I find it interesting, the comment from the radio regarding poets and soldiers. Especially given that it presupposes that one cannot be both. In WWI, which is the war that lead to Remembrance Day (Veterans' Day in the US), one of the big issues in that war was that pretty much everybody served. You saw army sizes and both voluntary and forced recruitments from all portions of society, not just the sub-sections that tended toward military service (which haven't actually changed much - the poor, looking for jobs (a soldier's pay in WWI for the entry level British grunts was about 4 times what they'd make as a laborer/factory worker), and those from military families w/ a tradition of service, although at this point it's less the abject impoverished and more the lower middle class looking for health insurance/college money in the US).
There are dozens of famous poets/authors who served in WWI, probably the most clearly associated being John McCrae, who wrote the poem "In Flanders' Fields" which is still printed on the Canadian $10 bill. Walt Whitman is another, and the list goes on. People tend to forget that the contemporary conflicts are not the socially all-consuming entities that the World Wars were, and that they draw far less from society on a human level (and thus allow for a much more selective source-pool of recruits). Just because one serves for a few years does not make them a soldier-and-nothing-but-a-soldier. How many of the poets and authors the reporter dismisses are veterans of the Vietnam War, for example? [/20th Century Global Conflict Specialist Rant]
I agree that there's a disturbing tendency in both fic and RL for people to put others down in order to promote their particular cause/character - look at the trend toward negative campaign advertising in recent years. The problem is, I think, people find it far easier to cut something (or someone) down rather than being confident in the merits of that which they are trying to raise. That, and the fact that there really *is* no quality control on the web, and you get a lot of authors starting out who have no idea what-so-ever of how their work will be interpreted by others (and who have no desire to think about it, beyond the concept that they're entitled to positive FB).
no subject
There are dozens of famous poets/authors who served in WWI, probably the most clearly associated being John McCrae, who wrote the poem "In Flanders' Fields" which is still printed on the Canadian $10 bill. Walt Whitman is another, and the list goes on. People tend to forget that the contemporary conflicts are not the socially all-consuming entities that the World Wars were, and that they draw far less from society on a human level (and thus allow for a much more selective source-pool of recruits). Just because one serves for a few years does not make them a soldier-and-nothing-but-a-soldier. How many of the poets and authors the reporter dismisses are veterans of the Vietnam War, for example?
[/20th Century Global Conflict Specialist Rant]
I agree that there's a disturbing tendency in both fic and RL for people to put others down in order to promote their particular cause/character - look at the trend toward negative campaign advertising in recent years. The problem is, I think, people find it far easier to cut something (or someone) down rather than being confident in the merits of that which they are trying to raise. That, and the fact that there really *is* no quality control on the web, and you get a lot of authors starting out who have no idea what-so-ever of how their work will be interpreted by others (and who have no desire to think about it, beyond the concept that they're entitled to positive FB).
Um, did I make any sense there?