Many of the youngsters among us probably won't remember Dick Cavett from his
TV show decades ago, but it is nice to see he still has much to say. My
apologies for the length of this message, but I hope you will agree that it
is well worth reading to the end.
Dick Cavett in the NYTimes
February 28, 2007, 6:03 pm
What My Uncle Knew About War
<http://cavett.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/02/28/what-my-uncle-knew-about-war/>
Tell me, are you too getting just a little bit fed up with our leader's war?
Isn't everybody? Do you actually know anyone who thinks it's all going to
turn out fine? Except that chubby optimist Dick Cheney, of course, who
thinks the Titanic is still afloat.
And am I alone in finding our leader's behavior at press conferences
irritating? I mean that smirky, frat-boy joking manner he goes into while,
far away, people he dispatched to the desert are having their buttocks shot
away. It's worst when he does that thing of his that the French call making
a "moue"; when he pooches his lips out and thrusts his face forward in a way
that seems to say, "Aren't I right? And don't you adore me?"
As in his case, I was never a soldier, but God knows I wanted to be. Not in
later years when my draft number came up for real, but back in my
Nebraska grade-school days when Jimmy McConnell and Dickie Cavett watched
John Wayne in "Sands of Iwo Jima" at least five times, one of us
sneaking the other in free through the alley exit. Then we went home, got
our weapons (high-caliber cap pistols) and took turns being John
Wayne. The alley was Iwo Jima.
Years later I met Big John. It couldn't have been better. He was in full
cowboy drag on an old Western (studio) street and mounted on his great
horse Dollar. He looked exactly as he did in "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," and
it took my breath away. I didn't just like him, I loved him. I sorta
wished I hadn't liked him quite as much, so I could have asked him, "Duke,
how come not you nor any of your four strapping sons ever spent
one day in the armed services?" ("I'm merely asking," I might have added to
lighten the tone. Or delay the concussion.)
I didn't dodge the draft, and unlike our V.P. I didn't have "a different
agenda." I didn't have to. I had mononucleosis (imagine how the
"nuke-you-lur" president would injure /that/ word in pronunciation) and, my
draft board said, they had way too many guys and nothing was
happening, war-wise. Sound preposterous? And yet there was such a time.