Killing Patton: A Review

October 16, 2014January 10, 2016 Rilaly2 Comments

Sometimes you have to pick the gun up to put the Gun down.” ― Malcolm X

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” ― G.K. Chesterson

“Nobody likes war,” is the old adage. Some do. Some have it coursing in their veins. These types do not seek war, but once it happens, something kicks in that separates them from the rest of us. Something intangible that no one can teach defines them among their peers. Give these types what they deem to be a justifiable and worthy cause and they won’t hesitate to lay down their lives for people they’ve never met. General George Smith Patton Jr. was one of these men. The intro of Patton’s most famous speech expressed as much:

“Men, all this stuff you hear about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of (BS). Americans love to fight. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-league ball players and the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans. Battle is the most significant competition in which a man can indulge. It brings out all that is best and it removes all that is base.”

Patton first saw combat in what has been called the Pancho Villa Expedition, or the Mexican Expedition of 1916, he then saw action in World War I (WWI), and then, of course, in WWII. Like many men of his era, Patton saw war for most of his adult life. Whereas some came to be affected by it in deleterious ways, Patton was emboldened by it.

Pacifists, like the television show M*A*S*H’s character Hawkeye Pierce, have never understood this mentality. The character stated –and I’m paraphrasing— “I never understood how someone that wrote as beautifully as Ernest Hemingway, would choose war as his subject.” The implicit statement in the character’s complaint is that only way Hemingway could write about such things is by never experiencing the true horror of it firsthand. Yet, a cursory glance through Hemingway’s history shows that he was an ambulance driver in WWI, a position that led him to see more carnage than all of the M*A*S*H writers combined, yet unlike the M*A*S*H writers, he continued to write of some of the glory that could be found in war, in many of his most famous books. The complaint that pacifists like Hawkeye Pierce, have of Hemingway is, if he saw the casualties of war how could he focus on the glory, when there is no glory in war, and the only winners are the ones that lose the least. Hemingway agreed, at least in part, saying:

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
― Ernest Hemingway

For better or worse, most of the men of Hemingway and Patton’s generation were either tacitly, or personally, affected, influenced, and characterized by war. Hemingway’s life was so influenced by the various wars that occurred in his life that for him to write on another subject was difficult. He did it, but many claim that most of his best works chronicled war. As a side note, Hemingway did attempt to enter WWI, but he received a deferment based on poor vision. Patton’s life was as influenced by war, and to write a piece on him without including descriptions of their war time activities he engaged in would be nearly impossible. War defined him, and he defined wars.

Killing Patton

For those not familiar with the process that Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard bring to the discussion of history in their Killing series, Martin Dugard does the research and Bill O’Reilly takes that research and puts it in a readable style that O’Reilly equates to a John Grisham style of writing. The research that Mr. Dugard performed in the eight books written before the Killing series so impressed Bill O’Reilly, that Bill labeled him one of the best researchers in the country.

The benefits of the partnership they formed comes through in the readability that O’Reilly brings to Martin Dugard’s research. I must confess here, that I have never read one of Mr. Dugard’s books, but as a researcher, and writer, I can tell you that it’s very difficult to edit, or delete, large chunks of the work you’ve done in research. A decent writer, knowing the virtues of pace and readability, will remove those large chunks of work that the researcher has unearthed and provide an easy read of the material.

Those of us that love history, love many of the mainstream, history books, but we also know that they have a tendency to get bogged down in detail. Even the best of these books require breaks. There’s just too much information in them for one brain to handle in one setting. Thus, the formula that these two men have laid out is that the writer, Bill O’Reilly, will surf through all of Dugard’s research and use only that which fits what he terms a readable pace.

