"America and the Holocaust" -- Ken Burns

  Ken Burns’s PBS documentary on America’s role in the Holocaust is the year’s most important new work of art. Its historic sweep is detailed, searching, profound, intellectually solid and emotionally compelling. It also catches truths as applicable to America and the West today as it is about the Nazi period.

That is, Burns’s latest epic series succeeds on the three time-schemes that any ambitious historic art work involves. An artist’s approach to some long past event undertakes to represent a significant truth about the period it depicts. Given that open choice of subject, it is at least equally about the time the work was made as it is about the time in which its action is set. Why else make it? Finally, the best historic works also catch a truth about the time when the work is seen  — even if it’s decades after the work was made and hundreds of years after the subject event.

Burns’s new series pointedly reflects upon the resurgence of white supremacy, xenophobia, fear of immigration and especially antisemitism, the appeasement or toleration of murderous dictators, that undermines Western democracies today. Especially the subject, America. 

Don’t miss it. And don’t leave it smug that “we’re not like that anymore.” In politics, in the media, in our universities we once again — or still — are. That’s why Burns made this now. 

A History of The Gauntlet

 

Furor Arma Ministrat: A select history of the Gauntlet

By Melanie Woods, April 27 2017 —

On Friday Sept. 23, 1960, 1,300 newspapers appeared on the stands of the newly minted University of Alberta, Calgary (UAC) campus. While the campus only consisted of two buildings back then — now known as Science A and Administration — the population was blossoming. The campus looked forward to welcoming over 1,000 new students for the 1960–61 academic year.  

Fifty-seven years later, the University of Calgary’s population totals well over 30,000 and dozens more buildings have sprouted across campus. But some things never change. University presidents still remind us to “lift up our eyes,” the Dinos still play sports and the Students’ Union and university still bicker over MacHall. 

As the newspaper of record, the Gauntlet has documented all of the university’s changes since that first issue on Sept. 23 1960. And through that time, the Gauntlet has changed too. In the past 57 years, the Gauntlet has switched publication dates, times and sizes. It has added new features and discarded others. In the 1990s it launched a website — www.thegauntlet.ca — and has also expanded through social media, radio and video. 

This year, the Gauntlet stopped printing weekly for the first time in its history and will move to a monthly magazine with a daily updated website. On the eve of this new chapter, we decided to look back on some of the key turning points in the history of the Gauntlet and the U of C. 

Sept. 23, 1960: Birth of a campus and a newspaper

“FROSH, WE ALL— In a sense, we’re all freshmen this year, as the Calgary university of Alberta packed up kit and caboodle to move to its new grounds. But it’s not physical buildings which necessarily sets apart the university from, say, the high school. It’s the people that inhabit and the ideas that are born in those physical edifices that spell the crucial difference. Still, this year should be a unique one for us all. The buildings are totally alien to all, strange and unexplored. Every day will bring new mysteries to be solved, new adventures to be enjoyed, new tribulations to be suffered and survived.” Maurice Yacowar, Sept. 23, 1960.

The Gauntlet wasn’t the first student newspaper at the UAC. That distinction belongs to the Cal-Var — short for Calgary Varsity — established when the UAC was still located at the campus that is now the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. In 1948, then-president of the UAC SU Frederick Cartwright established the Cal-Var Commentary, which published until 1960, when the UAC moved to a newly minted northwest campus.

To usher in a brand new era at the new campus, the SU decided to publish a new newspaper, releasing volume one, issue one of the Gauntlet. In its early years, the paper’s small office was located in Room 027 in the basement of what is now the Administration building. The paper was funded by the SU, had a circulation of 1,300 copies published weekly on Fridays and presented the same slogan it does today — “furor arma ministrat,” Latin for “rage provides arms.” 

Its first editor-in-chief was Maurice Yacowar, then a second-year English student described in his introduction as “the man who has dedicated himself to the conquest of vice, corruption and complacency.” Yacowar would also go on to have the distinction not only of being the first Gauntleteditor, but also the the first to be fired from the job.

