On 2 Jul 2003 14:17:27 -0700, (Kevin Brooks)
wrote:

Art's typical approach of denigrating the efforts and contributions of
others in order to somehow make his own seem more valiant or valuable
is unfortunate.

It's weird, and it raises some personal questions about his motivation
for posting. Why is this approach neccessary? Does he only want to
elicit vacuous sycophancy and uneccessary antagonisms? Is he really
unable to recognise the offensiveness of dismissing the contributions
of millions of other people, or hypocrisy of denigrating learning from
other personal experiences but making his own written accounts
available? The fact that he cuts these elements from his followups
indicates he's entirely aware of what he's doing. He clearly doesn't
want to tolerate any mmiddle-ground.

In any case the defensiveness and personal antagonisms are neccessary.
Who exactly runs this "Wannabe plot" to run veterans off r.a.m. or is
this just a fictious assumption on his part?

He could be a good source for information specific to
his experiences, but his continual belittling of anything and
everything that does not involve B-26 operations in whatever group he
was in in the ETO merely makes him sound rather shrill and casts
doubts regarding his veracity on anything of value that he may
actually have to offer. Kind of sad, really.

Indeed. The motivation for perpetuating this thread and continuing to
talk about this point on my side came on a personal level, as I heard
an old next-door neighbour of mine died yesterday. I never really saw
a lot of him, but he did encourage me, when I was much younger, to
learn about history and the war in particular. He never spoke about
his own service in Bomber Command, other than to show me a model of
his Lancaster, and maintained this silence even when he was approached
to record them a few weeks before his death, when he was in obviously
ailing health. Now his experiences have been lost for good. Still, I
never heard him denigrate Marauder aircrew or anybody else to
establish his own credentials. He was a broad enough character of a
man not to need those kind of childish games.

He was a good man, and a good neighbour. RIP John. Thanks.

Gavin Bailey

--

"...this level of misinformation suggests some Americans may be
avoiding having an experience of cognitive dissonance."
- 'Poll shows errors in beliefs on Iraq, 9/11'
The Charlotte Observer, 20th June 2003