Whatever is not forbidden is mandatory

When I was a teenager I had a little World War One obsession. My Italian grandfather had fought in it but by the time I was ready to ask him questions about things like that he couldn't speak English anymore and I hadn't learnt Italian yet. My British grandfather didn't remember WWI at all, but something he would occasionally obsess over in the last couple decades of his life was sitting with his mother as a little boy while she chatted with her friends about the aftermath of the war. She said she felt bad for all the young women, as all the young men were dead.

So after the Italian grandfather died and the British grandfather told me that chilling little vignette, I read everything I could get my hands on about that war. Part of the fascination I had was probably morbid, because that was a morbid war, with something like 10 million people dying over four years. But I think what was really keeping me in the books was realizing the degree to which even 'nice' governments didn't give a fuck about the lives or well-being of their people and would do anything, including slaughtering the cream of their youth, that they could get away with. And then, they got away with so much - you scurried over trenches and got shot, or if you tried like a sensible person to run away you were shot, and the only thing you were allowed to do was die or kill as many people as you could who were just like you - that I'm shocked we've allowed them to get away with anything since.

I think that's shaped the way I've felt about government ever since and made me admire the French, who boss their government around in and out of the democratic system, and not admire Americans, who seem to have had a supine relationship with a series of unrepresentative governments ever since they bossed Richard Nixon into getting rid of the draft. I've spoken to sensible people who have voted Bush/Cheney - I mean, if you have two fiscally irresponsible parties with nearly identical platforms, as the Kerry/Bush tickets were in 2004, why not vote for the one that promises to tax you least? But while there's something sensible in that, there's nothing to admire. Not if you're calling yourself a democracy and not if you care about keeping yourself safe from the people with the guns.

All of which is a long-winded way to say I'm really enjoying Blackadder Goes Forth, which I hadn't seen before and which is set in the trenches. People should show it to children in highschool when teaching about that time, but as I remember we didn't learn about it in highschool, and they say 'shit' too much to be okay with the Christian types who used to have to stand outside during the National Anthem. And look how good Hugh Laurie still looks in it: