"Go Take a Flying Fuck at a Rolling Doughnut!" -- Kurt Vonnegut

  

In a touching scene in the movie “Ford v Ferrari” Carroll Shelby, a Texan, tells a boy who lost his father in a racing accident, “Your Daddy thought you was finer than fur on a frog.” I was watching the movie in France in English with French subtitles. The translator said something like “Your father thought you were a very good boy.”

Metaphor, like poetry, does not translate easily or well.

The moment brought me back to trying to figure out military metaphor when I first enlisted.  The American military is more than 60% southern and western, so for a Boston Yankee like me, I had trouble understanding what some of the sergeants were saying. 

One of the first metaphors that confused me was hearing a sergeant say of a soldier struggling hopelessly with the wrong wrench for the job, “He looks like a monkey trying to fuck a football.”  I have a literal mind, so I could picture what he was saying, but could not understand why he was saying it.

But those ten words hold lots of meaning. A monkey, at least in popular culture, is extremely sexually active and so might try to have an erotic relationship with almost anything.  The monkey is presumed to have great energy which it will use even in pursuit of an impossible goal. So, a soldier trying with great energy to do something impossible is like that monkey. 

In that era, the American military was trying to reduce the amount of swearing by sergeants. When one soldier was disagreeing with and rejecting another soldier, he could say, “Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.”  This, like suggesting intercourse with one’s self, is an impossible task, and one that would be peculiarly painful in the likely event it failed or even if it succeeded. This insult had been in circulation at least since World War II. Many years later, I was reading “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, and smiled when I read the rolling doughnut metaphor.

But before I heard the traditional version, I heard my crew chief use the non-swearing variant using bureaucratic language to say the same thing. He said: “Please attempt aerial intercourse with a motivated, perforated pastry.”

After a while, the Army use of metaphor came easily to me. You could say I caught on, “quicker than chicken on a June bug.”

The French Unaware Americans Think French Only Surrender in War

Freedom Fries in the Congressional Cafeteria. 

Talking with French friends, I mentioned visiting the War Memorial at the center of the town of Foix in the Pyrenees.  The small town had memorial for war dead from both World Wars, Indochina (Vietnam) and Algeria.  As I walked around the memorial, I remembered the Republicans who started the “Freedom Fries” campaign and poured out bottles of French wine.  The draft-dodgers and never-servatives at the center of the campaign said the French were afraid to fight in Iraq.

The truth was, the French understood the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld lies behind the war and its ill-conceived plan and refused to be part of it.  The French view was the correct view.  Worse still French troops were on the ground in Afghanistan from the beginning of that war, because fighting the war that made sense. They fought and died in Afghanistan from the beginning of what has become America’s longest war.

I mentioned that the Republican cowards were using the stereotype common in America that French only surrender in war; my friends were surprised. They knew about the Freedom Fries foolishness but did not know that it was a stereotype with a 70-year heritage. 

When their protests began: “Lafayette; Napoleon; a million dead, five million wounded of 66 million population of France in World War I…”  I said this stereotype was as ubiquitous as the stereotypes of Russians, Germans and Brits that were part of their culture. 

The anger I feel when I remembered Freedom Fries is both because I have trained with and respect French soldiers and because the Republicans in question were and are such manifest cowards: now led by their Draft-Dodger-in-Chief.  When I hear that stereotype, I see cowards like Trump, Limbaugh, Cheney, and hundreds of other Pansy Patriots who send Americans to war and death and never served themselves, the worst letting another man take their place. 

Although a few more French intellectuals now know the low esteem in which the French military and French manhood is held by Americans, most residents of our allied nation are blissfully ignorant.  Which is certainly for the best.

Evangelical Escapees Around the World

When I travel, one of the categories of people I meet are Evangelical Escapees. Sam fits in that category.  He grew up in central Ohio in a family that was in Church twice on Sunday, Wednesday, and his teens youth group on Friday put him in Church at least four days per week. Three times a year, the big Church had a weeklong salvation event. In the summer, the whole family traveled around the south. His father was teaching and preaching at Camp Meetings. 

Sam, of course, had no choice about attending any or all of these services. For him, childhood was managing boredom attending events he had no interest in.  He was interested in science. His dad was a high school principal for a day job, but Sam was walled off from advanced studies because he had so many commitments outside school. “I never had time to really do homework. I did okay in school, but I wasn’t like the kids who took advanced classes.”

Sam left home after high school and eventually became a professional mountain bike racer. He married a researcher with a PhD in bioinformatics who got a job at French pharmaceutical company. Sam opened a bike shop in Paris.  He has a clientele of amateur athletes and some professionals on the French national team. He is a perfectionist who does bike fitting for people who want top performance. 

Sam is in his early fifties, tall, thin and fit. He is a strong rider who is very much part of the cycling community in Paris.  He speaks French with an American accent. He has a strong voice and speaks slowly. When I have heard him speak to clients, I can understand him a lot better than the native French speakers he is interacting with.

Sam says his parents really lived the faith they proclaimed. His problem was with nearly everyone else in his Church life. He learned racial epithets at Church before he heard them in “the world.”  And in the kind of Church he grew up in, Creation Science, the arrogant lunacy of asserting the earth is 6,000 years old was the only science. 

Better than Brainwashing--a convoy leaving Camp Adder, Iraq.

Sam is very far from his childhood: physically, spiritually, culturally, but not as far as a soldier I served with in Iraq. David heard me arguing with some Creationists in the mess hall before we deployed. He came up to me later and asked, “Can you really be a believer and not believe all that [Creationist] shit?” He had been told the opposite all through his childhood. He enlisted because he wanted to get away from home and Church, but he could not to a secular college. So, he turned 18 and headed for Iraq.  War was better than brainwashing. And after deployment he went to college with the GI Bill. 

David went back to his childhood hometown after serving in the Army, but got the secular education he wanted. Sam keeps in touch with his family, but is happily staying quite far from home.