Christina’s Common Sense

If I may boast a bit, I made it myself :).

I promise, this is my LAST non-post. Finals are almost over. 

When a baseball team wins the World Series, it has two options for next season: win again or do worse. And everyone will be comparing its performance in the next season to its performance last season. Such is James Bradley’s predicament in Flyboys: A True Story of Courage. Having hit a grand slam with Flags of our Fathers (which is really awesome, and it’s a good movie too), he can either repeat that performance or not quite hit the mark. And all his readers are watching his every move wondering if he can do it.

He can’t. Flyboys is not all bad—in fact, most of it is quite good. Bradley’s way with words leaves nothing to be desired. It’s no small feat to keep your readers interested when narrating the ins and outs of a battle. If you didn’t know it was real, you could be tricked into thinking Flyboys was a novel.  And Bradley does repeat some elements of his epic Flags of our Fathers performance. He does a marvelous job of showing the stark differences between the Americans and the Japanese and why that made the Japanese such a vexing enemy. How do you fight an enemy who doesn’t want to get out alive?

Unfortunately, Bradley also takes some pretty serious pitfalls. The first few chapters of the book are various moral equivalency arguments that the Americans were just as guilty as the Japanese. He does point out legitimate things that our side did wrong, but the idea that they are equal to the Japanese’s treatment of POWs—heck, their own guys—is patently absurd. Bradley poses the question “how do you fight an enemy who wants to die?” and then argues with how it’s done: killing the lot of them. He should know better, especially considering that his father was a Navy Cross recipient on Iwo Jima. 

Bradley’s second pitfall is his completely blatant bias. When he refers to the Japanese he interviewed, he attaches the suffix “-san” to their last names. This is a Japanese sign of respect. However, when referring to Gen. Curtis LeMay, Bradley calls him “Curtis.” One who fancies himself a military historian does not call high-ranking officers by their first names. It doesn’t take a particularly astute observer to see that the Japanese are getting the bigger share of Bradley’s respect allotment. 

However, Flyboys still has plenty to recommend it. I particularly enjoyed getting new insight into George HW Bush’s experience as one of the flyboys. Bradley does have a keen eye for detail and a unique way of telling a story. It’s pretty impressive, especially coming from a guy who, to the best of my knowledge, never wrote a darn thing in his life before Flags of our Fathers. It’s definitely worth the read, as long as you’re not expecting the home team to win another World Series.

And as for my misbehaving layout, I have discovered that this is remedied when I use Internet Exploder Explorer instead of Firefox. So if you have Firefox and my blog looks like a bomb just went off in it, try Explorer. I’m still working on fixing this.

What do you think of the Vietnam War?

If you’re like most Americans, you don’t think highly of it. And why should you? For over a decade our country was embroiled in a war that was a resounding defeat. Not only that, but the American military flagrantly disregarded international law, engaged in indiscriminate killing of civilians, and committed genocide against the North Vietnamese. Right?

If that’s what you think, you need to read America in Vietnam.

I will not kid you. This book is drier than the Sahara in July. But it is an excellent look into how Vietnam’s legacy does not match up with its reality. It’s really very impressive work, especially considering that Guenter Lewy is a political scientist (at The Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy, no less) and not a historian. Also, unlike most people who dare take America’s side in the Vietnam conflict, Lewy is no apologist for the war. It’s very hard to tell from the book which side he is on, as he spends the first half of the book raking Gen. Westmoreland over the coals and spends the second half pointing out what fools the historians and academics have made of themselves in post-Vietnam years (which, at the time the book was written, was only about 5).

If you want to know the side of Vietnam your overgrown hippie history professor doesn’t want you to see, you should read America in Vietnam. In fact, even if you are the overgrown hippie history professor, you should read America in Vietnam. It will provide a different perspective that has been largely buried for over 30 years.

After discussing Patton in my Two World Wars class last night, I stumbled across this on YouTube. It’s an overdub of the flag speech from Patton (which you should really see if you haven’t yet), and done very well. Hold out for the end!

And for those who wish to see the real thing, here it is:

As a piece of worthless information: Reagan got out of Hollywood because he lost the role of Patton to George C Scott. Can you imagine Reagan giving that speech?

Thanks to Katie for showing me how to embed :).

China has been causing much angst and consternation of late, with the whole Tibet fiasco and all. On top of all that, the summer Olympics will be held in Beijing this summer. Now, Hillary is calling for Pres. Bush to boycott the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies unless China shapes up and starts paying attention to human rights.

I can hardly think of a more limp-wristed, sissy-Mary way to show disapproval for China’s behavior. Not attend the opening ceremonies? What the heck is that going to accomplish? Nothing, that’s what it will accomplish. Not showing up to the opening ceremonies will have no impact on the Chinese. They lose nothing if our president does not attend the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. We, however, lose a lot. If Pres. Bush stays home from the Olympics, it will only make America look like she doesn’t have the guts to really reprimand China.

If America wants to show its displeasure with China, she should do so in a manner that actually gets attention. Not by keeping her president at home for the opening ceremonies. If we think that’s going to change any behavior, we’re kidding ourselves. Besides, the Olympics is a time for the world to send its best of the best to compete on the biggest stage in the world, not a time to play politics. Is that too much to ask?