Amid the idiocy of current news I find respite, even comfort from that phrase for it reminds me of what some people are capable of doing. The phrase is a passage from the Book of Ecclesiasticus also known as the Wisdom of Solomon. (The Thought Police who react to the use of the noun ‘men’ are advised to take up the matter with the author, Solomon.)
Today the three men who come to my mind were Dwight Eisenhower and John Steinbeck, and Bob Hope. I don’t suppose either name means much to most people these days, and so I will venture are few words of introduction.
Eisenhower was a general on whose order 1.2 million soldiers invaded Normandy France in 1944. Later he was a two-term president of the United States. When he retired in 1960 he made a pilgrimage to France. It was not a victory lap. There were no parades. He did not go to Paris to receive accolades. Rather he went to the war cemeteries in Normandy sixteen (16) years after the fact. The pictures need no annotation. These men died on his order and he knew it, just as he knew some of them personally.
John Steinbeck was a writer, mostly novels, but also journalism. In that same war, at forty plus years old, he followed twenty-year old American solders into battle. The dispatches are collected under the title Once There was a War for the literate.
Without a doubt the most compelling of many remarkable accounts is his observation of the comedian Bob Hope in an army hospital ward. Read it and weep.
We have need for more of their kind today. These three needed no gold to affirm their worth, neither in their own eyes nor ours.
Talk of a military parade reminded me of Eisenhower who needed no such parade, and a conversation with a reader at breakfast the other day called John Steinbeck to mind, When Eisenhower comes to my mind the first thing I remember is his face in the city of the dead in Normandy, while with Steinbeck it is report of Bob Hope among the dying. Morbid I suppose, yet uplifting, too.