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going to sacrifice my principles now. (Oddly, I had some linguistic confu-
sion in the 60s, too. At my first Vietnam protest march, I couldn t under-
stand what football had to do with stopping the war, but fortunately, my
friends Denny and Rob explained to me that the chant was Ho, Ho, Ho
Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win, not the NFL, as I had been shouting
enthusiastically.) This pattern of misheard slogans in times of national
crisis caused me to experience an epiphany. Maybe it wasn t just a coin-
cidence that I kept inserting my own malaprops into wartime rhetoric.
Maybe there was a message there. After all, wouldn t the world be a bet-
ter place if everyone kicked back on the couch, stuffing cupcakes in their
mouths and watching football rather than inciting violence of one kind or
the other? My course was clear. I would carry a Go-Pak not a backpack
but my old faithful shoulder bag stuffed with cupcakes. Every success-
ful antiwar movement must begin with one committed individual acting
from his own conscience.
There were still more decisions. What about those crucial other
essentials the president requires that we add to our Go-Paks? I would
start with a bottle of Jack Daniels, of course, never having accepted the
narrow-minded notion that whiskey and chocolate don t go well together.
And let s not forget books. (Inexplicably, there was no mention of books
in the official Go-Pak instructions but what can you expect from a gov-
ernment whose chief executive cites The Very Hungry Caterpillar as his
favorite book?) It seems only appropriate that my antiwar Go-Pak should
include a selection of my favorite antiwar novels. But how to choose? I
can only carry a few books in my bag without getting a knifing pain shoot-
ing down my left shoulder. (This is another advantage of the shoulder bag
over the backpack. If you re wearing a backpack, which distributes its load
evenly across your back, and you get a knifing pain down your left shoul-
der, it probably means you re having a heart attack. If you re wearing a
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shoulder bag, though, you can blame the pain on the bag and not bother
about going to the doctor.) Still, you want to keep the pain within man-
ageable limits, and to do that, I recommend no more than three books.
If we accept D. H. Lawrence s definition of the novel as the book of
life, then any novel about war is automatically an antiwar novel, since
war is necessarily not on the side of life. We can narrow it down a bit,
though, by eliminating from our Go-Paks all those wonderful novels por-
traying the ugly reality of the soldier s life (All Quiet on the Western Front,
The Naked and the Dead, The Thin Red Line, The Things They Carried)
and limiting ourselves to books whose antiwar message emerges in other
ways. So here they are, the three titles constituting my essential Go-Pak
collection:
A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway (1929). These
two sentences contain the essence of all antiwar
novels: Troops went down by the house and down the
road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of
the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and
the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops
marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves,
stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching
and afterward the road bare and white except for the
leaves.
Going after Cacciato, by Tim O Brien (1978). Can a foot
soldier, mired in the horror of Vietnam, leave his
squad and walk 8,600 miles to Paris? Impossible, of
course, utterly surreal, especially with the rest of his
squad ordered to bring him back to stinking reality.
And, yet, What about Paris? What about the bistros
and adventures and beautiful gardens? Have you
forgotten the gardens? Paul Berlin, one of the soldiers
going after Cacciato, hasn t forgotten. Paris is still a
possibility. It is. It s still a live possibility. Thank God
for that.
The Good Soldier Schweik, by Jaroslav Hasek (1930). In
this classic satire, Schweik, a Prague dogcatcher and
seeming imbecile, is drafted into the Austrian army
and sent to the Russian front during World War I. He
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never disobeys an order yet somehow never manages
to get to the front. I like to think that Schweik would
immediately see the wisdom of carrying cupcakes in
his Go-Pak.
Booklist, March 1, 2003
WHY I HATE CRAFTS
MOST OF THE BLAME for my allergy to all things crafty must fall on my
only-too-obvious lack of talent, but even that formidable obstacle might
have been overcome had it not been for the psychic damage done to me
by my eighth-grade art teacher, who we ll call Mr. (Hannibal) Lecter. You
don t run into too many sadistic art teachers, but this guy was the excep-
tion. You may understand his type better if I point out that, in addition to
nurturing the artistic sensibilities of a gang of hormonal junior-high kids,
Mr. Lecter was also the eighth-grade football and basketball coach and, in
the summers, worked as a butcher.
I first encountered Mr. Lecter on the football field. Being a skinny,
weak, and cowardly eighth-grader, I really didn t have much of a future on
the gridiron. I saw it differently, of course, imagining myself as a rubber-
armed quarterback in the Norm Van Brocklin mold. That illusion disap-
peared after the first day of practice. There was only one drill during that
two-hour session, and it didn t involve throwing passes. No, Hannibal sim-
ply divided his troops into two lines that faced one another, with about 10
yards of demilitarized zone in the middle, and instructed us to knock our
opposite partner on his ass. When the carnage ended, there were five bro-
ken arms and three broken collarbones on the day. (The rumor was that
this total was not Hannibal s personal best; at his last school, he was said
to have fractured 12 bones in one practice.) I survived the day without
any damaged parts, but that was mainly due to a technique I d perfected
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