GI Joe, Then and Now

There have been a recent spate of films based on the GI Joe toy 'character' - they're actually pretty good, fast-paced and containing a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor. Very high-tech, lots of CGI, and the premise is that of a very 'special unit' saving the world.

But the real GI Joe really did help save the world.

In December of 1943, the writer Ernie Pyle was 'embedded' (to use today's term) with the 143rd Infantry Regiment during a series of attacks aimed at capturing the Italian town of San Pietro Infine, on the western slopes of the Apennines south of Rome.

It was a miserable campaign; Rome is on the same latitude as Chicago, and the winter was cold and wet, the mud 'too thin to drink and too thick to plow'.

Ernie Pyle made a friend, Captain Henry Waskow from the cotton country of southeastern Texas. Waskow came from a large and desperately poor family, becoming an officer through a scholarship to Trinity College and service in the Texas Guard.

Waskow was a hard worker, and took his command responsibilities with a seriousness that was almost desperate. He felt that he'd never really been young.

He never grew old. On the evening of Tuesday, December 14, a shell fragment tore open his chest.

Ernie Pyle saw his body brought down from the hills, slung across the back of a small Italian donkey. When he was unloaded, Waskow was balanced on his feet for a few seconds, a ghastly imitation of life.

Pyle wrote about Waskow's men, coming to pay their respects. One said, "I'm sorry." Several swore. Another smoothed the dead officer's collar, and straightened out the torn clothing around the gaping wound - and then simply held Waskow's hand.

The dispatch was filed, and duly printed on the January 10, 1944 edition of the Washington Daily News. Ernie Pyle felt he'd lost his touch, but it was probably the best piece of writing to come out of the Second World War.

And it became a movie, The Story of GI Joe. Burgess Meredith played Ernie Pyle, and Henry Waskow (renamed 'Walker' in the film) was played by Robert Mitchum.

GI Joe, in a thousand advances and in a million foxholes, was given flesh by Ernie Pyle's words, and substance by Robert Mitchum's acting, in the very real personage of Henry Waskow of Texas.

He saved the world.

It would be facile to rant, now, about the hijacking of the name for a cheap series of action movies, and plastic toys.

But it's okay. We're payed homage, through Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. The stories are safe, in Stephen Ambrose's wonderful books, and Rick Atkinson's "Liberation Trilogy" (from which most of the material for this story came).

We won't forget. Now go, and enjoy that CGI with your kids!

I think Capt. Waskow would be pleased.

Because, or the Heart of a Mule

Some days it's just not worth it.

You get a look at what you think you've accomplished through the eyes of someone you respect - and realize that the green morning you'd had in your heart is a mirage. The reality is a cold barren evening, with a night that won't see a morning.

And maybe it's time to quit.

And why not?

I'd like to say it's because God spoke to me, either personally, or through His Word, Or that a song on K-LOVE or Family Life Radio reminded me that we're all  important, and beloved of the Father.

Nope. That's not it.

Maybe it's pride? No matter what anyone says, I know I'm good?

No.

What it is - is sheer dumb mulish obstinacy. I said a long time ago that I wouldn't quit, and I just won't. I don't care if God notices or not, I don't care if the work's any good or not. I'll keep going because.

Just because.

Loving Monday Morning

For a lot of couples, the transition from a nice weekend to the workweek to come can be fraught with peril.

It's all too easy to lose the good feelings and memories of the weekend, last thing Sunday night. Think of a weekend's memories as a vase; you can take it into work with you, and look at it when the office politicos are rampaging through the cubicles, empire-building away with grimly gay abandon.

Or, if you drop and shatter that lovingly crafted vase, you'll walk through the office door looking like the Taliban's latest recruiting poster. At least the political animals will leave you alone, 'cause their hats would;d look stupid sitting directly on their shoulders.

It's so easy to drop the vase. One careless word, one nudge from the evil eye of the television, and the joy-lights will flicker. The word becomes a sentence, and a harangue, and the joy-light gutters out, leaving only wisps of smoke to remind you of what was. (Vases and lights, and didn't I have a blast, mixing metaphors!)

Keeping the magic alive is easier than you think. It takes choices, and it takes discipline. Just two major parameters!

But beyond those, here are some further, practical applications of what you can do -

• Don't watch the local or national news late on Sunday night. Newscasting is entertainment, pure and simple, and broadcasters count their programs as being effective if they can instill either disgust or outrage. They give you an itch, so you'll want to watch more, scratching it. Fine for their ratings, but at best divisive for you as a couple. Sunday evening should be a time to be together, but the news is designed to compartmentalize you, keep you in a 'locked room' with the newscaster. So...why not turn off the TV after the end of Downton Abbey? Just set the rest of the evening as quiet time. (If you need to know the weather - a prime excuse for watching the local news - get it off the Internet during the day.)
• No controversial subjects, either for you personally (like family finances, or when are the remodelers going to put the roof back on the living room?), or generally (like, say, North Korea). If you need to get some personal stuff done over the weekend, pick a time during the day. Not last thing Sunday.
• This will sound odd - but no sex. Make Saturday 'date night', and set aside Sunday as a night of closeness and intimacy, but no intercourse. The reason is that we all tend to start mentally planning for the week, and not being 'there' for your mate can be demoralizing. It's a very grounded need, to be appreciated on that level, and competing with Monday's eight-o'clock meeting can lead to tears, or worse. Accept that, and develop physical closeness that will bring you together - but will also allow for the inevitable independent thinking, without hurt feelings.

