IP: War and culture

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> From: "Hiawatha Bray" <watha () monitortan com>
> To: <farber () cis upenn edu>
>
>
> Military historian Victor Davis Hanson has written some remarkable stuff
> about the war at the National Review Web site.  Here's his latest...
>
> http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson102901.shtml
>
> Excerpt:
>
> Culture is not immune to the ripples of battle. The accelerators of
> Modernism were Verdun and the Somme. Perhaps the present brand of
> Postmodernism was born in France after the inexplicable and humiliating
> German romp through the Ardennes in 1940. The crater in New York at the very
> epicenter of American arts and letters will have a similar, if not more
> profound, effect. With a rubble pile instead of the World Trade Center on
> the skyline, it will be very difficult a few blocks away at the nexus of
> American culture to suggest that facts are mere historical fictions or
> reality but textual expressions of power - or that feces on canvass and
> urine-jars best capture the ordeal of the human condition. Not that such art
> and literature born out of cynicism and nihilism will vanish as we proceed
> with this war and the inevitable losses, blunders, and paradoxes to come.
> They will not - at least for a time. But most people, desperate for
> transcendence and something real - and perhaps even beautiful - amid
> catastrophe and recovery, will now gradually grow uninterested in the
> clever, but empty games of the glib and bored. We have thousands of dead,
> after all, to mourn, the threat of still more lethal attacks, and a war in
> their memory to win - and our art, literature, and history will reflect
> that.


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