Gloomy New Year Thoughts
Van Loon's Diary Gloomy New Year Thoughts THESE are curious days. No matter how lousy * the commercial, a few yodelers intone the famous old Bavarian song about the Silent and Holy Night and bow...
...This paper-campaign is one of the queerest incidents of these unfortunate days...
...But I do resent as one of the participant in this conflict (aren't we all...
...For we are in no way prepared...
...The other day 1 'went t<i one of my usual eating places...
...That makes for a certain deficit within my own emotional life...
...I don't know...
...The restaurants arc having fashion shows...
...I SEE that His Holiness too has done some more ¦ praying...
...I have got to write me a couple of books and so I shall just give up trying to find out and wait until after the war and then take a list and check the victims off...
...BHt of course I can do marvelous deeds of valor to help win the war right here...
...I now save every drop of grease and fat and I send my letters without envelopes to save paper...
...Uncle Joe-Joe is sitting there with the face of the eat who has just eaten the Canary and a derisive expression of "we ain't saying nothin...
...I fear me that there will be very few I shall ever see again...
...I like the spot because the food is good and Mischa—bless his soul is one of the few good Hungarian fiddlers leu on .our continent...
...No matter how lousy * the commercial, a few yodelers intone the famous old Bavarian song about the Silent and Holy Night and bow dare you question the pious intentions of the sponsors who between ghastly figures about slaughtered marines will cheerfully inform you that you can now be as tall as she is, a message qf hope and comfort which they should send by short wave to southern Italy where that noble and brilliant Monarch, the deeply esteemed Victor Emmanuel will be delighter with the prospect of for once kissing his dear Monte negrinian spouse right on the smacker...
...I knew that this would have to come some time for one can only make war by either killing or getting killed...
...One of these days the big guns of the British Channel ports will begin to speas...
...Ninet> nine per cent of my thoughts are with the pooi kids in the Italian mud and slush and the jungles of the Pacific And meanwhile New York has become one vast Kermess or country fan or whatever you want to call it...
...He was just as eloquent as the Pope and he said just as little...
...AM) so it goes...
...I anticipate two months of such hideous news that my wobbly heart trembles at the mere thought of it...
...The illustrations too are exquisite...
...But hehold, every day I get beautifully printed catalogues from our leuding department stores and those booklets (sometimes they grow into regulai tomes) are printed on the most expensive paper of our nre-war abundance of woodptdp...
...May the good Lord have mercy upon us when we shall at last begin to understand the meaning of their messages of death and destruction and horror and grief...
...Heir is this morning's Tim** showing us a picture from Teheran and bring ing us a candid camera revelation of the (Jreal White Father, of Mr...
...Of course he has little opportunity for his art for the people who are solvent these days would not know a Czardas from a Rhumba and they greatly prefer the Waltz from Faust or the more sticky Grieg to anything else...
...And the blame for this does not rest with the public at large...
...I can't even discover how many of my friends and relatives in my native land are still alive or have been killed...
...Churchill do not understand a word of any Slavic tongue, the bright saying of the great Russian leader (and even if I poke fun occasionally at the man from the Kremlin I have a most profound respect for his intelligence and his courage) must have been somehow lost on his two companions...
...Thomas Watson, their President and a Knight of the White Eagle with the stars bestowed upon him by Adolf Hitler...
...I wonder what the Catholics of Austria whom he left to the' mercies of the Car dinal Archbishop of Vienna (a self-confessed Nasi) will think about it but I have no way of finding out...
...As Uncle Joe-Joe is completely ignorant of any language but his native tongue and Russian and as the Great White Father and Mr...
...Tliey merely get very, very rude and use lewd language and say thai they want to come home anil settle the hash of all those people who continue to keep up the pretense that war is merely a sort bf folkish-spending-feast and not the blood and sweat and pain and agony and suffering which they are so generously pouring into it...
...And it is no use asking my son and bis friends in the army...
...And so I arrived there all unsuspectedly until I noticed that I was expected to listen to a lady telling all about the evening dresses for the forthcoming seasons and what the undressed debutante would wear this winter at the southern resorts...
...Churchill and of Uncle Joe from the Kremlin...
...I don't know why this season of Good Cheer has been such a ghastly failure for me this year Of course I am out of step and I know it...
...I listened to the last broadcast of the Great White Father...
...I am asked to save paper and you are asked to save paper and being good and obedient citizens we save all we can...
...The other two statesmen lean forward with the eager expression of two salesmen of the International Business Machines Corporation at the annual "Think Feast" of that organisation trying to catch a nifty of the Hon...
...They advertise nothing that could possible be of any benefit to anybody during the most terrible war of all history...
...For it shows the great Tova-reesh showing so completely what he thinks of his neighbors ("we ain't saying nothin'") that it is a bjt painful...
...Apparently all thin lubbish is in great demand for otherwise why would it be so expensively advertised...
...But what use going on with my lamentations...
...that we have been kept in such complete ignorance about the real issues at stake...
...No, if I were the Timet photographic editor I would not have printed tnui particular photograph...
Vol. 27 • January 1944 • No. 1
