Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
All War Depends Upon It
“You hid in that ditch because you think there’s still hope. But, Blithe, the only hope you have is to accept the fact that you’re already dead. And the sooner you accept that, the sooner you’ll be able to function as a soldier’s supposed to function. Without mercy, without compassion, without remorse. All war depends upon it.” — Captain Ronald Speirs to Private Albert Blithe, Band of Brothers
Give up hope? I’m not one to argue with Saint Paul on the theological virtue of hope, and neither am I advocating we adopt the tactics of antifa or BLM, but something rings tragically true about the good Captain’s statement. I’m “hoping” Ricochet’s warrior caste will have something to say about it, so I guess I haven’t given up on it completely.
But, I have found, after a number of significant tragedies in my life, that hope for resolution in this life is unhelpful to basic functioning, at best. I could hope that the drug used to treat Little Miss Anthrope’s brain tumor will cause it to shrink and the results will show up in the next three-month MRI, and the next one, and the next one. . . I could hope that her condition (NF Type 1) will not further devastate her body and she’ll be able to lead a normal life one day. I could hope that Elder will overcome the effects of her medical conditions and treatments and that she will thrive at Hillsdale and reach her goals.
Some are more mundane hopes, like the hope I could have every afternoon when Colorado’s notoriously violent thunderstorms roll in that the hail won’t trash the garden I love and tend.
But, these hopes are debilitating when they don’t pan out. If I give into them, it makes me want to passively sit in a ditch and watch the battle rage around me. I stop fighting the everyday fight: get up, bathe, dress, take care of my family, tend the garden. . .
Politics is war, too. Some of us hope that, after Donald Trump, we can return to more conventional (Reagan) Republicanism. These same people are sitting in a ditch radioing in their complaints to Decorum Conservative HQ about how Trump is conducting the war. He’s doing it all wrong!!! Meanwhile, well before Donald Trump ran for president, the forces of the Left captured all the cultural high ground of idea transmission, from academia, social media, entertainment media, news media. . . and it is holding these advantageous positions and, rapidly now, taking more of them. “But, Trump tweets!” is just an act of capitulation, or worse — betrayal.
Life is war, too. It’s a constant battle against princes and principalities — against our own fallen nature. This is what Saint Paul is getting at with his theological virtue: without God, we’re hopeless. There’s no way we win this war on our own.
I once commented on a profound lesson I learned from the BBC drama Apparitions, about a Catholic exorcist in London. In the two episodes I watched, it is Satan who gives hope to the suffering at the price of their souls. He actually keeps his promises to win the temporal battle (to cure leprosy, for example), but by enticing the person into the ditch, he condemns the victim to hell. In real life drama, Jesus is the one who says, “take up your cross and follow.”
“Our perfect rest is Paradise. Here below we must stay near Jesus, and upon earth, Jesus presents himself above all upon the cross. That is his official portrait. He gives us little joys so that we may be able to endure life and merit our heaven, but he blends a portion of the cross with them. He will certainly give you the grace to manage your affairs if you confide yourself to his love. Don’t think too much of the future. Live in the present. The future will bring its own grace when the trial comes. . .
“Blosius, a great Benedictine mystic, says that the best form of mortification is to accept with all our heart, in spite of our repugnance, all that God sends or permits, good and evil, joy and suffering. I try to do this. Let us try to do it together, and to help one another to reach that absolute abandonment into the hands of God. . .
“Keep your soul set at large and act with the holy liberty of the children of God who has taken possession of your soul and if you abandon yourself without reserve to his wisdom and love, he will send you many mortifications far better than any you could choose for yourself.” — Blessed Columba Marmion, O.S.B.
In my own phrasing, lay down the struggle with temporal hope; take up the eternal fight and get out of that ditch, soldier!
Epilogue: Private Blithe did climb out of that ditch and learn to kill Germans. In 1944 (corrected), he was leading a patrol when he was injured and, unlike as portrayed in the series, he did not die of those injuries in 1948. He survived and made it home, but died of a perforated ulcer in 1967 in a German hospital. He’s buried in Arlington Cemetery, PA. He fought the good fight. RIP.
A beautiful essay. May each of us get the message through our heads that this is no time for focusing on superficialities, but that it’s a war. May we realize that fussing over Trump’s personality or acting all superior for noticing that he’s brash (news flash: we know that already) doesn’t make us oh-so-intelligent, but rather it makes us blind to what is happening around us and what the stakes are.
