In case you are losing a sense of the American Spirit, lest you forget, here is a reminder.

General George S. Patton’s Speach, Somewhere in England, 5 June 1944

Men, this stuff that some sources sling around about America wanting out of this war, not wanting to fight, is a crock of bullshit. Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle.

You are here today for three reasons. First, because you are here to defend your homes and your loved ones. Second, you are here for your own self respect, because you would not want to be anywhere else. Third, you are here because you are real men and all real men like to fight. When you, here, every one of you, were kids, you all admired the champion marble player, the fastest runner, the toughest boxer, the big league ball players, and the All-American football players. Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American.

You are not all going to die. Only two percent of you right here today would die in a major battle. Death must not be feared. Death, in time, comes to all men. Yes, every man is scared in his first battle. If he says he’s not, he’s a liar. Some men are cowards but they fight the same as the brave men or they get the hell slammed out of them watching men fight who are just as scared as they are. The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared. Some men get over their fright in a minute under fire. For some, it takes an hour. For some, it takes days. But a real man will never let his fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood.

Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best and it removes all that is base. Americans pride themselves on being He Men and they ARE He Men. Remember that the enemy is just as frightened as you are, and probably more so. They are not supermen.

All through your Army careers, you men have bitched about what you call “chicken shit drilling.” That, like everything else in this Army, has a definite purpose. That purpose is alertness. Alertness must be bred into every soldier. I don’t give a fuck for a man who’s not always on his toes. You men are veterans or you wouldn’t be here. You are ready for what’s to come. A man must be alert at all times if he expects to stay alive. If you’re not alert, sometime, a German son-of-an-asshole-bitch is going to sneak up behind you and beat you to death with a sockful of shit! There are four hundred neatly marked graves somewhere in Sicily, all because one man went to sleep on the job. But they are German graves, because we caught the bastard asleep before they did.

An Army is a team. It lives, sleeps, eats, and fights as a team. This individual heroic stuff is pure horse shit. The bilious bastards who write that kind of stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don’t know any more about real fighting under fire than they know about fucking! We have the finest food, the finest equipment, the best spirit, and the best men in the world. Why, by God, I actually pity those poor sons-of-bitches we’re going up against. By God, I do.

My men don’t surrender, and I don’t want to hear of any soldier under my command being captured unless he has been hit. Even if you are hit, you can still fight back. That’s not just bull shit either. The kind of man that I want in my command is just like the lieutenant in Libya, who, with a Luger against his chest, jerked off his helmet, swept the gun aside with one hand, and busted the hell out of the Kraut with his helmet. Then he jumped on the gun and went out and killed another German before they knew what the hell was coming off. And, all of that time, this man had a bullet through a lung. There was a real man!

All of the real heroes are not storybook combat fighters, either. Every single man in this Army plays a vital role. Don’t ever let up. Don’t ever think that your job is unimportant. Every man has a job to do and he must do it. Every man is a vital link in the great chain. What if every truck driver suddenly decided that he didn’t like the whine of those shells overhead, turned yellow, and jumped headlong into a ditch? The cowardly bastard could say, ‘Hell, they won’t miss me, just one man in thousands.’ But, what if every man thought that way? Where in the hell would we be now? What would our country, our loved ones, our homes, even the world, be like? No, Goddamnit, Americans don’t think like that. Every man does his job. Every man serves the whole. Every department, every unit, is important in the vast scheme of this war. The ordnance men are needed to supply the guns and machinery of war to keep us rolling. The Quartermaster is needed to bring up food and clothes because where we are going there isn’t a hell of a lot to steal. Every last man on K.P. has a job to do, even the one who heats our water to keep us from getting the ‘G.I. Shits.’

Each man must not think only of himself, but also of his buddy fighting beside him. We don’t want yellow cowards in this Army. They should be killed off like rats. If not, they will go home after this war and breed more cowards. The brave men will breed more brave men. Kill off the Goddamned cowards and we will have a nation of brave men. One of the bravest men that I ever saw was a fellow on top of a telegraph pole in the midst of a furious fire fight in Tunisia. I stopped and asked what the hell he was doing up there at a time like that. He answered, ‘Fixing the wire, Sir.’ I asked, ‘Isn’t that a little unhealthy right about now?’ He answered, ‘Yes Sir, but the Goddamned wire has to be fixed.’ I asked, ‘Don’t those planes strafing the road bother you?’ And he answered, ‘No, Sir, but you sure as hell do!’ Now, there was a real man. A real soldier. There was a man who devoted all he had to his duty, no matter how seemingly insignificant his duty might appear at the time, no matter how great the odds.

And you should have seen those trucks on the rode to Tunisia. Those drivers were magnificent. All day and all night they rolled over those son-of-a-bitching roads, never stopping, never faltering from their course, with shells bursting all around them all of the time. We got through on good old American guts.

Many of those men drove for over forty consecutive hours. These men weren’t combat men, but they were soldiers with a job to do. They did it, and in one hell of a way they did it. They were part of a team. Without team effort, without them, the fight would have been lost. All of the links in the chain pulled together and the chain became unbreakable.