Yacowar faced heat for a short story published in the Gauntlet’s first literary supplement, Callidus, on Feb. 14, 1961. The story featured depictions of the loss of virginity and sexual intercourse and caused widespread outrage across the campus and the city. The supplement was deemed illegal due to controversy over its publishing and was seized, with Yacowar fired by the SU shortly after. 

The SU claimed the firing was due to a multitude of reasons concerning editorial control of the Gauntlet, but in a Feb. 22 editorial, new editor-in-chief Alan Arthur questioned the move. 

“If, as Students’ Council asserts, this had nothing to do with their action, why did they hold a special meeting two days after the seizure, instead of waiting until their next regular meeting to consider Mr. Yacowar’s fate?” Arthur wrote. 

So would begin a long and complex relationship between the Gauntlet and the SU. 

The 1960s–70s: Growing into an independent press

“Control of the major communication media should not rest with the governing body, whether that body be the students’ council of a university or the government of a country. We’re talking freedom of press. The staff of this newspaper will not be forced by [Students’ Legislative Council] or its executive to publish anything. We will publish what we deem to be the proper content and lineage.”The Gauntlet Editorial Board, Nov. 22, 1978

The Gauntlet underwent many changes in its early decades. It changed its slogan to “the people’s newspaper” in the mid-1960s. The paper also moved from Friday to Wednesday in terms of publishing dates, then experimented briefly with publishing twice a week in 1972. That only lasted eight issues, but they went back to the twice-a-week model the following year, publishing on Tuesdays and Fridays for the next few decades. 

But during all these small changes and editorial board turnovers, tensions grew between the Gauntletand its readership, as well as the Gauntlet and the SU. The paper faced a defunding referendum vote in the fall of 1969 that proposed stopping SU fees from going to the Gauntlet. 

“When the Gauntlet was a bland, conservative rag nobody complained about shelling out two bucks a year for it. But now that we are disturbing a few minds, there is suddenly a move to smash us,” editor-in-chief Jimmy Rudy wrote in an Oct. 22, 1969 editorial about the referendum. 

The Gauntlet returned in September 1970 a little haggard, but quickly recovered. However, the tense relationship with the SU persisted, simmering beneath the surface. In 1978, it reached a boiling point.

On Nov. 22 of that year, the Gauntlet published a front-page editorial titled “Gauntlet editorial – newspaper principles.” In the piece, the Gauntlet editorial board detailed what they deemed to be undue influence from the SU on the paper’s content, particularly regarding advertising. The SU executive had struck a policy to dictate and control the ad presence in the Gauntlet. The Gauntletclaimed this went directly against the SU’s constitution, which stated “the editor shall control the content of the Gauntlet.” 

On Nov. 29, the SU executive published a response on the Gauntlet’s cover. “It is our interpretation that the SU is the ‘business manager’ of The Gauntlet, and the paper’s editors and staff are not empowered to decide all business matters,” John Lefebvre wrote on behalf of the SU executive. The Gauntlet brought its response to the Review Board, which ruled on Jan. 10, 1979 that the union had delegated ad lineage responsibility to the Gauntlet editors, thus ending the conflict. 

A month later in the 1979 SU election, the Gauntlet ran a referendum campaign to gain autonomy. The question asked students if they would be willing to contribute $1 a year for full-time students or $0.50 a year for part-time students to support an independent Gauntlet Publications Society. “Both the operation of the SU and the operation of the newspaper are becoming more and more sophisticated,” co-editors Scott Ranson and Mark Tatchell wrote in a Feb. 2, 1979 editorial. “Both are now worthy of their own autonomous, individual existence.”

On Feb. 16, students voted over two to one to fund the autonomous campus newspaper. The society held its first Annual General Meeting on April 11, 1979. In the final editorial of the year, Ranson called the referendum win a “total victory.” 

In the first editorial of the following year on Sept. 6, 1979, new co-editors Michele Bestianich and Rory Cooney welcomed students in an editorial titled “Autonomy at Last.”

