[Peace-discuss] News from Neptune tonight at 7pm

[C. G. Estabrook]

News from Neptune, the Patriotic Gore Edition, can be seen tonight at 7pm on UPTV (cable-cast and web-cast at <urbanapublictelevision.org>); it will be repeated thru the week.

Today is Crispin's Day, the feast of St. Crispin, the patron saint of shoemakers, who was martyred by the Roman Emperor Maximian on this date in AD 287. St. Crispin and his brother, St. Crispinian, lived at Soissons, where they were said to preach during the day and support themselves by making shoes at night. 

It was on St. Crispin's Day in 1415 that English troops, commanded by King Henry V, engaged the French army near the village of Agincourt in France. Despite being outnumbered nearly six to one, the English celebrated a famous victory. In Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth, King Henry addresses his troops on the eve of battle: 

"This story shall the good man tell his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered —
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England, now a-bed,
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here;
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon St. Crispin's day..."

Henry's reputation - and Shakespeare's play - are equivocal. See the remarkable essay by John Sutherland et al., "Henry V, War Criminal?" (Oxford UP 2000) - and the very different treatments in Laurence Olivier's 1944 film (WWII is the background) and that by Kenneth Branagh from 1989 (Britain's colonial oppression in Ireland is the background).

Karen Aram, Carl Estabrook, and David Green borrow the title of Edmund Wilson's book of historical and literary criticism, published 50 years ago, for a discussion of war crimes by the Obama administration. 

"Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War" (1962) consists of 26 chapters about the works and lives of almost 30 writers, including Ambrose Bierce, George Washington Cable‡, Mary Boykin Chesnut, Kate Chopin, John William De Forest, Charlotte Forten, Ulysses Grant‡, Francis Grierson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hinton Rowan Helper, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Henry James, Sidney Lanier, Abraham Lincoln, John S. Mosby, Frederick Law Olmsted, Thomas Nelson Page, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Albion W. Tourgée, John Townsend Trowbridge, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman. 

Wilson's introduction has been called a "mesmerizing if troubling manifesto" written "in the midst of various Cold War crises"; the introduction is a "blunt and sustained critique of the Cold War and of war itself"; it has been called "everything from shocking to naive to brilliant; some considered it unpatriotic, even un-American" - when it was published during the adminstration of another war criminal, John Kennedy.

###