Monday, May 20, 2013

Harvesttime Soma Revisited

VFW "Buddy" Poppies of Afghanistan 2013 
Offering poppies began in 1922 as a way to create awareness and raise funds for charitable programs, primarily focusing on disabled veterans and widows and orphans of those who fought and died.
Today the poppies are made by disabled veterans in Veterans Administration hospitals across the country.

The Irony of Drug Wars never sleep in the poppy fields of Afghanistan.

...one day they will give a war and no one will come.

 
In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hads we throw
The torch; be yours to hld it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though the poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Col John McCrae
Ypres, Belgium – 1915

Friday, April 5, 2013

“Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.”

In Carl Sandburg’s 1936 epic poem The People, Yes
Sandburg portrayed a little girl who, while watching her first military parade, observes,
"Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come."

http://www.genekeyes.com/
Charlotte Keyes -
During the anti-war protests of the 1960s this pre-war oberservation became one of America’s best-known anti-war slogans.
In 1961 Scientific American editor James R. Newman wrote a letter to the Washington Post in which he misremembered Sandburg’s line as "Suppose they gave a war and no one came?"

In 1966 Charlotte E. Keyes wrote an article for McCall’s magazine about her war protester son Gene, using Newman’s misrecollection of Sandburg’s line as its title.

This title soon showed up on a bumper sticker that was held up by news anchor David Brinkley on his NBC newscast.
After that broadcast, the meme caught fire, with little awareness of its origins.

Hollywood rides the wave with The 1970 movie, Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came? starring Brian Keith and Tony Curtis.
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/47916/Suppose-They-Gave-a-War-and-Nobody-Came-/overview

http://www.genekeyes.com/CHET/Chet-1.html#Suppose

Graffiti:
"What if someone gave a war & Nobody came?
Life would ring the bells of Ecstasy and Forever be Itself again."
~ Allen Ginsberg 1972