Word: patria
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...monuments. By Manhattan's Central Park, the seven American soldiers seem frozen in World War I. The men in the middle of the squad have bayonets ready for battle. One is injured but willing; another, caught in the arms of a comrade, is in the swoon of death. PRO PATRIA ET GLORIA--"For country and glory"--their motto reads in granite, barely legible. The infantrymen rise 15 ft. above the ground, an altitude that is microcosmic from the distance of the Sea of Tranquility. SIC TRANSIT GLORIA? As much can be said of the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst in London...
...first American painter since Benjamin West to become famous in England--and in France too. But he never set foot in the U.S. until his 21st year, and only rarely thereafter. The skeptic might say he hardly even qualified as an expatriate. As a boy he had no patria beyond the rented flat and the hotel room, and thus was unencumbered by the tension of nostalgia for early belonging that affects the real expat...
...responded with TV ads showing sprightly old people dancing and playing bingo and then being told that, at the state's request, they should drop dead ASAP to ease the fiscal crisis. Even though the idea had distant poetic ancestry in Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori, Silber's campaign fizzled soon thereafter. Still, Silber's message, though transformed somewhat, has survived...
...another of the cliches that help rationalize Western dithering -- could hardly be more misleading. It disgraces the heroism and patriotism of the Yugoslav partisans in World War II. It exaggerates the number and prowess of the Serb forces in Bosnia today, as well as their local support. For them patria is a Greater Serbia in which Croats, Albanians, Hungarians, Macedonians and Slavic Muslims are subject to second-class citizenship, if not "ethnic cleansing...
...will dash into the great venture with all that pride and spirit an ancient race has given me." The man's generation, destined for the trenches at Ypres and the Somme, was almost innocent enough to ship off thinking of Horace's lines: "Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori." Years later, American boys flying to Vietnam sometimes unreeled John Wayne movies in their head. That was the model; that was what a man should look like, act like, when he goes...