“Editing has pushed me to recognize when my own work is not succeeding and how essential revision is to the process. It’s also taught me that belief in a piece is essential to publication. Editing inspires, perhaps even demands, belief in a poem or story, enough to publish work that’s operating at its best quality. Also, to be on this end of the process increases my enthusiasm about submitting my own work and helps me accept any rejections. Because I’ve been in the position of saying, ‘We already have a story about ninja alien cats so while this is a good story, it’s too much ninja alien cats for one issue.’ So in that respect, I’m more accepting of rejection as a natural occurrence in the submissions process. On the flip side though, having edited and sent acceptances, I know it happens, that this isn’t some weird numbers game, that if the work demonstrates quality writing and is a good fit for a journal, it will get accepted.” – Gina Keicher (quoted in “An Interview with the Editors of Salt Hill,” by Roxane Gay)
“Cats and birds are wonderful, but they keep their own counsel and their own identity. They sit withing their own circles, even in the house, and let us spy, occasionally, on what it’s like out there. Only the dog sits right at the edge of the first circle of caring, and points to the great unending circles of Otherness that we can barely begin to contemplate.” – Adam Gopnik, “Dog Story”
Ninety-eight years ago on this very day the so-called Great War (aka, the World War, aka the First World War) “broke out,” as wars are said to do. How did this misfortune come about? Through an unstoppable cascade of double-dog dares, to wit:
A Serbian nationalist assassinated an Austrian (aka, Austro-Hungarian) duke;
The Austrians (aka, Austro-Hungarians) demanded some stuff from the Serbians for reparations;
The Serbians said, No way, man;
The Austrians (aka, Austro-Hungarians) said, You don’t give over, we’re going to attack;
The Serbians said, So attack, we double-dog dare you;
The Russians said to the Austrians (aka, Austro-Hungarians), We be friends with the Serbians and if you be attacking them, we be attacking you;
The Austrians (aka, Austro-Hungarians) said, So attack, we double-dog dare you;
The Germans said to the Russians, We be friends with the Austrians (aka, Austro-Hungarians, though we prefer the Austrians) and if you be attacking them, we be attacking you;
The Russians said, So attack, we double-dog dare you;
The French said to the Germans, We be friends with the Russians, since their dukes and duchesses and stuff all speak French, and if you be attacking them, we be attacking you;
The Germans said, So attack, we double-dog dare you;
The British, who more or less wanted to stay out of things–or, truth be told, wanted to play all these other folks off against each other so they could scoop up the pieces–said, We don’t really have a dog in this fight, but we do be friends with the Belgians so if anyone (and Germans, we mean you) thinks to march through Belgium to get to, oh, let’s say France, perchance, well, you see, it would be a terrible bother, but we can’t see how we would have any choice other really, than to come to their aid, what with it being impolite to do otherwise;
To which the Germans said, We double-dog dare you, you irrelevant English swine (which was fisticuffs-provoking insult to those British who were not English).
All the double-dog dares being in place and ignored, the attacks and counterattacks and countercounterattacks and countercountercounterattacks ad nauseam began and forty million (40,000,000) dead people later they ended. Along the way, Japan and the United States entered the war, also as part of the double-dog-dare cascade, to wit:
Japan saw an opportunity to pitch in with the what were called Allies and scoop up German territories in the Pacific. They double-dog dared the Germans to try and stop them, to which the Germans muttered, We cannot stop you, all our dogs are in other fights.
The United States just wanted to make money and when the Germans started fucking with the money-maker by sinking United Stateser ships, the United States said, Stop it or we’ll pitch in with the what are called Allies and we will show you a thing or two.
The Germans said, You are degenerate Americans and we double-dog dare you.
So the degenerate Americans from the United States Thereof pitched in and the what were called Allies won and the decline of Western Civilization, which began on this date ninety-eight years ago, continued apace, with the American Empire coming along after yet a second world war (they couldn’t get it right the first time?) to shine and burn brightly as the final efflorescence of what for a half-millennium had been a powerful civilization pretty full of itself but quickly at its end going to the dogs.
“‘The market’—like ‘dialectical materialism’—is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason (it is not open to question). It has its true believers—mediocre thinkers by contrast with the founding fathers, but influential withal; its fellow travelers—who may privately doubt the claims of the dogma but see no alternative to preaching it; and its victims, many of whom in the US especially have dutifully swallowed the pill and proudly proclaim the virtues of a doctrine whose benefits they will never see.” – Tony Judt, “Captive Minds”
“Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers.” – Tony Judt, “Ill Fares the Land” (emphasis in original)
“Under our Constitution there can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race. That concept is alien to the Constitution’s focus upon the individual. To pursue the concept of racial entitlement–even for the most admirable and benign of purposes–is to reinforce and preserve for future mischief the way of thinking that produced race slavery, race privilege and race hatred. In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American.” — Anthony Scalia, Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Mineta, 534 U.S. 103 (1995)
“The novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth—not a different truth: the same truth—only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.” – Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative (emphasis in original)
“One meets all sorts of men in the army, and he often finds himself in a crowd of the very roughest of the human species. But human nature is very much the same everywhere. No matter how ‘rough’ a man may become, or how wicked, he naturally admires the excellent qualities of others, and condemns their faults very much the same as do those more cultivated and virtuous. To be popular with such men, it is only necessary to be unselfish. A selfish man is popular nowhere. His ill nature will creep out in a thousand ways in spite of him, and bring all his virtues into contempt.” – Wilbur Fisk, Hard Marching Every Day (eds. E. and R. Rosenblatt)
“The scenes in a soldier’s life are continually shifting, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, and we soldiers get to be nearly as indifferent about the matter, and care as little where we go, as a horse cares where his driver may see fit to drive him. And we have just as little voice in the matter as a horse has. One day a soldier may be in his tent comfortable, contented, and happy, and the next day on a march with but few of the world’s comforts and but little cause of contentment except what he finds within himself. A soldier’s time and services are not his own, they belong to the Government which he has sworn to defend, and it is his duty to be ever ready and obey with alacrity whatever the Government calls upon him to do. Sometimes a streak of good luck will turn up to a soldier whether he deserves it or not, and sometimes they won’t turn up though he may deserve it ever so well. It would be easy to mention a great many good boys in the ranks who have been doing duty at the front since the war began, but to whom no soft detail has ever been given, or any particular favors shown.” – Wilbur Fisk, Hard Marching Every Day (eds. E. and R. Rosenblatt)