In the book Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II’s Most Audacious General, the two authors uncover a wealth of information. At its best, the book provides details of some of WWII’s most heroic efforts. It provides details of the lives, and the actions of some of WWII’s great leaders Patton, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and some details of Winston Churchill’s actions during the War. It also informs the readers of WWII’s lesser-known heroes, the warriors that carried out the orders of all those listed above. There are moments in the book, a reader will find thrilling, and other moments involving the chilling details of how close this war came to going the other way if not for some crucial German mistakes, some of which were procured through Allied deceptions. Those of us that believed that WWII came to an end soon after the Omaha Beach landing have been corrected by many authors, including the two here.

The most controversial portion of Killing Patton involves the death of General Patton. It provides details of a conspiracy theory that the Premier of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin, may have ordered Patton killed. Anyone that knows anything about Bill O’Reilly has to suspect that this was his idea. One has to suspect that while sifting through Dugard’s research, Mr. O’Reilly unearthed a sales tactic to separate Killing Patton from the numerous books written on WWII. The latter involves as much speculation on my part, as the conspiracy theory does.

As the theme of a 2003 ABC special, conducted on the assassination of John F. Kennedy suggested, some of the times, it’s difficult to believe that consequential men can die by inconsequential means, or that inconsequential men can take down consequential men … Even by accident, as appears to be the case of Patton. Some of the times, it’s much more interesting to look at all of the circumstantial evidence and wrap it up in a bow for greater sales and easier promotion. While on his promotional tour, Bill has admitted that he doesn’t know exactly what happened, and that he’s speculating with this particular theory, and that the evidence he cites is circumstantial, but he says, “There’s enough there to warrant more investigation.” Some have questioned the latter, and others have outright refuted it. Those that have refuted it have dismissed the entire book on the basis of this theory. Personally, I think this is a mistake, but I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t admit that factual errors, or speculative theories, in other books have rendered those books unreadable by me. With that qualifier out of the way, I must say that this is a great read, and there are numerous, substantiated facts in this book that are fascinating.

Some may also dismiss Killing Patton on the basis that it is but another book that glorifies war, warriors, and the archetypal males that have a lust for violence and war. Some may argue that the very premise of such a book only contributes to the patriarchal, male dominated society that we’ve all been trying to defeat for the last few decades. They would also argue that in our more civilized societies, the warrior mentality is a lot less necessary, as any and all threats we face are greatly exaggerated by political types of the same mind. These men, these warriors, used to be enshrined in their cultures, but some may argue that was based on the fact that those societies were less stable, that needed warriors to help them continue as a culture. They argue from the mentality that our civilization is so much more stable, and permanent, that intellectual diplomats, and social leaders, are far more necessary to continued peace. Yet, those types usually fail when confronted with irrational evil, and it is at that point that warriors, like General George S. Patton, are brought in to clean up the mess and provide the continued illusion of permanence.

A Matter of Death and Life

October 12, 2014June 26, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

Life is not random, some say, it is choreographed by a controlling force with a master plan that we may not understand at first, but will eventually come clear when we look back and see the final portrait. For others, life is a random series of moments, equivalent to an abstract pointillism painting. This belief suggests that we’re simply here one day, talking to our friends, gone the next. Human life has more meaning than the life of the badger in the arena of consciousness of life, but little more than that. The primary difference, for these people, comes from the act of looking at life, examining it with strained eyes, until we see a purpose that we believed was there all along. No matter how one looks at it, we can all agree that these moments of life are finite, and that it is an abuse to waste them. The latter becomes all the more clear when we’ve survived a death-defying incident.

Part of the allure of the story of the vampire is the dream mere mortals have of being immortal, so that these moments of life can be infinite. These dreams only become more profound as we age, and the realization of our own mortality becomes more substantial –and the idea of eventually becoming inconsequential, even to those that love us most, haunts us– we dream of immortality. The dream of immortality is one thing, the non-fan have argued, but the actuality of it would be quite another.

The import of the allure of the vampire story is the question that fascinates us, “What would you do if you knew knew that you were going to live forever?” The less obvious question, asked by cynical viewers/readers of the story is, “Why would you do it?” How exciting would the bungee jump be to the person that knew there was no chance they were going to die? The primal fear of falling would surely affect some vampires, as they were all mortal once, but if you can’t even be superficially wounded, much less mortally, how much allure would there be in the “death plunge” of the bungee jump?

In most incarnations of the story, the vampire is not only immortal and invulnerable to superficial injury, they can even manipulate situations to a point where they wouldn’t have to experience emotional pain. Through the power of their eyes, most vampires can convince mere mortals to do their bidding. As a result, no girl can ever dump them; no bully can pick on them; and no moron can ever do anything to mess their life up. In most incarnations of the vampire story, the use of this power is selective, so as to allow the mortals involved in the story to do things that give the story greater drama, but the cynics in the audience wonder why the vampires don’t just turn on their eye power and persuade the girl to love them. (I know most vampire stories involve the vampire wanting organic love from the girl that results from the mortal deciding to love them, but the very idea that they can circumvent this process by turning on their eye power diminishes this to a tool used by the author of the story to provide drama.) We cynics understand that thread of the story that the greatness of love lies in its achievement for the vampire, but when he is utterly devastated by the failure to do so, the vampire doesn’t have to experience that devastation. The vampire has a plan B. The eyes. Just flick on that power.

Mere mortals have no idea if the girl is going to love us in real life, and we have no plan B if she doesn’t. We are pretty sure that we’re going to survive the bungee jump, and the roller coaster, as they offer some comfort of being a controlled environment, but there is some fear –that results in some adrenaline– involved in the idea that we’re not 100% positive. If you were 100% positive that you weren’t going to die, or even receive some painful superficial wounds, why would you do it? Would there be any sense of accomplishment in achieving love from another, if you knew that you had such a solid plan B that you could convince the girl to love you, regardless what she decides.

Some of us have had near death experiences, from a car crash that first responders informed us should’ve resulted in the end of our moments; we’ve been informed that if our death-defying incident had occurred inches to the left, or right, we would no longer be here to talk about it; and others have had incidents that require no such explanations of how close they’ve come. Those that have survived the latter speak of a sense of euphoria that overwhelms them and profoundly informs the rest of their life. This sense of euphoria, they say, does not last forever, or as long as it probably should, but for the short time you’re immersed in it, your second lease on life can be euphoric.

In an attempt to explain this blast of euphoria that comes from being unsuccessfully murdered, author of the collection of essays We Never Learn, Tim Kreider, uses the plot of Ray Bradbury’s The Lost City of Mars to illustrate: “A man finds a miraculous machine that enables him to experience his own violent death over and over again, as many times as he likes –in locomotive collisions, race car crashes, and exploding rocket ships– until he emerges flayed of all his Christian guilt and unconscious longing for death, forgiven and free, finally alive.”

In the essay, Reprieve, Kreider explains that after it was deemed that he would survive the attempt on his life, he considered everything that followed as “Gravy.” A term he derives from a man, author Raymond Carver, that was also granted a second lease on life.

Quoting from the proverbial “food tastes better” template of survivors, Kreider states that he did things he wouldn’t have done in his pre-murder attempt life, and what was once deemed troubling, dramatic, and consequential in the first life, became trivial in the scope of having survived. Kreider claims he even developed a loud, racauos laugh, in his reprieve, that caused “People to look over to make sure I was not about to open up on them with a weapon.” He claims that laughter could be heard when he complained to a friend, “You don’t understand me.”

The friend responded: “No, sir, I understand you very well –it is you who do not understand yourself.”

Whereas most survivors perceive divine intervention in their narrow escape, Kreider states that even in the midst of his euphoria, that “Not for one passing moment did it occur to me to imagine that God Must Have Spared My Life For Some Purpose. I was not blessed or chosen, but lucky.”

I wish I could recommend the experience of not being killed to everyone. It’s a truism,” he basically states, that motivates most thrill-seeking adventurers to attempt what are basically “suicide attempts with safety nets”. “The trick,” he writes, “Is to get the full effect you have to be genuinely uncertain that you’re going to survive. The best approximation would be to hire an incompetent, Clouseauque (Inspector Clouseau, played by Peter Sellers, in the movie The Pink Panther) hit man to assassinate you.

