Word: songful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fall in love like any other man?" croaks Cockney Anthony Newley. Down in front, wondering right along with the singer, is his most devoted fan. "I know every song by heart," says Charlotte Ford Niarchos. "I sometimes think I could get up on the stage and sing them myself. But not so well, of course." The divorced heiress followed Newley's stage show all the way to Toronto, indicating more than artistic admiration. Newley, who is in the midst of divorce proceedings, allowed gallantly: "The very fact that she is here is a most beautiful thing...
...justified in classifying the Song My massacre as a "tactic" of the war. The press, by the very quantity of its coverage, implies that the incident is an unprecedented misfortune. Americans can rest assured, therefore, that the whole episode was unique, the work of a handful of deranged criminals who disgrace their uniforms...
...tactic of mass annihilation (the military term is "depopulation") of women and children wasn't invented by William Calley or Ernest Medina or any of the other Song My protagonists. The killing of large numbers of noncombatants dates back to the advent of the bombing in 1965. At least two pilots in the Air Force and one in the Navy have admitted annihilating villages ("suspected VC hideouts") containing exclusively women and children. The only possible innovation that came out of Song My is methodological: napalm had been, up to then, the main weapon of depopulation...
...small temptation, as you can see, to be diverted by tactical questions of the war. The fact that the Song My incident is far from unique should intensify, rather than obscure, our condemnation of any American presence in Vietnam...
...ADDED feature of the Song My issue is the insight if offers on the way we as a nation evaluate human life. Our justification to kill a human being defending his own country apparently depends on his sex and age. We are outraged at the death of a child, it seems, to a degree proportional to the bigness and brownness of his eyes. It is evil to kill women and children, but not to widow and orphan them. We publicly empathize with them while we sanction the killing of those who would free them from foreign occupation...