Going out the door on Monday with a warm glow from a nice 48 hours can set the tone for the day, the week, and sometimes your whole career.

It can help you recognize opportunity, mend rifts, and overcome obstacles. Riding the crest of a wave of joy will bring sunshine into the workplace.

Care to give it a try?

The Politics of Pity

When Norman Vincent Peale wrote The Power of Positive Thinking in the 1950s, you'd think that no one, up to that point, had even had a positive thought in their life.

It was revolutionary, the way that suddenly you could actually have some control over your thoughts, and over what would happen in your life! Peale's book gave birth to a whole host of successors - one might say to the entire self-help section of your local bookstore.

But, positive thinking goes against something in human nature. There is something in us that clings to unhappiness, that wants, almost desperately, to make things out to be worse than they really are. To paint ourselves as helpless pawns in a rigged game of cosmic chess, or as flotsam in a torrent leading only to an eternal sewer.

Why? Simple. We want pity. We want to be relieved of responsibility through raising others to feel sorry for us. If we can do this - we've turned adversity into a perverse accomplishment.

It's the gift that keeps on giving, because 'accomplishing pity' traps us within its web. If we rise above the circumstances that put us there, pity will be withdrawn.

Not wanting to lose what we fought to gain, we absolve ourselves of the responsibility for our own actions. and we live there, professional victims in a room lit by flickering bathos.

Ugh.

Victimhood becomes politicized, and a cause in itself. If you feel you can claim victimization, you're news. If there are a lot of people who share your experiences, you're Big News.

If you had problems but overcame them, you're No News.

It can be a generational curse. Much like beggars in the Far East, professional victims maim their chilkdren; instead of cutting off a limb, or disfiguring a face, they imbue their kids with the certain knowledge that they're special for what they've been denied by evil design.

And, finally, victimhood becomes part of the national fabric. We're a decent country - the United States has gone to war several times to liberate others, and we've never kept an inch of conquered land. That's nearly unique; only Canada has done the same.

This decency makes us, all of us, cringe in guilt at those poor people. We want to help them, somehow.

We don't get a choice. We're forced to help, by a bludgeon of guilt, to open our pocketbooks, and to assume an uncritical view of professional victims.

But what would happen if we said, GET OVER IT ALREADY!

I wonder.

What Do We Owe the Past?

"The English Patient", Michael Ondaatje's elegiac novel (and the subsequent film) is purportedly based on the life of Hungarian Laszlo de Almasy, a nobleman who explored the Egyptian and Libyan deserts during the 1930s, and who, after an ill-starred romance in whose course he reluctantly aids the German Afrika Korps, dies of burns in an Italian hospital.

It's a well-written story, and a visually beautiful film. Unfortunately, it's as phony as a three-dollar bill.

Almasy was a real person. His claims to nobility are disputed, but his explorations of the Sahara are not - he discovered hitherto unknown 'swimming man' petroglyphs that indicated, for the first time, that the huge desert was once well-watered. He was by all accounts brave and resourceful.

He was also a supporter of Hitler, and willingly worked as a guide for the Afrika Korps. He died in 1951 in Austria.

So, what's wrong with a little bit of artistic license? Doesn't basing the main character on a real person make the story more attractive?

Indeed it does. Unfortunately, it;'s a bit too attractive, and the real Almasy disappears behind his fictional counterpart. His real story is interesting; he was a proficient desert navigator, and delivered two Nazi spies to Cairo in 1942. He could have been instrumental in forming an irregular raiding force for the Germans, much like the British Long Range Desert group, founded by Ralph Bagnold (who literally wrote the book on sand dunes - "Physics of Blown Desert Sand" was used by NASA to study sand dunes on Mars).

But the Germans didn't take the opportunity, and Almasy's role was limited to guiding small units around the flanks of Britain's Eighth Army.

So what?

Lots. The Second World War is the defining event of the 20th century, and has shaped the world we live in today. Understanding the mechanisms that were set in place by that conflict and refined through the subsequent decades is vital for charting a successful course through the dangers that face the free world.

To understand something, you have to know it. The real it, not a novelist's imagined world. And we are losing direct experience of that period in history every day. In a decade, there will be virtually no combat veterans left living. In two or three decades, the war will pass from living memory, and literature is all we'll have left.