“It’s one of the maddening perversities of human psychology that we only notice we’re alive when we’re reminded we’re going to die, the same way some of us appreciate our girlfriends only after they’ve become exes.” Kreider writes of his terminally ill father, writing that while in his last days: “(The man) cared less about things that didn’t matter and more about the things that did. It was during his illness that he gave me the talk that all my artist friends have envied, in which he told me that he and my mother believed in my talent and I shouldn’t worry about getting “some dumb job.””

But, Kreider writes: “You can’t feel crazily grateful to be alive your whole life any more than you can stay passionately in love forever—or grieve forever, for that matter. Time makes us all betray ourselves and get back to the busywork of living.”

The latter quote reminds one of a guest on The Tonight Show in which this guest talked about a love that spanned decades. She claimed that her husband provided her a white rose every day, and that the two of them never fought. In the aftermath of that interview, host Johnny Carson turned to his sidekick Ed McMahon and said something along the lines of: “It’s a beautiful story, and I wish I had the same (Carson was married four times), but I can’t help but thinking how boring it would be to never fight for that many years. I’m not calling her a liar. I believe her. I just think it would be boring.”

In great loves, and great lives, life can experience great highs and great lows, but the great highs cannot be fully appreciated without the contrast of great lows.

I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best,” Kreider writes, “Crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. We dismiss peak moments and passionate love affairs as an ephemeral chemical buzz, just endorphins or hormones, but accept those 3 A.M. bouts of despair as unsentimental insights into the truth about our lives. It’s easy now to dismiss that year (following the survival of the unsuccessful murder) as nothing more than the same sort of shaky, hysterical high you’d feel after getting clipped by a taxi. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of reality, being jolted out of a lifelong stupor. It’s like the revelation I had the first time I ever flew in an airplane as a kid: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold on to when you descend once again beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather.”

We all love to quote Murphy’s law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” It’s important to prepare for things to go wrong, of course, but is it a truism that everything will go wrong, or is it a “maddening perversity of human psychology” that we only notice things when they do? If the petty jurisdiction of local weather provides us with clear and 60, how long will we remember that versus -2 and 10 inches of snow? And how beautiful is clear and 60 when all we’ve known, all week, is -2 and 10 inches? How beautiful, conversely, would clear and 60 be if we could use the eye power of the vampire to have clear and 60, 365? The dream would be one thing, the reality quite another.

A Review of David Cross’ Review of Music Reviews

May 15, 2014June 14, 2014 RilalyLeave a comment

If you had informed me that a cynical wit, the caliber of stand up comedian, and writer of the incredible Mr. Show, David Cross (aka Tobias Funke) (aka the Chicken Pot Pie guy), was going to mock the verbose, wordy, prolix, grandiloquent, garrulous, and logorrhea found in most music reviews, I would sing, “Hot Dog, Hot Dog, Hot Diggity Dog!” Like most comedic ideas, however, the ambitious idea of what the essay Top Ten CDs to Listen to While Listening to Other CDs portends is much more enticing than the actual results.

As anyone that has tried to sell the artistic merit of “challenging and difficult” music to a friend knows, describing music can be a difficult and challenging thing to capture. The effort that those of us —that know little to nothing about the complexities involved in music creation— put forth usually results in us saying something nonsensical along the lines of: “It kind of sounds like a cross between the second side of Led Zeppelin III and the first side of Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica.” When our listener’s express varying degrees of annoying confusion, we usually end up saying, “I don’t know, here, just listen to it.”

Those of us that regularly read professional music reviews, regularly skip the time-consuming, flowery verbiage of music reviews, to their summation of the particular songs on the album that lets us know that This is the best song on the album, and that we may want to check out the propulsive, crunchy beats on That, but that the song “…And the Other Thing!” doesn’t quite accomplish what the band had probably intended it to. We then listen to the samples of This, That, And the Other Thing to make an informed decision on the album based on what the reviewer has stated is a decent representation of said album.

