun out of control and fractured the nation. While Harriet was busy on her last trip to Maryland, Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States, an event that prompted a furious response from Southern states. The Kentucky-born lawyer won the election of 1860 with only 40 percent of the popular vote, sending Southern Democrats into a tailspin. Even though the Supreme Court had ruled in their favor by protecting slavery, Southern states saw Lincoln’s victory as a threat to their existence and immediately began to discuss plans for secession.
3. Trigger - the life and times of Willie Nelsen's guitar
4. In the elevator on the way to work..
Co-worker: Happy Veterans Day!
ME: Uh, Happy isn't exactly the word I'd use.
Russian Co-worker (laughs).
Co-worker: Have a good Veterans Day?
Yes, we get Columbus Day off, Election Day off, but alas, not Veterans Day. The Irish/Italian Union fell down on the job -- just saying.
Being a Veteran means you enlisted and served in the military and most likely a War, it was started after WWI, on the final day of WWI, November 11.
Flying Veterans to Memorials on Veterans Day
The Story of 75th Division - my Great Uncle's Division and Where He Served During WWII
And...the story he told me years later...among others.. Combating Evil: WWII Stories and Folk Tales From Veterans Long Dead
no subject
Date: 2019-11-12 03:11 am (UTC)One of my favorite teachers, James Sunwall, served in the Pacific. He's still alive, and 96. (I'm going to visit him on Saturday.)
Many of my friends served in Vietnam, and I know a lot of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Veterans Day has a lot of meaning to me.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-12 03:18 am (UTC)My Uncle was in Vietnam, he got shot in 'Nam (in the ass in a helicopter) - he's 82.
Both my great uncle's served in WWII. One was an ambulance driver and among the first to enter Auswitchz, he was never the same after it. Both are long dead now. The one who entered Auswitch died in his 40s, I think. And the other died in his 70s.
I've know veterans of the wars, and work with many here and there.
It's a painful holiday though -- because War damages everyone and everything it touches.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-12 03:22 am (UTC)Though I am amused by your uncle getting shot in the ass. One of my friends flew a helicopter in Vietnam. He wrote a book about it - CHICKENHAWK.
No one anywhere near war comes away the same.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-12 03:27 am (UTC)He was military intelligence. We think he was a spy during the cold War, because he was stationed in Berlin as a soccer coach who took teams around Eastern Germany to compete in Soccer. Very odd. My Uncle wasn't exactly known as a soccer player.
I think I've heard of Chickenhawk, it sounds familiar. I've read a few War books here and there. The craziest was Slaughterhouse Five by Vonnegurt, but also the most wrenching.
The Japanese did a lot of anti-war movies after WWII. Almost all of their sci-fi anime is anti-war and anti-nuclear weapons.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-12 03:32 am (UTC)CHICKENHAWK is a good book. It's nonfiction. SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE is amazing. I was really fortunate to hear Vonnegut speak once. Such an amazing writer.