May each of us realize that nobody cares if you have to hold your nose to vote for Trump. Just do it. Because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.
Hope, you say? Yes, I know her of old. Lovely garden, by the way.
This is the Quote of the Day. We still have six open dates this month. If you hear or read something interesting, why not sign up to share that quotation on one of those dates?
Have you ever played tug-of-war with a dog? The dog doesn’t care about which way he pulls, just that he is opposing you. You can walk around and the dog will surely pull 180 degrees from before. Politics is like that. While there are basic philosophies inherent in people, the day-to-day fighting is just pure opposition. Therefore, it is impossible to return to Reagan unless we return to what Reagan opposed (oil embargo, malaise, USSR). Maybe China aggression + Wuhan economy will make for the conditions where the next Reagan comes about, but I think cancel culture and Big Tech will be important and thus culture wars will continue with our future presidential candidates. It is Josh Hawley vs. AOC for the next decade.
As for hope, many people are hoping that cancel culture will not come for their job. Many are hoping that the Marxist fervor will burn itself out quickly. But that is not going to happen. These things will need to be beaten with effort and once people give up the hope for pain-free deliverance and realize they have to fight too, then the better off we’ll be.
Thanks for this. Man, did I need it.
And yes, that is a lovely garden. I want to walk into that picture and into the cottage.
Read your incredible essay to Jody. He was yahoooing your following statement. Perfect metaphor.
“These same people are sitting in a ditch radioing in their complaints to Decorum Conservative HQ about how Trump is conducting the war. He’s doing it all wrong!!! Meanwhile, well before Donald Trump ran for president, the forces of the Left captured all the cultural high ground of idea transmission, from academia, social media, entertainment media, news media. . . and it is holding these advantageous positions and, rapidly now, taking more of them. “But, Trump tweets!” is just an act of capitulation, or worse — betrayal. “
Great essay. No argument with it except that the ‘Trump tweets’ sometimes become a distraction because they are ill-timed and, occasionally, just plain stupid. They become a distraction from the war we need to be fighting. It’s a bit akin to General George S. Patton’s off-the-cuff remarks that the British and Americans were destined to rule the world after World War II. Those remarks were just an unnecessary distraction.
When I look at the upcoming election (not just the Presidential, but the Senate and House of Representatives) I see it as a war for our own survival. It’s not hard to harken back to Winston Churchill’s words that if we lose,
“…all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science…”
In a sense, the brand of Progressivism that we now see has become the “perverted science” that Churchill alluded to. Our universities have been the laboratories for this science and have spawned the practitioners that have, in turn, perverted the mainstream media and judicial systems.
We have less than 120 days to win this war. There is no time for distractions. We already know the enemy’s strategy; yesterday, Joe Biden sent out his own Joseph Goebbels, (press secretary, T.J. Ducklo) to accuse President Trump of backing “white supremacist causes”. We can expect this right up until the eve of the election.
Another thing that Republicans must expect will be “October Suprises” at every level. I am confident that Democratic operatives (think Sid Blumenthal) are busy composing these in concert with their toadies in the Mainstream Media.
Like it or not, Republicans/Conservatives will have to master the art of the “clean narrative” that is presently being used against us by the national media. As Greg Gutfeld has pointed out, “the media take a simple story with a villainous cop, an innocent victim and an easy-to-understand moral to the tale.” As outrageous as this is, it’s working. Republicans/Conservatives need to turn the tables on the Progressives and make this strategy work against them.
We presently have a pathetic creature hunkering down in his basement, confident that he can stay there until his inauguration. It’s time to show him that it’s not happening.
It has been a long time since I have been in that lovely garden. Perhaps in the near future I can revisit and show my wife all of the lovely flowers there….
As for whether Trump is doing things wrong in terms of his communication style and his choice of messages (for example, spending time defending the Confederate flag and criticizing NASCAR), the acid test will be the November 2020 election verses Joe Biden.
Biden is senile. But if Biden cleans Trump’s clock this November despite Biden’s senility, that will be prima facie evidence that Trump has done things wrong in terms of how he chose to communicate.
You don’t have to go full bore Mitt Romney to appreciate the electoral advantages of presenting oneself as calm, informed and articulate to the public.
