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Paul Fussell
From Doing Battle
(Little, Brown, 1996)
From Chapter Seven
From the 1950s on, my presiding emotion was annoyance,
often intensifying to virtually disabling anger. Anger at my accepting
invitations to make too many changes of identity too fast: from college to
professional killer, and then to benign professor. I was angry at myself for
my inability to make sense of this process, to infer from it some general
enlightenment instead of cynicism and nihilism. I was angry at the whole
postwar atmosphere of public misrepresentation and fatuous optimism, the
widespread feeling that the war had produced good for the United States, with
good defined as people's ability to buy new cars and refrigerators. So what if
85 million people had been killed, most of them civilians? Here, no one had
been bombed, eviscerated, burned to death, raped, or torn apart. Here, the war
was now largely represented almost as a source of fun, for which act national
euphemism became necessary: the War Department was euphemized into the
Department of Defense, the armaments and war budget became the defense budget,
and soon air strikes -- later, surgical air strikes -- would replace the bombing of
women and children. Public rhetoric was growing indistinguishable from
commercial advertising, and I came to regard both as the cynical manipulation
of the weak of mind by the cunning and the avaricious. Increasingly the country
seemed managed not by an elected government but by the National Association of
Manufacturers, abetted by the Central Intelligence Agency, forcing anyone of
energetic conscience to embrace the role of enemy. And how could I avoid
indignation at the local bragging habit, America's proud pointing to its three
thousand colleges and universities without noticing their failure to produce
more than a handful of first-rate
minds? I was bitterly conscious that the central thinkers of the modern
world -- Freud, Marx, Darwin, Jung -- had all arisen elsewhere.
Hear Paul Fussell read this passage (in RealAudio):
"Annoyance then Anger" (2:37):
RA 28.8,
RA 14.4
(For help,
see a note about the audio.)
Return to The Other Side of War: An Interview With Paul Fussell
Copyright © 1996 by Paul Fussell. All rights
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