“Now more than ever the Gauntlet is a student newspaper. Whether the Gauntlet continues to strive for responsible journalism, or succumbs to financial and especially staff instability is up to the student body,” they wrote. “The hard work of past Gauntlet staffers has formed a base to work on, and we hope students will participate as the Gauntlet continues to grow.” 

1980 to now: An evolving Gauntlet

“A year from now, the issues reported in the Gauntlet will have been forgotten by most of us … but they will, nonetheless, affect us in some way. That is education.” Roman Cooney, April 11, 1980

The ‘80s and ‘90s marked continuing change for the Gauntlet. Publication dates, frequency and numbers shifted. The Gauntlet started to print in colour in the 80s and moved to full-colour newsprint in 2015. The Gauntlet’s website was introduced in 1998 and its focus on social media spread across various social media platforms over the following two decades. 

In 2001, the Gauntlet moved from its offices in MacHall 310 — now occupied by CJSW 90.9 FM — to its current location at MacHall 319, just above the Den and Black Lounge. This year, the Gauntletreceived $492,694 in Quality Money funding to renovate and update the space.

On Jan. 14, 1993, the Gauntlet published its thousandth issue. At the time, the newspaper had a circulation of over 13,000 print issues a week. In its final year of weekly publication, that number had flatlined at 6,000 a week.

However, the web presence that started in 1998 has skyrocketed. Currently, the Gauntlet receives around 40–50,000 hits a month on its website. More people than ever are talking about articles online, retweeting tweets and engaging with Snapchats. 

The Gauntlet’s slogan is still “furor arma ministrat,” which originates from Virgil’s Aenid and translates to “rage provides arms.” In the Gauntlet’s case, the rage is a desire to inform, and the arms is student press — even as that form evolves and shifts.

This edition marks the first time the Gauntlet will publish monthly. It’s the next chapter in a very long, very complicated story. Like many changes before this — from an editor fired over a short story about sex to a fight for autonomy — the Gauntlet will continue on, as it has for over 57 years on the University of Calgary campus.

---

Official Competition

         This is a fascinating, funny, often jaw-droopingly surprising backstage drama cowritten/directed by Mariano Cohn and Gaston Duprat.   The title both reveals and conceals this fascinating film’s levels of reality. As an art film it announces itself eligible for festivals’ official competition.It should do well there. 

         But its real interest lies in its variety of unofficial competitions.

The idea of a great film project originates in the ego of the financier. He spends big bucks to create — and have his name attached to — two projects as related as metaphor as in vanity. He funds two bridges. The literal spans across water, the metaphoric to an audience, against a vaster gulf. To achieve the latter, bridges must be built between the three isolated star egos.

His bridge to the arts is the brilliant eccentric director Lola — whose very name evokes cinema’s history of destructive vamps, from Louise Brooks on. She insists on casting two major figures, the box office star Felix (infelicitous) and the classical theatre purist Ivan (imperial). Their antithetical backgrounds guarantee disjunction. 

And disfunction. That central triangle houses several unofficial competitions. Of course the two male males mouth mutual respect but butt heads to establish seniority. Their objective is seniority within the production to preserve that in their respective egotisms. 

With a woman in the unaccustomed role of director, aka reigning authority, Lola here tries to free and synchronize her strafing stars by exploding the conventional modes of theatrical rehearsal. Her obviously suspect strategies to free her actors from their reflexes and ruts make for really Absurd Theatre, in the flightless wings. She sets the actors against each other, denies them their usual methods of preparation and performance and, in an ultimate violence against their self-respect, destroys their prized trophies and mementos. Lola makes Artaud seem like Hallmark.  

If the two male leads are competing for their own vain purposes, both for the imminent audience’s and for the boss woman’s approval, their respective egos are riven by the project. In turn each proposes performing both roles, as if to consume their rival out of fear of being consumed by him. The film -- happily? -- ends on the prospect of an actual attempted murder charge.

