Notes on the Military-Industrial Complex
Kempton, Murray
Blown in the Wind Notes on the Military-Industrial Complex Murray Kempton The following was cunningly pirated from the editors' office of the New York Review of Books by our editor and...
...He spent his remaining years in Hawaii, where he died in 1935 at the age of seventeen years, eleven months...
...and then he asks about the cannon balls, and then he looks to the wind...
...The enormities of Pax Americana continue to singe the sensibilities of the few gentle idealists still staggering across the wasteland Amerika...
...On 9 February it was announced by the United States Air Force that they had found yet another method for memorializing those pathetic creatures maimed in the service of their country and twisted in the workings of this awful machine...
...Blown in the Wind Notes on the Military-Industrial Complex Murray Kempton The following was cunningly pirated from the editors' office of the New York Review of Books by our editor and second-story man, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Jones can wheel his Ford Ranchero right through on one of those weekend outings when he and his squalling puppies insouciantly glide down the freeway leaving a foul wake of "disposable" schlock and carbon monoxide...
...The "hero" survived though he was not discharged from service until 1921...
...Published without permission from the New York Review of Books...
...Perhaps the Air Force will display poor Silver's body in a drive-in window so Mr...
...A machine gun bullet had pierced his breast and his right leg had been torn off when a shell exploded near him while he struggled under heavy German fire...
...Stumpy John Silver is to be mounted in permanent display at the Air Force Museum of Wright Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio...
...And we erect monuments from the flesh of those valiantly departed, and the sweet poet asks again more plaintively "...how many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand...
...And near Dayton, Ohio they will raise John Silver's body on a pole so we can gawk...
...and so the great wheels continue to turn...
...Silver delivered a message through "enemy" lines to a destination twenty-five miles away, despite serious injury...
...Yes, the Air force has decided to actually mount Silver's body in their infamous display, so that all the cocktail gutted middle Americans can parade their funky wives and sniveling darlings before this inspiring desecration...
...It was in 1918 that Mr...
...On the plaque that will be placed beneath Silver's body the Air Force states that Stumpy John Silver (named after the one-legged pirate in Treasure Island) was but one of many homing pigeons who served the American forces with valor in the War to End Wars...
...Putatively the display is a symbol of "the heroic and faithful service" of Stumpy John and his class to "the American combat forces during the First World War...
Vol. 4 • April 1971 • No. 5
