for 7 June 2001. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Tim Cavanaugh
Special Guest Editor

Terry Colon
Art Director

Heather Havrilesky
Senior Editor

Joey Anuff
Publisher

It will only be when we are rid of America's Greatest Generation that a real depiction of WWII will make it to the screen. The realities of WWII are closer to Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven than anything else — everybody is wrong, right, and extremely brutal all at the same time. They snuck up on us in Pearl Harbor, we dropped incendiary bombs on them. They executed downed US pilots, we dropped a second nuke on Nagasaki to squash any ambiguity about our ability to drop nukes. Luckily, the Japs started it.

Thank God for Pearl Harbor, or WWII would have ended up just like Vietnam.

-Shill Biddingsley
<cameron@slip.net>

Ah, who the hell knows which movie World War II was most like? It wasn't like any of them, as WWII veterans never tire of pointing out to their ungrateful progeny. I don't see how having no living memory of the war will make the movies about it any more accurate. In fact, movies about the war used to be a lot better, or at least more grown-up. Not so much wiseguy pictures like The Dirty Dozen but oddball efforts like Hell In the Pacific and Beach Red. There are various Sam Fuller efforts worthy of note, and who can heap enough praise on Bridge On the River Kwai? I believe it's when people forgot about the Pacific theater that they started to go in for this bowdlerized notion of what it all meant. It took Stephen Ambrose to throw out the reasonably adult and nuanced view and return us all to our cornfed, tough but fair, fighting for democracy, giving-out-candy to Italian street urchins infancy.

But you're right about this silly and selective umbrage everybody demonstrates after the fact. The US tried and executed at least one or two Krauts because during the Battle of the Bulge, when the decision of the battle, and in fact any possible chance of their country's survival, depended on their moving as fast and as far as possible, they got saddled with 83 American prisoners, killed them, and kept moving. Not the kind of story you brag about to your grandkids, but what were they supposed to do? Shooting prisoners, what a crock! Who wouldn't shoot a prisoner under the right circumstances?

Sucksters

Well, this wasn't vastly reported, but after I saw Pearl Harbor, I was so mad I undertipped the waiter at the corner sushi bar. That'll teach those kowtowing devils! There's a Kurosawa festival coming up at the Odeon, and me and some other red-blooded Americans are planning to read the subtitles aloud in funny voices. Then we're going to stand out on a street corner and jeer every Toyota that passes. Are you in with us, citizens?

Richard Von Busack
<regisgoat@earthlink.net>

Reading subtitles aloud in funny voices is truly one of the most devastating weapons in democracy's vast arsenal. Who can say what the withering powers of comedy might have accomplished in the Big One?

Sucksters

hey suckers,

i've had a half-dozen eggs sitting out on my coffee table for about three weeks now, do you think they would qualify as "rotten" or do i need to wait longer before i "use" them? cheers

blair carswell
bates college media services

<bcarswel@abacus.bates.edu>

The age of great vandalism foods has passed. Today's processed filler has none of the splat and eclat you can get from the farm-fresh treats of yesteryear. Still, the modern funmaker uses stealth to achieve maximum damage. In coastal areas, a medium-sized bag of potato chips, liberally spread around one's enemy's car or property, will transport all and sundry to a world of birdshit. Who's zoomin' who, when you fill every cranny of your enemy's driver's side and passenger's side door locks with your ABC gum? (Modern locks are tricky, but can be effectively stuffed.) And for old-fashioned food-throwing, we say, "Step aside, rotten egg; make room for the fat and juicy carnitas burrito supreme!" Expensive, yes. Effective, undoubtedly! Happy hunting!

Sucksters

It's equally depressing to realize that all the witty, extemporaneous things I've said to people in conversations over the years have not been archived somewhere, but there you go.

As a professional writer in all seriousness I can say that the communication of opinions is bullshit. All that matters are the facts, the primary data, and every individual has to take the same facts and come to their own conclusions. Don't worry, archeologists of the future will be able to examine at our nuclear waste and Starbucks mugs and pretty much us figure out.

Andrew James
<ajames@neptune.on.ca>

Which is why every "On My Mind" column Abe Rosenthal ever wrote is available in every library in the country? What the hell are you talking about? What kind of professional writer in all seriousness are you, anyway, hotshot?

Sucksters

I've said it before so I guess I'll have to say it again: Yeah, the guys who fought in WWII were brave and selfless and came home not wanting to talk much about it. No war stories from my uncle who---I learned much later---essentially lived Catch-22. Nor my father, whose troop ship I learned---even later---was sunk with all hands 3 days after he was pulled off it. Or my first girlfriend's father, who was shot down, captured, and escaped 3 separate times. Or my ex-father-in-law, who took a little walk in the sun up the Italian peninsula. Only the guys who never saw the elephant up close admire Rambo.

But the Depression and the Second World War and the Holocaust and the general horror of it all didn't fall from the sky. They were caused, by cowardice and stupidity and pigheadnesses and evil, by the same generation that pretty much had to bleed to fix it. Oh, OK...maybe it was mostly their fathers' generation that screwed up, but there was plenty of blame to go around.

Memorial Day is over. I'll put a stone on my father's grave and get misty watching the grass grow over the monuments. But by and large, undaunted courage is what you need when you've fouled up so bad that hoping for miracles is the only way to get out of it and I'll take quiet boring competency over last-second heroics every time.

Alan
<akornhis@optonline.net>

Well, until somebody figures out a way to make boring, quiet competence as stirring to the heart as collective purpose, common enemies and undaunted valor, it looks like we're stuck with these inflated tributes. There are a whole lotta WWII movies coming out, you know. But why can't they make some good ones? Why doesn't somebody do a movie about the American guerillas who fought in the Philippines from the fall of Bataan until 1944? That's a real story, it could be made on the cheap, and it would provide more entertainment value than we're getting right now.

Sucksters

I've been reading suck for years, and you guys always make me laugh, or at least grin halfheartedly...

But our mascot is a puppy named Butler Blue, certainly not a big bad Nazi. Incidentally, cute little Sarah Fischer is a Butler student. She could take the dog in a fair fight.

Thanks for the publicity,

Danielle M. Henry
Class of 2001.

<amuseddisinterest@yahoo.com>

What makes you think Sarah fights fair? Didn't you see her take out that other lady driver last year?

If you're dog isn't a Nazi, why does the big inflatable balloon version of him in the Indy 500/Memorial Day parade have him (?) posed Sieg Heiling? What were we supposed to think? That he's more like an ancient Roman Centurion? Something about that big bulldog face, the SS salute, and the school motto — "What Holocaust?" — got us jumping to conclusions I guess.

Ben

Dear Sucksters,

Shame on you for regurgitating an Indy 500, (July 2000) story on Memorial Day 2001.

The sound of freedom isn't those steroid-induced, suped up, gas sucking, race cars emitting megadecimal noise that causes major hearing loss. It's the foot marching and heel clicking of military trainees at Champaign, Quantico, Fort Campbell, Pensacola, Lackland, and other places.

Freedom is never free, it's paid each and every day by American men and women in uniform. Show one of your own writers some much deserved respect----Private First Class Ambrose Beers.

I wrote this poem dedicated to him and the other sacrificial lambs who paid with life and limbs and continue to purchase our freedom on a daily basis. I know Ambrose is still alive and kicking, but he gives up more of his freedom than those immigrant, beer sucking, ungrateful Serbian pigs sitting in the stands at Indianapolis.

"Is Freedom really Free"

Is freedom really free
Did all those soldiers die for me