Under Fire

After watching a unit of Moroccan soldiers pass by—black Africans who will cut off a man’s head in combat—Henri Barbusse writes:

‘No doubt they’re a different race from us .. In fact, they’re real soldiers.”

“We are not soldiers, … we’re men.”

They are men, good fellows of all kinds, rudely torn away from the joy of life. Like any other men whom you take in the mass, they are ignorant and of narrow outloook, full of a sound common sense—which some-times gets off the rails—disposed to be led and to do as they are bid, enduring uder hardships, long suffering.

They are simple men further simplified, in whom the merely primitive instincts have been accentuated by the force of circumstances—the instinct of self-preservation, the hard-gripped hope of living through, the joy of food, of drink, and of sleep. And at intervals they are cries and dark shudders of humanity that issue from the silence and the shadows of their great hearts.

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Polite words from the rose-garden

There has been a great deal of right-wing commotion to return to a life of values and to save the United States from progressing further by turning the country around and heading backwards as fast as possible. I and others have posited that women’s right to vote is endangered and perhaps Corporate America will even reinstate a modified form of slavery to solve the problem with jobs and profits.

I expect such thoughts as these were in my mind as I read Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford. This collection of four novels published in the 1920s deals with the dissolution of an old English family and, by extension, the society they represent. It is a premier example of the novel dealing with the major changes resulting from World War I and his highly recommended. What I noticed when seeking a quotation from The Last Post (Book 4) was that I had run my hi-liter down the edge of several passages that seemed to agree with my assessment of the reactionary conservative movement in this country, but from the other end of the time period.

Just a couple of quotations:

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The Sanctity of Marriage

When public officials, religious leaders, and general zealots insist on the sanctity of marriage being supported and even included in the law of the land, they are exposed as uninformed hypocrites by the reality of the world and the history of marriage itself.

Sanctity of marriage implies some moral, religious basis for the institution. Well, in some religions it is a sacrament so marriage is considered very important. Of course this doesn’t really address the fact that a couple can be legally married totally independent from the church simply by going to a Judge, a Justice of the Peace, or the Captain of the cruise ship. Is marriage a sacrament or a legal concept? If it is a legal concept, then the State may recognize the religious marriage as if it had performed the ceremony itself. But let’s face it, the ceremony is just decoration, the signatures on a legal contract are what constitutes a marriage.

Historically, religious and civil laws have been far less separated than they are today. Marriage, as an institution, was given the sanctity of the church and the control of the civil authorities fundamentally to assure the continuance of the wealth of powerful families. If there was no strict way to tie a woman to a man, then there may be offspring that could challenge the normal inheritance path. After all, remember that marriage was fully developed in a time when women were chattel—uneducated, without any legal rights of their own.

I ran across a comment in Parade’s End that seems apropos, if a little dated: