But Seriously
Ben Stein
October 4, 2018, 12:05 am
The Kavanaugh beer wars.
As my loyal readers know by now, my wife is not in good health. She stays in bed almost all day, often with her old hubby lying next to her snoozing away. But at about 10 at night, we usually take out our DVDs and watch documentaries about World Wars I and II and the Korean War and Vietnam.
The best of all of these artifacts is a major British series called The World at War. Produced by the Brits, largely with the help of the incredibly fine Imperial War Museum, these are works of genius. Art, history, science, poetry, everything is included, although because it was a long WORLD war (World War II) some of the film is cruelly short. The accounts of the Battle of Midway and the many battles off the Philippine sea are FAR too short, just for example.
But for a bite-sized morsel of about twenty hours, it is glorious. You see courage, sacrifice, brains, idiocy, all in close proximity to each other. Just for my wife and me, we cannot watch more than a few minutes at a time without crying.
The end parts, where the narrator, Laurence Olivier, reels off the numbers of the dead from each major combatant, could make a stone weep.
I think of this, and then I think of the tragedies going on in the world right now: horrifying civil wars in Yemen and in Equatorial Africa, a fierce bloodletting in Syria. Terrible diseases ravaging Africa. Staggering violence in our Latin American neighbor nations. Cruel genocide against the Rohynga people of Burma. An everlasting threat about existence itself directed against my fellow Jews in Israel by Russia itself.
more
https://spectator.org/but-seriously/
