Today marks the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War. As the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month approaches, Captain Harry S. Truman spent the time furiously pumping artillery shells into the German lines. Then all fell silent.
History records an eerie feeling overtook the battlefields. Suddenly there were no orders given, no tasks at hand. Suddenly, there was no purpose. A feeling of elation, but an empty feeling nonetheless.
Gone were the certainties of life, for millions had witnessed firsthand how fragile and temporal it is; and many millions more, who dealt with the consequences derivatively, would experience a creeping, certain, inward cynicism. And for many the leap back across the chasm between the hell of war and the long-awaited-for paradise of peace would prove impossible. It was a horrendous sacrifice given subsequent history.
The struggle became known to the next generation as The Great War; known to us as the First World War, for there would be yet another to follow. It wasn't the end of the madness. It proved only to be Act One. After an interregnum of twenty years...just enough time to grow another generation of cannon fodder, the war resumed with more horrifying consequence and Captain Harry Truman would find himself again firing the last shot of that war as well.
They are all gone now, those men who endured. I remember their forms and faces, fragile and wrinkled in old age, marching in the parades of my youth. I remember the selling of paper poppies, a reminder of the war, for poppies dotted the fields of Flanders before the armies reduced them to black and grey, and would again return when the guns fell silent. They stood, amid the terror, as a benchmark of hope that life would indeed go on in this time of terror. The poppy would forever stand transfixed in the minds of those who found themselves hung on the barbed wire and face down in the mud.
There was always the mud, the stench, the rats. But foremost there was always dead and the dying. Death everywhere and constant like the death rattle of mankind.
It has been a century now as we mark the end of the madness of a war that defined the century and whose repercussions find us still.
To commemorate the milestone our Caesar Disgustus is off to France making the event, as usual, all about himself. Disgustus cannot socialize without insult; he cannot act inoffensively in solemn circumstance.
Accordingly, and predictably, he no sooner landed in France when he insulted the French President because Marcon had suggested that the European Union form its own military force. What other options present themselves in the wake of the open declaration of Disgustus that the United States stands now prepared to go it alone? What security is there now in American assurance?
It is a faux outrage, of course, since nothing about Disgustus rings genuine, except, of course, the incessant narcissism. As he begs out of a ceremony honoring the dead because it was raining, he further undermines by his every act the international relationships that have kept the peace all these years. By going to Europe, Disgustus does not honor the sacrifice, he defiles it.
It has been a century now. As time has passed the ideals enshrined in Wilson's 14 points and the promise of the American Century has been tested by war and by a long and tenuous peace. The American standard, like old glory at Fort McHenry, is now tattered and torn and, until recently, has yet stood as a beacon around which most of the world would happily stand.
Not any more. Disgustus defiles our national honor and the hope that is America. Rapidly dismantling the world we had hoped to create in our image he marks the eclipse of the American Century; the end of American greatness. We find ourselves once again hung on wire and face down in the mud.
"An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh"
Impeach and Imprison.
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