Yankee B.S. and Doctor Who

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Headnote: in North America, B.S. is the polite abbreviation for bull droppings.

Note: On the BBC TV show Doctor Who, which has run for over 50 years, just like a Phoenix, “the doctor” lives hundreds of years in successive different body-personalities. With his time travel box, for a special episode, he could meet his future selves.

Sad Head-quote: “I’m not just a time lord… I’m the last of the time lords.”

Hello Reader,

Got Yankee B.S.?

…I wonder what the poet Homer would have thought? …

Recently I found out that while our British cousins may not use our term “Yankee B.S.,” they know the concept too. I learned this by watching the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special, the one introducing the specific Doctor whom his future selves don’t like to talk about, played by John Hurt: He is the one who ended the Time War… by the utter genocide… of both the Daleks and his own planet of the Time Lords, Gallifrey.

In the second act, young Clara and Mum, the head of U.N.I.T., are in the “black archives.” That’s where alien technology is kept hidden away. The two ladies see an object locked in it’s own room, on it’s own display pillar, looking like an oversized leather wrist strap.

Clara: What is it?

Mum: Time travel. A vortex manipulator, bequeathed to the U.N.I.T. archives by Captain Jack Harkness, on the occasion of his death…No one can know we have this, not even our allies.

Clara: Why not?

Mum: Think about it. Americans, with the ability to re-write history. You’ve seen their movies.” 

I’m sure viewers laughed loudly…Clearly, our British cousins know of Yankee B.S.

It’s all so tiresome. I remember back in the 1970’s a boy in my school was collecting weekly magazines of Marshal Cavendish’s History of the Second World War in 96 weekly editions. They stacked like encyclopaedias. But the boy only collected for six months, until # 25, the Pearl Harbor issue, then he stopped. He told me, “Because now the Yankee B.S. starts.” (Besides, he was low on cash) I was collecting too, using my paper route money. My father used the same term, when he said I should stop collecting the issues. I protested “But Dad, I am smart enough to know Yankee B.S. when I see it, I am!” After a short power struggle, Dad finally admitted, “But I wouldn’t want to read it.”

“U.S. citizens,” (five syllables) also called Americans (three syllables) also called, by those who share the continent with them, “Yankees” (only two syllables) believe, according to their movies, that they won both world wars all by themselves. And that war is glorious, and that Yankee army men are far better than any other fighting force, past or present. I have to shake my head, reciting that sarcastic line, “Go tell it to the marines.” 

Someday I want to see again that U.S. Air Force movie made from the post-war novel, “Twelve O’Clock High,” because a family friend once said it’s the only U.S. war movie he ever saw without Yankee B.S. It’s the one where the hero gets shell shock: He has a nervous breakdown, and is relieved of command. In the novel, on the last page, with the hero relieved, it’s like becoming free from addiction: suddenly for him the very grass and trees become so much greener.

Homer, blind though he was, would not have been surprised to hear it. In the Iliad he describes Truth: a javelin tearing through a man’s bowels; a group of men in fear running like sheep before wolves; a defeated fighter pleading for his life at the knees of an armed warrior. Homer knew that war is not all glory. And something else: In his epic? No Greek B.S… No Trojan B.S…

This fall I heard a short version of the Iliad recited as prose by two middle aged fellows— they alternated —in a theatre underneath the British Museum. Afterwards a young lady asked me in surprise, “Is that really how it ends?” I said yes, and recited the final line. The poem starts years into the war, and ends with the war still going. 

The Iliad has two living horses pulling a chariot, who can talk. They tell the charioteer driving them into battle that he won’t make it—he hears, and he just keeps going. But the Iliad has no wooden horse. If you didn’t know your history, didn’t know Homer was Greek, then it would be impossible to tell from the epic which side, Greek or Trojan, won the war. Not like Hollywood, eh?  Homer knew Truth, and the Greeks loved him for it.

Epilogue for Doctor Who

On Youtube, there is a sound track called Sad Man/Mad Man with a Box.

Now I understand. No glory.

When young Clara, companion to “the doctor,” looks into the eyes of old John Hurt, she tells him she can see he hasn’t destroyed Gallifrey yet: His eyes are too innocent.

Only the BBC would have a scene, in the 50th anniversary, where an utterly sane John Hurt, from the past, impatiently asks two of his future selves (The one who regrets, and the one who forgets) why they are both so childish—a frozen pause. A long pause. I think every viewer got it: Nothing like being the sole survivor of a genocide you caused to drive you forever mad. 

Sean Crawford

As snow lies cold

Calgary 

December 2017

Footnotes:

~The “no Iliad B.S.” idea I got from Simone Veil’s classic work from during the Nazi occupation of France, The Poem of Force which I have on my desktop favorites. Here’s the link.

~I expressed my awe at the Trojan war in my essay Troy, the Iliad and Music archived January 2014.

~Link to a lengthy blog essay 10 Things Most Americans Don’t Know About America, complete with condensed TV scene, by blogger Mark Manson.

~You may wonder at the idea of a charioteer who keeps going even after he hears the news straight from the horse’s mouth. Could that really happen? Yes. 

My brother often played cards with a Canadian tank squadron commander who kept putting his newest replacement tank commander in the lead tank. One day the commander only lived because, when his tank was struck, his loader disobeyed the orders for the “order of escape,” by rushing up the commander like a mouse, and rushing out the hatch. When the commander went out the hatch he found the man’s body sprawled on the turret. The commander’s odds of surviving must have seemed, to him, to be as low as the odds for that fighter whom King David put in the front lines. (Because David, like Paris desiring Helen, wanted the man’s fair wife to be a widow)

On another occasion the squadron leader was wounded in his leg. But he was not given a fair treatment, long and proper: No, because the casualties were too heavy. Instead, he was merely given a steel pin so he could be sent back to the lines where he was needed. Like that Greek charioteer, he just kept going… 

…In my drawer I am keeping forever a black wrist band from when I was an honorary pall bearer for a reservist tank crewman, killed in action, whose body was shipped back here from Afghanistan. Corporal Nathan Hornburg. Heroes keep going.