February 19, 2025

1 thought on “The Progressives add to the Academy of the Overrated

  1. My personal library contains maybe a thousand books or so (no, I don’t spend time counting them).

    I just finished “China Crosses the Yalu” by Allen S. Whiting, which I am sure GQ would find dull as ditch water.

    I read that because I came across reference to it in David Halberstam’s “The Best and The Brightest,” and I just ordered “American Guerrilla: My War Behind Japanese Lines” by Roger Hilsman, a player in the Kennedy administration, for the same reason.

    As to “Catch-22,” I read that when I was in Viet Nam.

    Somebody over here sent me the book, and when I started it, I thought it was a parody on the Viet Nam war.

    I kept looking back at the copyright to make sure it wasn’t.

    That book should be required reading for all Americans, not buried, because it is one of the most accurate portrayals of American foreign policy I think has ever been written, with us giving our “enemies” our equipment to use so we would have a pretext to go to war with them – kind of like rich kids who want to play baseball giving their second-hand gloves and bats and balls to the poor kids, so the rich kids can be assured of having a weaker team to beat to make them look good.

    Which takes us back to this footnote from “China Crosses the Yalu” by Allen S. Whiting:

    Tsai Ying-p’ing, “The Road to Final Victory,” People’s China, Vol. I, No. 4, Feb. 16, 1950, p.27, offers estimates of the total amount (provided by United States) captured (by Communists from Chiang Kai Shek) in the (Chinese) civil war, without indicating condition of equipment or its subsequent disposition in combat (in Korea).

    This includes 52,051 pieces of artillery; 297,740 machine guns; 2,612,126 small arms; 598 tanks; 378 armored vehicles; 492,799,000 rounds of ammunition; and 5,183,390 shells.

    end quotes

    That, of course, was wonderful for our economy, or at least that of the military-industrial crowd in this country.

    Do they talk about stuff like that in GQ, I wonder?

    I have “John Adams” by David McCullough, of course, and the GQ crowd probably doesn’t like that one because it has an awful lot of pages in it, which probably scares the be-jaysus out of the m, having to understand all those words and what they mean.

    And of course, it is dry, because let’s face it, people, John Adams was a dry dude.

    And what do the intellectually-challenged crowd have against “Gravity’s Rainbow” by Thomas Pynchon, other than the fact that it takes some time and concentration to understand the psyches involved there?

    And “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut?

    It’s good to see they didn’t include Marvel comics on the list, probably because that is where they draw their intellectual content from.

    Next thing we know, they will want people to stop reading the Cape Charles Mirror, and then what will become of us?

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