"I don’t look for anything… I find.” This is a famous uttering by a famous painter. Picasso. Unlike him, we often try to find stuff, including life, and find nothing. Or what we find is old, fake, tired and useless. The new stuff is too dear or exclusive. So we make it up.

And some of us become afraid of what attractions are to be found… Russia and sex included.

Humans’ obsessive nature which is the response to natural hunger has tainted our ideas and desires. This is why the Western media are demonising the other guy, such as Putin, as an enemy of our obsessive but settled clear as mud democratic ideals. Yes, "Putin and Russia are going to interfere with the 2020 Presidential elections by supporting Trump and Sanders — at the same time." This will be our excuse for mucking it up. We define the excuse ahead of mucking it up, because we're going to muck it up, aren't we?

Dali hails a taxi in Figueras, Spain. He is young and he will be obsessed by the landscape of his youth forever: the flat ocean, the craggy cliffs, the yellow dry earth and the grey olive trees of the Costa Brava. And he is obsessed with Gala, his (Russian, what else?) woman he stole from a French poet — in his own time. The Taxi driver asks him: "where to?” “Paris!”… Dali wants to visit Picasso. What better way to travel 700 miles than in the back of a chauffeur-driven Citroën?… In Paris, Dali meets budding surrealists. “I am a genius” he announce himself, and if you want to see clearly, you need to be mad…

And there was Pascin… On the second of June 1930, after his friends have not seen him for a few days drinking to oblivion in bars till daybreak, they went to his place and demolished the door. On the other side, Pascin has hung himself to the door-handle after having cut open his wrists. Julius Pincas was his real name. Born in a Bulgarian bourgeois family, like many artists of the time, he’d come to Paris. He had said that artists have to die by 45. He just did.

His prolific gig was — what would be described these days of prude Victorian Political correctness — as porn. He painted naked ladies in their attractive sexy splendour, with morbid, possibly decadent erotism, as other painters did bright Med landscapes. At sixteen he'd become the lover of the madam of a brothel. Thereafter he is always about with a cortege of young girls, black, white, lesbians, drugged. They sleep with him and rob him of his enticing drawings. He knows. He often tell them: “Please not these ones, I need them. Take one from the other pile…”

Porn is the bête noire of many religious uptight souls as if god had made the pleasure of sex as a vicarious punishment for the original sin. Porn, mind you, has become an industry rather than an art form — like making socks or hamburgers. Porn plays hard on our distorted hungers in need of incrementation in our desires. Some of it is soft, hard and dangerous. It relieves boredom… But do we have time to be bored?

Apparently soldiers do… Being in the military isn’t what it’s claimed to be… Glory? Medals? Often when you are dead… Meanwhile the war-pushers, like Joe Biden, try to become President of the biggest warring nation on earth. Some soldiers turn to porn for entertainment and Doritos for food… Crazy. 

Not long ago, I read a young social media warrior contemplate his periodic dream of joining the U.S. Navy to avoid what he calls the “Doritos and porn” purposelessness of youth. The first time, right after high school, he’d considered it for the “purpose, order, meaning” it would bring him amid his depression. The second time, he was “studying grand strategy, political theory, foreign policy alongside some of the foremost instructors and top students in the nation,” and desiring an “anchor.” Yet he won’t pull the trigger. Reading some James Jones might help cure him of his armchair romanticization.


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All this is to say that those who perceive in the military a romantic escape from the tedium and purposelessness of materialist, consumerist, ennui-infused American society are mistaken, to say the least. Certainly there is a higher purpose, as there are with many callings, martial or otherwise. But it can quickly be obscured amidst the boredom, bullying, and banality of the military experience. Even for those able to “keep their eyes on the prize,” you might find that your leadership was lying to you about the war in which you served and saw friends die. In that case, you may find yourself wondering, as many veterans are, if you “fought for nothing.”