If the reviewer really enjoys the album, however, and I mean really enjoys it, you will usually finish their review with the belief that this latest offering from Quiet Riot could lead you on a spiritual journey not seen on this planet since Jesus of Nazareth spent forty days and forty nights in a desert.

As Cross writes of the website Pitchforkmedia.com:

It is a site that basically reviews music but in a very, very precious and often overly verbose way.”

In the essay, Cross mocks the idea of these tediously verbose music reviewers by writing his own fictional review, of a fictional band’s, fictional album, using an equal measure of verbosity to capture the essence of the particular review he lines up for the reader. The idea behind Cross’ indirect mockery is that most album reviews are overwrought and probably intended to either feed into whatever collegial relationship that the writer presumably wants to have with either the material, or the band, by lending it exaggerated weight, or that the writer of said review can find no other venue for showcasing his writing abilities and extensive vocabulary.

When Cross reprints the reviews, such as the unintended comedy Dominique Leone provides in his review of Animal Collective’s album Sung Tongs, for Pitchforkmedia.com, laughter ensues:

(The song) “The Softest Voice” layers clear-toned guitar figures upon each other, as (singers) Tare and Bear whisper in harmony above, as if singing to the vision peering back at them from the skin of a backwoods creek. The rustic, secretive manner of their voices and the barely disturbed forest around them suggests that whatever ghosts inhabit these woods are only too happy to oblige a lullaby or two. Likewise, the epic “Visiting Friends” gathers in faceless, mutated ghosts (i.e., oddly manipulated vocalizations from the duo) to hover over their dying fire in visage of nothing better than the tops of trees. The constant strumming moves alongside the voices, helping to keep them afloat, but never suggesting they should organize themselves into anything recognizable or predictable. It’s windy, and if it rains they’ll get wet and continue to play.

Again, it’s difficult to find the perfect verbiage to describe music, or the seemingly ethereal vibe of Sung Tongs, but some of the times the authors of these reviews get so carried away with their use of language that one can’t help but think that the reviews are intended to impress upon the reader what an adept writer they have before them. A reader finds themselves wondering, a thousand words in, if this review is so concerned with showcasing their ability to write like Faulkner that their attempts at sharing an appreciation for music becomes secondary. Either that, or Dominique wrote this particular review in the hopes that he might receive a call from Animal Collective’s Avey Tare that communicated a collegial respect Tare had for Dominique’s ability to capture the ethos of his album, in a manner a less adept writer would’ve struggle with. “You got it, Dominique, you really captured the essence of what we were trying to do with this album! I like you! I really, really like you!”

Cross then provides his thematic review of his fictional group, and their fictional album, in the same overwrought themes Leone used in his Sung Tongs review:

—why not listen to As I Became We by “Tishara Quailfeather.” The virulent and hermetically sealed pinings of the world’s only triple-gold-selling Native American artist living in an iron lung. It’s as if newly dead, and thus still pure angels, reached down into the Virgin Mary’s throat and gently lifted out the sweetest and more plaintive sounds man will ever hope to hear in his life. RATING—7.17

Again, if you’re anything like me, you would’ve rushed out to the bookstore to purchase Cross’s book I Drink for a Reason the minute you heard that this comedic legend attempted this particular spoof, in essay form. If you’re anything like me, you thought that these self-indulgent music reviews —done by writers that can’t get read anywhere else— are an untapped goldmine of material that probably should’ve been tapped long ago, but no one had the guts to do it to a reviewer that might be eventually be reviewing your material at some point, down the line. If you’re anything like me, you thought it was such a clever idea that you were just dying to laugh at all ten attempts Cross made in this essay, and if you’re anything like me you eventually ended up thinking that the idea of doing it was so much better than the finished product. It’s kind of funny, in that Cross successfully matches the theme of self-indulgence these reviewers engage in, but it’s David Cross’s maybe not as hilarious as this David Cross fan expected it to be.