Eccentric Flower:199808/insomnia and warfare

twenty-five august ninety eight noon

insomnia and warfare

Good title, yes? Don't bother reading the entry, just enjoy the title. Sounds too much like a Steve Vai album though.

Although I do not sohelpme intend to become your maiden aunt who is continually giving you updates on how her bursitis is acting up, whether you like it or not, I need to say a few words about sleep. Specifically, mine.

I didn't write a postcard last night as promised. When I came home from work (early) I tried to nap because I was so tired. I couldn't sleep. Angry at sitting around with my brain befogged, at seven p.m. I tried to nap again. No dice.

I have suffered from intermittent insomnia ever since I was a very small child. My body usually is willing to sleep on cue, but my brain is often unwilling to let it. The brain just keeps whirling around, Tasmanian Devil style, even while the body can't keep its eyes open. Which is nearly the state I was in last night.

Unfortunately the brain depends on the body to communicate its ideas to the world, and the body was incapable of writing complete sentences last night. So here was the brain, steadily getting more and more steamed because it had all these things it wanted to write down, and the body was having none of it. Very frustrating.

On Sunday night I finally got to see Saving Private Ryan. What an internally contradictory movie.

The first half hour is absolutely brilliant, and as good an anti-war exemplar as you'll ever see. By never giving you the long vista, the cinematographer gets you thinking in terms of very small gains - claiming the next three feet of beach, not the next thirty. Everything slows to a crawl. The noise and the camera wobble and the washed-out colors all contribute to this sense of being unable to get your bearings, being unable to find a safe place to rest where the guns can't reach you. Ultimately the top of the beachhead wasn't very far from the landing boats at all, but it seemed like miles to the men climbing it, and the genius here is that it will seem like miles to you too.

The rest of the movie is a standard heroism-and-glory war movie, with the standard characters (all of them well-acted, though) and the standard setups. It's a very good war movie - but its view of heroism and Doing The Right Thing is straight out of a John Wayne pic, and rather undermines the blood and horror of the first half hour.

The only differences is that the characters are more aware of the stupidity of what they're doing (although they do it anyway), and some of the wrong people die. Otherwise it's Sands of Iwo Jima.

Look, I'm not that rabid a pacifist. I believe there were genuine and good reasons why World War II needed to be fought, and furthermore I believe it's the last war this country has yet been involved in where I'd have no qualms about signing up.

But we must also face the fact that if I had been alive then and I had gone to war, the odds say that I would not have lived through it.

There is no way to sugarcoat the fact that so many people were knowingly sent to the shores of France by the government in order to die. There is no way to sugarcoat the fact that all wars from the end of the Civil War to the end of the Vietnam era were wars of attrition - I can send more resources and manpower, and afford to lose more, than the enemy can.

That's a lousy way to fight, whether you're the person on the battlefield or the one who has to write letters to the mothers and widows.

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