Great War

Today, they had a special on NPR about World War One veterans. It was mostly about how they are the "forgotten veterans,." They are awfully old and mostly dead, so they seem justly forgotten, until you realize that you can't think of one piece of 1960's popular culture that refers to WWI veterans. So yeah, forgotten.

The special involved finding surviving veterans and interviewing them. The questions were all very boring, the kind of questions you could probably find good answers to in a book. "What was it like being drafted," and "How was it being in the navy [during this completely non-naval war because we couldn't find enough army veterans]?" Those aren't interesting questions. Obviously what is interesting about these people is that they are really old. In 10 years they'll all be as dead as every other Great War veteran, and what will we have gained? I think the interviews should have consisted of two questions: What do you hate most about the modern world, and what did Victorian people's voices sound like? Now that's reporting.