We owe it to ourselves, our children, and not least of all the people who lived at that time to represent it accurately. There's nothing wrong with novels or films set against the backdrop of the war, but playing with facts to make a better tale goes beyond a boundary I think we ought to respect.

What do you think?

(By the way - Almasy's romance with the lovely Katherine would certainly not have occurred in real life. He was a homosexual.)

The Toughest Question in Evangelism

How do you talk about Christ to someone who already has a strong - and different - faith?

It's one of the hardest jobs in evangelism, and I'm not sure that there is a good answer, any more than there is one 'right' answer.

To begin with, you have to start from a position of respect. A devout Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist is probably already living a life, in its details, that many Christians would consider good, even holy. To dismiss, or worse denigrate that will result in the shades being drawn against you - and worse, against Jesus.

You're an ambassador for Christ, remember - and the most important thing you can do is to do what He would do. And he treated almost everyone with care, compassion, and respect. (The merchants in the temple are an exception, all the more powerful because of the contrast with his usual way of working.)

As Christ's representative, the most powerful tool you have to convince someone is the effect of Christ on your life. Quoting the Bible won';t help - every other religion has scriptures. Promises of Heaven won't help - every other religion believes that its adherents will achieve eternal life (and they usually believe that you, as a Christian will too...this is where they may feel that they are a step ahead of you, at least in 'tolerance').

What Christianity has, that no other major religion does (at least to nearly the same degree), is the willingness to service and sacrifice. Christ's example is one of dying so that others might live, and that is possibly the strongest ethos in the human soul.

But be careful - if you take that into the redemption of original sin, Adam's sin, you'll lose your argument. Most non-Christians simply don't believe it, and feel that there's an element of unfairness so glaring, blaming all of us for Adam's sin, that they see the Christian God as preposterous.

Far better is to use His death as the ultimate victory over the last enemy - death. To say that He died and rose to show us that this is what the world will be like, from that moment on, opens eyes and hearts.

The rest, original sin and all, will be learned in due time. But you need an open door, and this is one you can't break down.

You can only knock, and when the door's opened, extend your hand, leaving the rest to God.

Science and Truth

When a politician says something, we don't believe it - and we shouldn't.

When a scientist says something, we usually believe it.

Sometimes we should. And sometimes we shouldn't.

The common perception is that science is about truth. Many young people enter the profession, thinking that they'll be able to work in a rarefied purity of purpose. They imagine that the discoveries they make, small or large, will move mankind toward a better and more complete understanding of Creation.

It doesn't work out that way.

Science is about money, and it's about politics. Truth can be a convenient platform. And that's all.

1. Science is about models. We don't know how the world really works, and this side of Heaven, we never will. So we construct models of mathematical equations and chemical reactions that describe what we see. We start small, using a situation for which we know the limits, and for which we know the answers, and build a series of procedures by which we can use scientific tools - math and chemistry - to reproduce, on paper and in the laboratory, what we see. These models are proved - 'validated' - by applying them to a larger number of examples for which we don't know as much going in but we know 'where we're supposed to end up'.
2. Science is about money. It takes horrendous amounts of cash to pay professors, graduate student assistants, and technicians. Equipment also costs money, and the university or institute gets a cut ('overhead') of ten to fifty percent of the total cost of the project (overhead pays for buildings, clerical support, toilet paper...the non-glamorous stuff). A scientist applies for grants from agencies like the national Science Foundation, or from industry, to solve problems that are of current interest - and these interests are often driven by either making money, or saving money.
3. Science is about politics. It really depends on where you're from, and whom you know. If you work at a university that's 'in', and you got a PhD working for a professor who's popular, your chances of being 'funded' are good. If you're from a small Christian college in the Midwest, and got your degree from a journeyman technical college, you probably won't see a cent. The value of what you want to do is of really minor importance. You may have a cure for breast cancer but if your credentials aren't 'cool' your work won't be supported.

This may sound discouraging, and it is. The scientific world - the real one, driven by the factors that allow things to get done, money and power, simply doesn't care about truth. It cares about supporting its own.

Good things do get done, but it's not nearly what could be accomplished.

As a case in point, the cause - and cure - for stomach ulcers was discovered in the late 1980s. A researcher in Perth, Western Australia, found that ulcers were caused by bacteria, and could be cured by antibiotics. To prove it, he drank a cup of water containing the disease-causing organisms. He got ulcers, and cured himself with the appropriate antibiotics.

You'd think that he would have been hailed a hero. Quite the contrary - he was told that his research was of only limited value, because he didn't come from a big-name school, and he didn't work at a major university. The results were buried, published in a minor journal, and ignored, until an 'approved' researcher deigned to follow up his work, twenty years later.

So - the next time a scientist steps forward to tell you the 'truth' - smile, and nod.

And know where he's coming from.