Don’t forget, you men don’t know that I’m here. No mention of that fact is to be made in any letters. The world is not supposed to know what the hell happened to me. I’m not supposed to be commanding this Army. I’m not even supposed to be here in England. Let the first bastards to find out be the Goddamned Germans. Someday I want to see them raise up on their piss-soaked hind legs and howl, ‘Jesus Christ, it’s the Goddamned Third Army again and that son-of-a-fucking-bitch Patton.’ We want to get the hell over there.” The quicker we clean up this Goddamned mess, the quicker we can take a little jaunt against the purple pissing Japs and clean out their nest, too. Before the Goddamned Marines get all of the credit.

Sure, we want to go home. We want this war over with. The quickest way to get it over with is to go get the bastards who started it. The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we can go home. The shortest way home is through Berlin and Tokyo. And when we get to Berlin, I am personally going to shoot that paper hanging son-of-a-bitch Hitler. Just like I’d shoot a snake!

When a man is lying in a shell hole, if he just stays there all day, a German will get to him eventually. The hell with that idea. The hell with taking it. My men don’t dig foxholes. I don’t want them to. Foxholes only slow up an offensive. Keep moving. And don’t give the enemy time to dig one either. We’ll win this war, but we’ll win it only by fighting and by showing the Germans that we’ve got more guts than they have; or ever will have. We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We’re going to murder those lousy Hun cock suckers by the bushel-fucking-basket.

War is a bloody, killing business. You’ve got to spill their blood, or they will spill yours. Rip them up the belly. Shoot them in the guts. When shells are hitting all around you and you wipe the dirt off your face and realize that instead of dirt it’s the blood and guts of what once was your best friend beside you, you’ll know what to do!

I don’t want to get any messages saying, ‘I am holding my position.’ We are not holding a Goddamned thing. Let the Germans do that. We are advancing constantly and we are not interested in holding onto anything, except the enemy’s balls. We are going to twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all of the time. Our basic plan of operation is to advance and to keep on advancing regardless of whether we have to go over, under, or through the enemy. We are going to go through him like crap through a goose; like shit through a tin horn!

From time to time there will be some complaints that we are pushing our people too hard. I don’t give a good Goddamn about such complaints. I believe in the old and sound rule that an ounce of sweat will save a gallon of blood. The harder WE push, the more Germans we will kill. The more Germans we kill, the fewer of our men will be killed. Pushing means fewer casualties. I want you all to remember that.

There is one great thing that you men will all be able to say after this war is over and you are home once again. You may be thankful that twenty years from now when you are sitting by the fireplace with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the great World War II, you WON’T have to cough, shift him to the other knee and say, ‘Well, your Granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana.’ No, Sir, you can look him straight in the eye and say, ‘Son, your Granddaddy rode with the Great Third Army and a Son-of-a- Goddamned-Bitch named Georgie Patton!’

“That is all.”

This is a particular frustration for me: these new insincere definitions society is giving to words. We’re so comfortable and safefeeling that we can treat a word like Patriotism as an opinion indicator. We get to pretend we are pacifists – intellectually and morally superior to the ignoramuses who think war is ever needed – and associate hurt feelings to the word Patriot.

Wars happen because of aggressors – people willing to kill for what they want or feel is there’s. If we didn’t have patriots willing to kill aggressors, no University or pacifist could exist. By the very nature of the pacifist, it will be overcome quickly by the aggressor – if not for the patriot willing to do the pacifist’s killing for him while he reads anti-war books and releases torture memos.

That senseless rallying of people to hate, that’s necessary too if you want to keep your progressive society. No, we can’t be like Europe and have a civil-service equivalent of a military – because we don’t have a US to depend on for defense. Even is you happen to disagree with a particular decision, you still have to value the fact that we have patriots willing to carry out that decision.

Sorry you got hurt feelings over being called unpatriotic Dr. Dove. But shake it off and respect the people who did all the killing that secured this world you’re such a master of – by at least keeping their description. What else can you call them? Contingency reducers extraordinaire? Don’t let the media and popular culture pollute everything! It’s like “torture” and “massacre” – words that get used to invoke a feeling rather than describe something aligned with their actual historical or logical meaning.

There are plenty of words to describe an idiot who is in complete support of a regime, and usually names specific to regime. What would we call the soldiers right now deploying to Afghanistan who voted for McCain? They’re not patriots? Hell, most the soldiers I’ve had conversation with have a list of problems with the Administration (Clinton, Bush, or Obama) – or just don’t give a shit – but either way do their damn job.

Patriot are the people that made this free world of ours. I doubt many of those boys that climbed into those damned Higgins boats and ran out onto the beaches of Normandy under fire from MG-40s did so because they agreed with some asshole in Washington. They knew what was going on. They saw Germany taking over Europe. They could have stayed safe at home and dealt peacefully with Hitler, kept selling him shit. You know, plenty of people wanted to do it that way. But we had plenty of young men willing to go all the way over there, train up, and go fight even after puking on their boots and shitting in their pants. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t in order to achieve self actualization, it wasn’t blind allegiance, it wasn’t for pay or reward – it was their duty to their loved one, free society, and the loving God.

