Me: Hey, want to watch this DVD about World War II?
11 y.o. son: Maybe.
Me: What do you mean, “maybe”? It’s World War II!
11 y.o. son: Is it the shooting part? Or the talking-and-making-peace part?
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The Edge of the American West 
27 comments
December 11, 2011 at 1:30 pm
JWL
That is precisely what Winston Churchill would have sounded like at age 11.
December 11, 2011 at 1:37 pm
eric
I kind of think Winston Churchill sounded a lot like that in adulthood, as well. Which is to say, it says more about Winston Churchill having the sensibility of an 11-year-old boy than it does about my 11-year-old boy having the sensibility of Winston Churchill …
December 11, 2011 at 2:08 pm
joel hanes
I’ve been trying to convince my six-year old that real moments of heroism for Frodo, Sam and Bilbo are when they show mercy to Gollum, but he remains convinced they’re heroes because they’ve got cool magic swords.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan 12.01.09 at 4:37 pm
Crooked Timber
http://crookedtimber.org/2009/11/26/6-best-fantasy-novels/
December 11, 2011 at 3:59 pm
JWL
“I kind of think Winston Churchill sounded a lot like that in adulthood, as well”
It occurred to me to write as much. But I opted not to, in respect for Churchill’s failed attempt to corral President Eisenhower and the Soviets into a conference to reach an accord on nuclear weaponry (cica ’54). That wise-yet-forlorn attempt belies the conventional image of the man as a war lover.
December 11, 2011 at 4:01 pm
eric
It’s not that he was a war lover, it’s that he vastly preferred the shooting part of wars to the talking part of wars. Particularly, he had little time for or understanding of Bretton Woods.
December 11, 2011 at 6:08 pm
snarkout
I was just saying the other day — and I defer to y’all history-professing types — that Churchill was basically saved from historical ignominy by the fact that Hitler and Stalin really did live up to the monsters in his head, making a belligerent, silver-tongued Manichean the right man for the job. I understand how such stances as “let Gandhi starve”, “gas the Kurds”, and “Mussolini is to be admired for his dealings with Italian workers” get written out of history, but I found the portrayal of Churchill-the-wise-man in The King’s Speech particularly egregious even for a Hollywood biopic.
December 11, 2011 at 11:52 pm
TF Smith
I’ll give him props for “better to jaw, jaw, than war, war…” and the fact that he negotiated with Collins in 1921 suggests a lot.
Given his experience at the sharp end in the Sudan, South Africa, and the Western Front, I’d suggest Churchill had a more personal understanding of the costs of war than anyone else on the national stage in the 1930s and 1940s.
Best,
December 12, 2011 at 12:31 am
Ed
The King’s Speech producers knew it would confuse American audiences if Churchill didn’t buck Bertie up. His drunken floor speech in Commons for David would have sunk its Oscars.
December 12, 2011 at 4:09 am
Dave
Well, y’know, if Churchill had been right all the time we’d have to use him as a role-model, whether we liked it or not, so consider that a bullet [or a gas-grenade] dodged.
December 12, 2011 at 6:57 am
eric
And Lord knows, nobody regards Churchill as a role model.
December 12, 2011 at 7:47 am
Malaclypse
And Lord knows, nobody regards Churchill as a role model.
While I’m not surprised that Churchill topped that list, I do not know whether to be pleased that people remember Cromwell, or appalled that anybody would vote for him. Calling Cromwell the greatest Briton really should be beyond the Pale…
December 12, 2011 at 9:40 am
Anderson
That is a terribly sad poll. Diana? Flabbergasting.
OTOH, I had forgotten who Brunel even was; apparently he is drilled into schoolchildren’s heads.
December 12, 2011 at 9:47 am
Malaclypse
I had never even heard of Brunel, but this hat is made completely of Win.
December 12, 2011 at 9:52 am
dave
Nothing in there about role-models, of course. There’s a bit in Crick’s bio of Orwell, where he recounts how Eric Blair’s sixth-form class either voted or perhaps wrote essays on great men, and Lenin came out very high up. Crick notes that, of course, Eton sixth-formers were clever enough to know the difference between greatness and goodness… Ah yes, p. 128 in the Penguin edition.
December 12, 2011 at 10:06 am
eric
And you’re prepared to argue that the BBC poll participants thought likewise.
December 12, 2011 at 10:09 am
eric
Waitaminute, I naively believed you as a reporter of fact; I should have known better: Mowlam cites WSC’s representing Britain’s “big heartedness, its strength of character.” That doesn’t sound like a distinction between Leninesque greatness and goodness.
December 12, 2011 at 10:25 am
snarkout
England’s greatest man.
December 12, 2011 at 11:42 am
dave
I don’t believe I’m prepared to remain in a conversation with people who don’t know who Isambard Kingdom Brunel, possessor of not merely the world’s winningest hat, but its all-time most splendid name, is.
p.s. Daniel Lambert, only one letter-pair reversal away from being the unbeatable no. 1 shirt for England soccer…
December 12, 2011 at 12:51 pm
Malaclypse
Actually, on further reflection, the winningest thing about that picture of Brunel is not just the hat, but just how very rumpled and stained his suit and shoes were. No project manager today would ever get that dirty.
December 12, 2011 at 1:30 pm
ben
No, the winningest thing about that picture is the Brobdingagian chains in front of which Brunel is standing so casually.
December 12, 2011 at 1:30 pm
ben
-nagian, of course, not -agian.
December 12, 2011 at 2:32 pm
Anderson
Unemployable and sensitive about his bulk, Lambert became a recluse.
So sensitive that he sat for a portrait. Attention-hog.
December 12, 2011 at 9:28 pm
TF Smith
Imagine the ship the chains were restraining…
Were all these people actually “Britons”?
Would Shakespeare and Elizabeth I ever identified themselves as such?
December 14, 2011 at 10:14 am
ajay
Were all these people actually “Britons”?
Would Shakespeare and Elizabeth I ever identified themselves as such?
As heirs to Cymbeline and Caractacus? Damn right…
December 14, 2011 at 10:25 am
ajay
I do not know whether to be pleased that people remember Cromwell, or appalled that anybody would vote for him. Calling Cromwell the greatest Briton really should be beyond the Pale…
There’s a real split here between British people, who remember Cromwell for what he did in Britain, and Americans, who focus on what he (or rather his successors) did in Ireland. IIRC this blog has praised President Grant, without any recognition that any surviving Sioux might feel a bit differently.
December 16, 2011 at 3:07 am
Peter T
Well, Russians were on track to vote for Stalin as their greatest man until the current Kremlin organised a phone-in. Maybe it’s that distinction between good and great again.
And never mind Cromwell’s successors in Ireland – the man himself gave direct orders for more than a few massacres (eg at Drogheda).
December 16, 2011 at 12:17 pm
dave
The really interesting thing about the massacre at Drogheda is how insignificant an episode it was, compared, for example, to the sack of Magdeburg, or something a little later like Louis XIV’s devastation of the Palatinate, and yet how central it is when the appalling, unprecedented, ever-to-be-remembered outrages of Cromwell in Ireland are summoned up.