So, for fun, I asked my 4th hour class a joke question at the end of a quiz on imaginary numbers. (Just checking their imagination!) Here are some of the answers:
Question, "Who is buried in Grant's tomb?"
Mummies
Jimmy Hoffa
Nobody
A general
Lincoln
Groucho Marx (By far the most popular answer, repeated fifteen times by fifteen different students)
King Tut
Darth Vader
Your mom:p
And two students got the correct answer: General Grant:wah:
The Groucho mental association with Grant's Tomb originates with this having been Groucho's Question. He had a quiz show and he often threw in "Who's buried in Grant's Tomb" to give away a free correct answer so he could hand out a prize. I love the idea that some people now think Groucho's buried there.
Technically, since both Ulysses S Grant and his wife are still above ground embalmed in marble vaults, nobody's buried there at all.
Týr;1450349 wrote: The Groucho mental association with Grant's Tomb originates with this having been Groucho's Question. He had a quiz show and he often threw in "Who's buried in Grant's Tomb" to give away a free correct answer so he could hand out a prize. I love the idea that some people now think Groucho's buried there.
Technically, since both Ulysses S Grant and his wife are still above ground embalmed in marble vaults, nobody's buried there at all.
That's right!
I used to watch Groucho's show, You Bet Your Life it was called. I don't remember the Grant's tomb joke, but I remember the "Secret Word." I loved those lunatics, the Marx Bros.
As a kid (being a bit of a smartass), if the question was asked in your math class, I probably would have said that the tomb contained an imaginary number of bodies.
Here, for the record, is a likeness of Julia Grant endorsing an early brand of curling tong.
Speaking for myself on the subject of her husband, I can never distinguish between photos of Ulysses S Grant and his wartime sidekick in the rape of the Confederacy, William Tecumseh Sherman. Given that each was as guilty as the other this seems appropriate. Both were a disgrace to their uniform.
Týr;1450493 wrote: . Both were a disgrace to their uniform.
While it's true that the Civil War was one of the bloodiest and most vicious in the 20th century, thanks to weapons far outstripping tactics (foreshadowing the horror that was WWI), both Grant and Sherman realized that the only way to win a modern war is sheer genocide. That's why we have lost every war since WWII. An unwillingness on the part of us, and humanity as a whole, to fight that kind of war anymore. Today, if we lose ten percent of our troops in a battle we consider it a bloodbath. Then, they lost 50 to 80 percent in a single battle, and went out the next day and did it again. Faced with a war like that, what would you have done to end it?
I give them respect for realizing what was needed to win, even though I abhor it and despise war.
Saint_;1450497 wrote: both Grant and Sherman realized that the only way to win a modern war is sheer genocide.
And they deserve "respect" for supervising it, disagreeable though it may be? The trouble with the US public is that too high a proportion of it think along the same lines. Without such disdainful greed and unconcern, the displacement and death of millions of unarmed civilians in the Middle East over the last decade would never have been possible.
Some years ago - forty, at a guess - I bought a copy of "From Atlanta to the Sea" by William T Sherman, published by The Folio Society, "edited from the second half of Sherman's Memoirs covering the period 18 March 1864 to the end of the war by B H Liddell Hart. 304pp" - it's a damn sight more readable than the bare-naked memoirs themselves which are rather more full of mundane detail. I was appalled at the cynical reasoning behind the campaign of destruction aimed at Confederate civilians. And you ask for "respect" for these commanders? Doesn't that devolve some of their blood-guilt onto your own shoulders?
Here, to pick an almost random field command:[Special Field Orders, No. 120.]
HEADQUARTERS MILITARY DIVISION OF THE MISSISSIPPI
IN THE FIELD, KINGSTON, GEORGIA, November 9, 1864
[...] In districts and neighborhoods where the army is unmolested, no destruction of each property should be permitted; but should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless, according to the measure of such hostility.
... and that's the reason so many Confederate civilians lost their lives during the Civil War. Deliberate targeted reprisals ordered by the commander of the force. And you offer "respect"? And then you wonder why your country still destroys millions of lives in pursuit of its own financial interest?
The goal of warfare is to beat the enemy into submission. If you cannot commit yourself to doing that, you have no business being there.
Grant and Sherman, along with Lee and many others, understood this. Had the Strategists of today run the the American Civil War, we would still be fighting it today. (so folks think we still are)
While I detest war, I detest even more the ridiculous waste of resources and human life that these "Limited Warfare" strategies, and Pacification methods that they have come up with in the last 50 or so years. We need to either avoid warfare, or commit to total war.
IF we cannot evolve to a point where warfare becomes extinct, the we should let fly the missiles and save the universe the pain and agony of the next 100,000 years of human evolution.
The home of the soul is the Open Road.
- DH Lawrence
I agree entirely with what you write there. All I've done is to query whether respect is due to those who oversaw, and still oversee, these mass deaths. From my viewpoint it most certainly isn't, since respect would merely encourage others to sign up in future and perpetrate further humanitarian disasters on behalf of the cynical political ideologues who plan and trigger these wars.
Týr;1450500 wrote: And they deserve "respect" for supervising it, disagreeable though it may be?
They deserve respect for having the guts to follow through with the only solution that would bring the war to a quick end without endless years of guerilla warfare.( See: Vietnam and Afghanistan) For the record, my ancestor, Abraham Lincoln, presided over the war and ended it.
Saint_;1450511 wrote: They deserve respect for having the guts to follow through with the only solution that would bring the war to a quick end without endless years of guerilla warfare.( See: Vietnam and Afghanistan)
We shall evidently have to agree to differ. My respect goes solely to those who died - and continue to die - by the orders of these killers while having no means to avoid their fate.
For the record, my ancestor, Abraham Lincoln, presided over the war and ended it.It's a technical term, ancestor. I note Wikipedia's observation that "The last person known to be of direct Lincoln lineage, Robert's grandson 'Bud' Beckwith, died in 1985". Perhaps Tad Lincoln scattered his seed more successfully than has been heretofore recognized.