And Divinity Dove, I’d say you are living in one of the few societies at one of the few times when you can be a true Christian and a true patriot – because our nation was founded on principles that include the free practice of religion, and many other core Christian values (not killing and all that, as long as you get your head out anyway).

So, with Denmark promoting Lutheranism, and the US pushing sanctions, I’d say a Patriot could easily appose such sanctions in the regular way – voting and e-mailing Bill O’reilly. It would be so illogical that all patriots would have to say something! Seriously, what if we put sanctions on all the Islamic countries for “promoting” Islam? LOL

But then, what if Denmark were imposing Lutheranism on its citizens. Then I think you would be a good Christin and patriot to support sanctions against them, especially since any such move would almost certainly have some stupid political motivation behind it, and not be anything approaching the will of God, and could soon see regime change along with a new religion imposed contrary to Christianity.

Professor Dove recently said to me:

“Who owns the heart and mind of our children?…  Everyone is telling them what to think and how to think.  Do you know what they are being told?  What are you telling them? “

And I responded:

I’m telling them that penises are poisonous and vaginas are haunted. It’s the only way – scare’m.
I hated that when I was a kid. Teen age boys have too much testosterone to be afraid of anything, or make rational decisions for that matter. And, from my perspective, fear was basically the only thing that ruled.

I remember a conversation that was being had where each person was stating the trauma that each of their boys endured while driving which made them suddenly start driving like they had a brain. “Such bullshit” I remember thinking. I drove better than any of them and had never had anything happen that was scary and didn’t make me want to take more chances.

Ah excess testosterone… Sure, I rubbed a few things and got the car stuck once honing my tactical driving skills, but hell – you have to learn one way or the other and if I ever need to drive in a war zone or as a wheel man I’ll have some background.

I think kids will only have their behavior affected by people they respect. Adolescents emanate their idols. The big problem is kids respect people for weird reasons, which means they have their behavior affected by weird people.

Obama’s bow to the prime minister would have been at least in reasonable taste had he executed it at all appropriately. And that good taste would only have been due to the cultural effort put forth. But in this case there was no real effort.

First off, non-Japanese bowing to Japanese can come off condescending. Most Japanese understand very well – especially a prime minister – the near world wide custom of shaking hands. Yeah, it’s an American thing we first forced the British to get used to, and then anyone else who wanted to enter the global market. But it’s now widely used and accepted.

The Japanese use the bow with each other. And the bow they use is different from the awkward one Obama pulled. Traditionally the bow – for men – is done with both hands at the sides and with a straight back bending only at the hips with eyes down. And it’s much shallower, usually 15 degrees for an informal bow and as much as 30 degrees for a formal bow, with the subordinate bowing the longest and deepest.

The full etiquette is complex. But often on person will bow longer than the other. In this case the shorter bower bows again, which causes the longer bower to again bow, resulting in several reciprocating increasingly shallower and shorter bows. Regardless, the bow is returned, but in this case it wasn’t.

Obama’s bow was way to deep – like 80 degrees. That’s way too deep for anyone, let alone the President. He also hunched over rather than bent, and did it while shaking hands. The Prime Minister didn’t return the bow but Obama kept up little bows. It looked awkward. The Prime Minister didn’t seem to know what to think. His wife gave the smallest of small little bows in return to Obama’s bows to her, but had the same trying to be polite look on her face.

And yeah, now a day many Japanese combine the bow and hand shake. But again, the bows are extra shallow and mutual, usually down slightly to the left to allow space for the mutual bowing.

The bow to the Saudi king was wrong in so many ways I just like to believe whatever that was Obama’s aids said it was: he dropped something, the king was short, or whatever. I don’t even want to think about how that looked. I figure in reality someone, one of those idiot advisors, just plain dropped the ball. Maybe Bush pulled a trick and left some books on Airforce 1 with the dust covers switched.

And you’d think with all the czars getting hired left and right, Obama could get a 15-year-old Google czar. Give him a bag with a laptop and sat-phone. Before Obama goes kneeling down before the next chief or emperor, give the kid a call. Ask him to look up proper bowing etiquette in that culture – and maybe even look up the appropriateness of bowing to begin with. Hell, check the news in the past few months for the last 10 or 20 world leaders to meet with this guy. Did any of them bow? No? Oh – well then – maybe we should keep our planned bowing exhibition to the privacy of our own homes then. Or just look out the damn window! “Hey Rahm, you see anyone bowing out there? I was thinking of throwing the guy a bow. But, you know, I don’t want to go looking like a jackass again.”

You have to watch this one again when some Iraqi reporter threw his shoes at Bush. Watch the video, Bush dodges them in a way that says emphatically that he has dodged shoes and/or shoe-like projectiles in the past. AND – his Secret Service men don’t react right away! The second shoe is spent before they start getting in the way. And the best part is Bush almost enjoyed it. He always looks like he’s in physical pain speaking to the public, and a nice shoe attack gave him a quick break. LOL –  he cracked out a big jack-ass smile

I bet Bush had one of the best talks of his life after that. He’s one of those guys that excels after the ice is broken. He looks like a stammering fool reading a speech, but man to man (or woman) from what I hear he has an irresistible personality.