reviewing

Continuing The road to Tunis. This really brings the allied struggle in that part of the world to life. The climate and conditions, the attitude of the natives, the entanglement of the Gaullists, the Vichy military and the French colonials, the battle strategies, the equipment and supplies, the men of the various allied nations, the qualities of the commanders, the exhilarating, gut-wrenching physical and emotional ride of it all. Many things will remain with me, moments of death and glory, and one of the most interesting was the behaviour of much of the German military immediately after surrender – joking and relaxed in dealing with those they’d been trying to kill only hours before. As a person who could never join up with a military outfit for the simple reason that I just would not be able to shoot at people under any but the most exceptional circumstances, I’m intrigued by those who are able to inure themselves to such activity, presumably to achieve some higher good.

I think what I would find difficult would be shooting at other people who are just caught up in something, like the military machine of their own country – and you’d never know if the person you’d just shot was fighting you out of hatred, out of more or less misplaced patriotism, for mercenary motives, through testosterone overload, or with some reluctance. If it was Himmler or Goering in my sights I wouldn’t hesitate, knowing what I know, but of course it’s almost always the ‘common’ foot-soldier, an unknown quantity, who comes into your sights. That’s the most horrible element of war, it’s the innocent or the duped that end up killing and being killed. And they can do their job with incredible proficiency, sometimes. They take pride in the mastery of small but deadly tasks.

I’ve spent much of the morning reading John Quiggin’s blog. A post entitled ‘Howard’s record’, written to mark the fact that Howard has just overtaken Hawke to become Australia’s second-longest-serving Prime Minister, has generated some 42 comments, many of them longer than the original post. The post reviews the period of Howard’s tenure and concludes that it has largely been a do-nothing government. The various comments elaborate, argue, point out omissions and so forth, and though they inevitably tend to become tetchy point-scoring slanging matches as I scroll to the end, they’re for the most part well-informed and well-argued. Reading them through gives me a renewed sense of the passion and the quality to be found in Australian political debate, and in the blogosphere at its best. Quite apart from agreeing or disagreeing, I don’t follow all the lines of reasoning, especially those based on economics, and I still don’t know what the CGT is and how it might have affected housing prices, but all in all if you want to reflect on Australia’s political history over the past decade you couldn’t do better than to start here.

Last night, watched a Hollywood movie, ‘A few good men’, which was remarkably good, by which I mean the language was rich, fast-flowing and smart and the story often went over my head (which isn’t surprising, I tend to vague out with movies). More tomorrow.