And to All a Good Night

The National Review Online today features what you might charitably call a symposium, though without all that gay shit Plato had to—you’ll pardon the expression—shove in there. It’s called “Christmas at War,” and I imagine a heavy period to lend a little gravity to the pronunciation thereof: “Christmas. At War.” It is not to be confused with the War on Christmas, which is a discrete portion of a wider ideological struggle. If you’d asked me just hours ago if I believed that any table of contents would ever achieve the same gauzy silliness doing drag as necessary commentary as was achieved by this recent edition of TNR, I wouldn’t have believed it. And yet:


It is “Patton’s Prayer,” that reaches the highest aeries of kooky jingo nostalgia, a reminiscence of the Great Showboat personally calling on the assistance of god a-mighty to kill all the Krauts. All of the World-War-II-ia centers on a Patton who’s done even crazier than George C. Scott did him and a General Barry McAuliffe who comes off in Skelly’s piece as a sort of unhinged, merry psychopath, played, one imagines, by Mel Gibson. “Ever spend Christmas in Fallujah?” is actually about spending Christmas on Parris Island. It’s one of those manly-man hunting story things: we all froze our asses off out there and it was cold as hell and we didn’t shoot anything and Phil lost the tip of his pinky to frostbite, but damn it was a good time.” Count me out. I’ve never spent Christmas in Fallujah, but I’ve also never spent a Christmas hanging out in an abbatoir. I know the common human behavior is to make the whole table taste your disgusting appetizer at the restaurant, but I really see no reason to elevate human misery and suffering to an anecdote that will years late begin, “Well, it wasn’t so funny at the time . . .”