tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post163333227826652749..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: The Good Romans: « C'était comme au bowling » "C'était une soirée cool..." (Stevie Smith: Tenuous and Precarious) Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-61092043451244177502016-07-15T22:49:42.935-07:002016-07-15T22:49:42.935-07:00Thanks, fellows. Bastille day will never be the sa...Thanks, fellows. Bastille day will never be the same. Ou sont les neiges. Demonstrations of bellicosity among the Gauls always have that same element of empty theatricality one gets from the bombastic rhetoric, the pronunciation snobbism, in fact everything else we are supposed to believe has to do with their Invention of Culture (in the form of the croissant was it then?), and their Valour and Courage as a people, exhibited wonderfully in the heroic scuttling of the fleet at Toulon. When the Turtle goes to his Vocabulary of Outrage, reaches in deep and pulls out one of those beautiful Gallic abstract concepts, like "Monstrosity!", you've got to know nothing ever changes. <br /><br />Fifty years ago now I spent two months (July / August '66) in the high country above Nice, in a stone cottage perched on a hillside directly across a steep gorge from another ridge where there were cottages occupied by Tunisian migrant workers. By night the mistral wafted their radio music across the gorge.<br /><br />Last night both Drumpf and Hildebeest were beating the drum for a Declaration of War in the Morning, against... well, whoever.<br /><br />Today it turned out there wasn't even a Plausible Whoever, as the perp was a whack Tunisian with no radical political affiliation and a rap sheet that ran to one traffic stop for road rage, period. He'd been away from Tunisia for four years. There had been that beach blast targeting tourists some years back, no doubt he knew about that. But then, so did the whole world, if it was paying attention.<br /><br />When living in the region I learned to avoid that tourist stretch of holiday plage down front of the swank white hotels. Being run over by a speeding truck on that slice of expensive frontage can't have been any fun at all. But then I feel exactly the same way about being run over by a speeding jetta here on a murican thoroughfare, and so far nobody has stepped up to declare war over that. <br /><br />Haven, thanks for your good thoughts. Nobody forgets anything. It’s never over.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-72755034221067213932016-07-15T12:27:29.195-07:002016-07-15T12:27:29.195-07:00Tom, Those links to Vietnam are, as we used to say...Tom, Those links to Vietnam are, as we used to say, right on. The painful fact is that there’s no statute of limitations on the blowback of anybody’s empire. Atrocities of another century lead to atrocities today. Nobody forgets anything. It’s never over. The casual terror of colonial armies becomes late or soon the cause of some individual’s bloody act of revenge—Apocalypse Whenever. This isn’t the end of the world; it just feels like it.Hazenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13417573435195561519noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-17496833482718496532016-07-15T08:49:20.024-07:002016-07-15T08:49:20.024-07:00Great post Tom, from Maori warriors to tricolor of...Great post Tom, from Maori warriors to tricolor of jet trails above L'Arc de Triomphe to last night's carnage in Nice . . . Bastille Day will never be the same,STEPHEN RATCLIFFEhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12339481653546188412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-33880251189524850312016-07-15T03:28:12.249-07:002016-07-15T03:28:12.249-07:00Who Killed Brown Owl?
On The Promenade of the Eng...<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9Tt9enGH1E" rel="nofollow">Who Killed Brown Owl?</a><br /><br /><a href="https://twitter.com/NewsThisSecond/status/753708818119397377?s=09" rel="nofollow">On The Promenade of the English</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVor2Xm8qg0" rel="nofollow">"How, one is left to ask in horror, can one civilization inflict such pain upon another, in the name of an ideology, so routinely as to make such acts of mass violence seem almost commonplace?"</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6gcz4hdLA8" rel="nofollow">The Ride of the Valkyries</a>TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.com