This is why Jones, who is recommended by TAC’s own Andrew Bacevich, is so essential. Those tempted to equate the military with romantic escapism need to be brought down to earth. Those tempted to send someone else’s kids to “the sandbox,” inspired by the glorious drama of war, need to know what they’re going to encounter and potentially suffer from for the rest of their lives. Jones wrote in Thin Red Line: “War don’t ennoble men, it turns ’em into dogs.” I don’t agree with that characterization…at least not all the time. But it certainly happens often enough that we must ponder it long and hard.

Casey Chalk covers religion and other issues for The American Conservative and is a senior writer for Crisis Magazine. He has degrees in history and teaching from the University of Virginia, and a masters in theology from Christendom College.


Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-military-wont-save-...

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Casey Chalk wrote an entire mature article without mentioning "you-know-who" though he hinted at it with "a higher purpose"… Congratulations.


It seems Casey wrote about a subject he knows well: military fare and its devastating effect on many young men. All I know is that my grandfather was too old to fight in WW1, so he was sent away to make army uniforms, while my dad was too old to fight in WW2, so he became an artillery instructor. The kids were still too young to go and fight. We scraped through as peace-time came. Granddad had very few stories to tell about his war service. Both of these clever men, being old, married with children, did not suffer the angst of younger men sent to fight, awaiting their designated bullet, and pushing fast the boundaries of their short life… But their psychological scars were still not pretty… 


After the war, James Jones tried to be part of a utopian society in the 1950 — the Hanby Writers' Colony in Marshall, Illinois — with his then lover, Lowney Hanby and her husband Harry Hanby. It was partly funded by Harry and, after the financial success of From Here To Eternity, by Jones as well. A commune where budding artists could focus exclusively on their writing projects, the colony dissolved only a few years after, because James Jones went to live to France in 1957. He had married Gloria Mosolino, after a fight with Lowney, leaving the colony in a financially unfit situation.


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War is often referred to as butchery, as often mentioned on this site. Battlefields need to be cleaned up otherwise they smell of carrion. BUT some old and middle-aged men are often in favour of it for their own self importance, political and financial. Yes, remember Joe Biden once more, and his push for the war against Saddam? Sad political theatre of the absurd when one allies with political opponents for fake reasons, though profiting from war is not fake. The fakeness of the WMDs was known way before the first bullet was fired… We knew. I knew. Biden said sorry a decade later, after many widows and mothers had buried their men and sons. Too bad… Nearly 5,000 US soldiers died from enemy fire, and more than 10,000 killed themselves, still at a rate of two or three a day — not like Pascin, but from the despair, the pain and the futility of such acts of war that only predictably sowed crap, instead of the inflated democratic ideals. 

Now, Biden wants to be the President, the persons who give themselves the right to send such sons and daughters to the slaughter, for the profits of the war machine in Washington. Joe Biden is a Catholic thus a religious hypocrite. He is a devious politician first, though he prays to the same god as Casey Chalk.

Someone suggested that Biden knows he’s going to loose the Democratic nomination, but he stays in the race to prevent Sanders from winning, to help Warren — herself a loony war-woman and a Russia hater. People like her justify their hate by demonising "them", such as Putin. It’s simplistic and uninspired looniness. We can only despair or be ANGRY.

Don’t we deserve better! Trump seems to be the Salvador Dali of distorted geniused politics, while the Democrats rob us of soap and toothpaste so they can appear clean and moralistically superior… It’s a mad human world, in a vortex of looniness, in which our leaders are the most crazy. And nothing matters… How can young soldiers find satisfaction by killing someone they do not know? The hate of the enemy is manufactured like plastic toys in a Chinese slave factory... So the soldiers shift from Amphetamines to sleeping pills, then to porn and crap processed food, like Doritos — corn chips fit for a President like Donald Trump.

This is insane…

Lucky, there are many many ordinary people out-there, only vying for ordinariness, and who don't pay attention to the madness at the top. They push a pram with love and are the heroes of peace, they run an efficient (but not maximised) local business, and laugh at ordinary enjoyment. They don't ask complex questions... The sky is blue...

GL.

Picture at top by Pascin...