I bet Mailer cursed like a sailor
As a follow-up to Tuesday’s post, I came across this, which is only tangentially related: an old article at The Atlantic about the “real” Second World War. It discusses the remarkable dichotomy between the way the war was reported to the public, particularly in America, and the way real soldiers would describe the combat:
In the popular and genteel iconography of war during the bourgeois age, all the way from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history paintings to twentieth-century photographs, the bodies of the dead are intact, if inert — sometimes bloody and sprawled in awkward positions, but, except for the absence of life, plausible and acceptable simulacra of the people they once were… The same is true in other popular collections of photographs, like Collier’s Photographic History of World War ll, Ronald Heiferman’s World War II, A.J.P. Taylor’s History of World War II, and Charles Herridge’s Pictorial History of World War II. In these, no matter how severely wounded, Allied soldiers are never shown suffering what in the Vietnam War was termed traumatic amputation: everyone has all his limbs, his hands and feet and digits, not to mention an expression of courage and cheer…
What annoyed the troops and augmented their sardonic, contemptuous attitude toward those who viewed them from afar was in large part this public innocence about the bizarre damage suffered by the human body in modern war. The troops could not contemplate without anger the lack of public knowledge of the Graves Registration form used by the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps, with its space for indicating “Members Missing.” You would expect frontline soldiers to be struck and hurt by bullets and shell fragments, but such is the popular insulation from the facts that you would not expect them to be hurt, sometimes killed, by being struck by parts of their friends’ bodies violently detached. If you asked a wounded soldier or Marine what hit him, you’d hardly be ready for the answer “My buddy’s head,” or his sergeant’s heel or his hand, or a Japanese leg, complete with shoe and puttees, or the West Point ring on his captain’s severed hand.
What got my attention, and made me think of Tuesday’s otherwise unrelated post, was this quote attributed to Norman Mailer:
You use the word shit so that you can use the word noble.
I also found it attributed to Dwight Eisenhower with the phrase “without sounding ridiculous” on the end. I actually think it’s more effectively turned around to “You use the word noble so you can use the word shit,” which is one way of saying that one’s limited use of profanity has more impact because of the simple rarity of it. Like if your mother became infuriated at something and screamed an F-bomb. Whoa.
I, on the other hand, drop F-bombs so regularly that it’s difficult to tell if I’m angry until I start flinging poop.
