"If You Share A Room with A Monk in Jerusalem, You Have to Expect An Early Wake Up"

My recent ten-nation trip began with a week in Jerusalem. I met my old friend and roommate from our Cold War military service, Cliff Almes, in Darmstadt, Germany.  He has lived there since we both left the military in 1979, becoming a brother in a monastery there. He is Bruder Timotheus. 

We stayed in a German Guest House in the middle of the Old City of Jerusalem just 100 meters from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. For a monk of 40 years, being that close to the most holy site in Christendom was a blessing of the first order.  The Church is open between 4am and 6pm each day and mobbed with tourists and pilgrims every hour except 4-5am. 

So, Cliff awoke every morning at 3:30am, dressed and spent an hour at the Church.  Then came back. I was glad we could stay at a place that delighted Cliff so much.  I seldom go to sleep before midnight. Even if I weren’t an iconoclast, there is nothing that interests me enough to get up at 3:30am. 

Mostly I got back to sleep and stayed asleep through Cliff’s return, waking for the communal breakfast at 8:30am. 

Cliff stayed in Jerusalem a few more days as I went off to the Republic of Georgia. Two weeks later we went to Dachau and Nuremberg together.  We met in Darmstadt in the evening and drove to Dachau. At one point I asked if he had any reason to set his alarm before 7. He smiled and said, “No, but if you share a room with a monk in Jerusalem, you have to expect an early wake up.”

"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.