So much of the perception of Trump’s communications is manufactured by the left-wing media. And there are many, many other factors that will decide the 2020 election, including the economy, the death toll from COVID, the chaos in the streets, the tensions with China, . . . His tweets tend to affect the people who twitter, which isn’t anywhere near the majority voters.
The upside of Trump’s communication style is it has exposed so many who we thought were right-wing allies as, um, not. As Klavan says, that will be his lasting accomplishment no matter what happens in November.
This is how Rush Limbaugh describes hope:
Hope is the fool’s excuse for doing nothing.
If you want a daily dose of optimism, enthusiasm, and courage in the face of overwhelming odds (Stage 4 lung cancer), listen to Rush every day.
In 1969 the Corps made a tour in Viet Nam 12 months vice the 13 it had been. That time period provided me with 365 occasions for hope. Among all of the differences between 1944 and 1969 was the introduction of the timed length of a tour of duty with a definite ending. Our WW II fighters were in it for the duration. To sustain hope for an indefinite amount of time, under the conditions of combat in that war, would strain the reservoir I would think.
I saw somewhere that the guys in WWII saw combat an average of one in forty-two days. The beginnings of Air Cav and such meant later guys can fight more often. I don’t know how that shakes out overall.
Maybe in the Pacific. I doubt that was true in Europe.
Really excellent essay. That is one of the smartest things I have ever read.
That is one of my all-time favorite movie scenes. For as much as those guys worried about Speirs as being sort of a psycho, they always liked his leadership and he always moved things forward as was the case in this scene. He knew exactly how to help the guy, and he did it. I have almost never had any form of leadership that good in my life.
Too many Republicans are very dense about this.
I just listened to the William Bennett show podcast where Bennett discussed Trump’s campaign for re-election with Conrad Black.
They both seemed to acknowledge that Trump’s personality and behavior is contributing to Biden’s superior position over Trump in the presidential race. Bennett mentioned the huge percentage of voters who’s main motivation for voting for Biden is antipathy to Trump.
So, “Trump tweets” is not an example of capitulation or betrayal. It’s a fact, one that could cause the demise of the Trump re-election effort.
I have long loved the Band of Brothers quote. It’s paradoxical, but it really helps. So, yes, I’ve surrendered all hope that Trump will try a bit of self-discipline and be a better man. Acceptance and resignation. That’s the ticket. But I’m not giving up my God-given right to complain. That is an ancient and honored (by repetition, anyway) tradition of soldiering.
Right, it’s just not helpful to you or the cause.
Are you talking to me, Rufus? /blushing
I’m learning so much about leadership watching this series. What is it about Speirs and Winters that makes them such good leaders? It’s their ability to recognize what their people need when they need it. As a parent, I have too often failed at this. It’s painful, but that’s how we grow, right? Right?? /Lord, I hope I’m still learning to be better
It’s hard to believe that Winters ended the war as a major and Speirs as a lieutenant (as best I can recall).
My question is how do we fight? It seems that the only form of protest we see is a Trump rally. And here I do hope that people are not intimidated by the cancel culture to the extent that they would step back from participating in such rallies this year. Conservatives briefly protested exaggerated quarantine measures (in Michigan, for example) but I wonder if our lack of public protests comes from a fear that having your picture taken while rallying for a conservative cause could cost you your livelihood, to say nothing of speaking out openly or on social media with your actual name.
Yes, that’s just it. Fear. That’s why we need to accept, we’re “already dead.”
Tell the truth no matter where or under what circumstances. Donald Trump is reviled for this and may very well lose the election because of it (Andrew Klavan’s “The Left’s Assault on Black Lives” is excellent on the Katrina effect in use here).
Do it with charity, if possible, but don’t hope you won’t lose your job. Accepting that you will lose your job is the only way to overcome these totalitarians.
We won’t win unless we’re willing to incur the costs.
This comment got a surprising number of likes. I think that the first part is quite wrong, at least for the conservative side. I don’t think that I adopt positions simply to oppose the Democrats.
I agree. I think it’s the second paragraph that comports with the message of this post.
And therefore the federal republic.
My favorite part of Band of Brothers:
Funny thing, though, at the end of the Bastogne episode, the epilogue says the narrative is Patton came to save the 101st, but no one in the 101st ever admitted that they needed saving.
My father-in-law was Airborne Ranger (medic in Korea, ran a supply depot in Vietnam). That sounds just like him.