The invasion became a bloody, yet treasured, memory of America the Good, a story we have carried over from the olden time-that is, the twentieth century-as a parable of selflessness, in which the dragon of Hitlerism is slain and the continent of Europe is delivered from evil.
The men who fought at Normandy, 75 years ago, are either gone or in their mid-nineties and older.
There will be the 50th anniversaries of Chappaquiddick; of the moon landing; of the Manson gang's murder of Sharon Tate, et al.
The most interesting polarity in the events 50 years ago lay in the contrast between the Apollo 11 moon landing and the Manson gang's murders.
The lesson of the Manson murders concerned evil and motiveless malignity, but of a peculiar kind: motiveless stupidity would be more like it, starting with Manson's cheesy Satanism-a knock-off of the diabolism that had become a counterculture cliché.
If the moon landing amounted to a triumph of applied scientific intelligence, the Manson business represented an achievement of applied stupidity, an American rendering of the banality of evil, spooky and vicious and dumb as a rock: Helter Skelter, swastikas on the forehead. Evil and stupidity are fraternal twins.
We are left to recollect these emotions, 50 years later.
https://www.city-journal.org/d-day-and-summer-anniversaries
The men who fought at Normandy, 75 years ago, are either gone or in their mid-nineties and older.
There will be the 50th anniversaries of Chappaquiddick; of the moon landing; of the Manson gang's murder of Sharon Tate, et al.
The most interesting polarity in the events 50 years ago lay in the contrast between the Apollo 11 moon landing and the Manson gang's murders.
The lesson of the Manson murders concerned evil and motiveless malignity, but of a peculiar kind: motiveless stupidity would be more like it, starting with Manson's cheesy Satanism-a knock-off of the diabolism that had become a counterculture cliché.
If the moon landing amounted to a triumph of applied scientific intelligence, the Manson business represented an achievement of applied stupidity, an American rendering of the banality of evil, spooky and vicious and dumb as a rock: Helter Skelter, swastikas on the forehead. Evil and stupidity are fraternal twins.
We are left to recollect these emotions, 50 years later.
https://www.city-journal.org/d-day-and-summer-anniversaries
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