Give a sissy a gun and he will kill everything in sight. TR [Theodore Roosevelt]’s slaughter of the animals in the Badlands outdoes in spades the butcheries of that sissy of a later era, Ernest Hemingway. Elks, grizzly bears, blacktail bucks are killed joyously while a bear cub is shot, TR reports proudly, ‘clean through … from end to end’ (the Teddy bear was yet to be invented). ‘By Godfrey, but this is fun!’ TR was still very much the prig, at least in speech: ‘He immortalized himself along the Little Missouri by calling to one of his cowboys, “Hasten forward quickly here!”.’ Years later he wrote: ‘There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, ranging from grizzly bears to “mean” horses and gunfighters; but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid.’
There is something strangely infantile in this obsession with dice-loaded physical courage when the only courage that matters in political or even ‘real’ life is moral. Although TR was often reckless and always domineering in politics, he never showed much real courage, and despite some trust-busting, he never took on the great ring of corruption that ruled and rules in this republic. But then, he was born a part of it. At best, he was just a dude with the reform play….
As a politician-writer, Theodore Roosevelt most closely resembles Winston Churchill and Benito Mussolini. Each was as much a journalist as a politician. Each was a sissy turned showoff. The not unwitty Churchill – the most engaging of the lot – once confessed that if no one had been watching him he could quite easily have run away during a skirmish in the Boer War. Each was a romantic, in love with the nineteenth-century notion of earthly glory, best personified by Napoleon Bonaparte, whose eagerness to do in his biological superiors led to such a slaughter of alpha-males that the average French soldier of 1914 was markedly shorter than the soldier of 1800 – pretty good going for a fat little fellow, five foot four inches tall – with, to be fair, no history of asthma.
—Gore Vidal
To put all this depressing shite in context, I unwind with You Tube videos of the Crimean War and randomly read any page in Tuchman's, A Distant Mirror to realize this earthly adventure has been off the rails for just about forever. Try to imagine how many wars your antecedents had to dodge/survive just so the current insanity can be cataloged by you, et al! The more things change...