The ultimate unofficial competition, then, is internal, in each of the three leads. That’s how these three grandiose grotesques come to represent insipid little us. As they fight and scrounge for mere self-respect all three seem miniaturized by the large, industrial/theatrical sets through which they are deployed. The film uses the heightened world of theatre/film to externalize our inner turmoil in discovering and realizing our respective character -- and roles.     

A Mystery in Citizen Kane

I’ve long been troubled by an element in the newsreel company scene early in Citizen Kane. Uncredited Alan Ladd appears there, which is fine; he wasn’t a star yet. But Joseph Cotten appears and speaks in that scene ("Rosebud"). That’s Cotten outside his prominent role as Kane’s friend Jeb. And we’ve seen how Jeb has aged by then. 

Is that a mistake? How could that appearance happen? Couldn’t Welles find someone else to deliver that line? Did he think no-one would notice? Did he not care? Did he forget?  Was he so negligent with such an obtrusive subtle detail? Our boy genius Welles err so obviously?

Here’s my solution. Welles was always a magician. He did tricks as a kid. His F is for Fake exults in magic. So Cotten’s appearance out of character is magician Welles’s personal signature. Even more dramatic and subtle than that announcement: “A Film by Orson Welles.” 

Mere magicians can make someone disappear. More impressive, newly coined film magician can make someone appear.  He gives us two Cottens — first the unnamed, in the “outer" film— then the Jeb, in the “inner." With Cotten’s non-Jeb appearance in the film company’s meeting he embodies his master’s ultimate ability, to create a person out of thin air, beyond the material consistency of a “role.”

And light. One more brilliant touch in that scene. As one of the executives stands in front of the bright screen his head seems to emit a beam of — darkness. That's the newsreel company striving to find a Kane beyond the known and filmed — and beyond that, Welles creating that search for his own purposes. 

This force of abiding mystery returns at the end. When we finally learn what the fugitive “Rosebud” literally means — the sled burning in the furnace — we don’t get to rest on the fire's light (illumination) but we’re left with the thick black smoke rising out of the fire. That denies the sled aa  “solution” of the mystery. 

From all the divergent perspectives we get on Kane, the childhood scene and the metaphorically-laden “Rosebud” (“Gather thee…” etc.) don’t really solve the character’s enigma. The film is a testament to the complexity of its hero. The human — whether Kane, Hearst (with his more private Marion Davies’ “Rosebud”) or (by Welles's working title) “The American" — has dimensions beyond the crossword puzzles the mistress works on -- a tempting metaphor for the investigator’s search for “Kane.”  In confirmation of that continuing mystery, the film closes on the dark, foreboding “No Trespassing” sign and the ever-thickening fence that open the film. We all have No Trespassing signs that protect others’ probes to our core.       

Sharp Stick

One might expect a Lena Dunham Rom-Com to have teeth, candour, shock But nothing prepared me for the excellence of this work — the insightful script, intense shooting style, the uniformly detailed and delicate performances. 

As the title suggests, the film is about the pain of being a woman in an America under the lingering reign of phallicism. Even in this all-woman family, where all three principals have asserted their agency, the male power still causes damage.

At 25 Sarah Jo is a virgin already bearing embarrassing midsection scars from surgery. The emotional scars come here. She is an extremely competent caregiver for needy children, the Downs boy Zach in her opening job, the cerebral palsy girl at the end. Her free-spirited mother, Marilyn, has mastered the art of using men then dumping them. Sister Treina is a flashy assertive African-American, who usually appears in costume whether for or between shooting herself performing for video streaming. .

While Mother Marilyn cruises on her even keel — usually stoned — her daughters find opposing trajectories. Treina’s confidence is smashed when the boyfriend she’s thinking of marrying denies responsibility for her pregnancy and dumps her. In a remarkably current scene, her family honours her regretful need for an abortion and celebrates the child she would have had. 

In the central plot Sarah Jo’s surrender of virginity leads to her first romantic betrayal. She admires her employer Josh’s engaging relationship with his Downs son. She also believes his claim of detachment from his pregnant wife, Heather (an opulent performance by Dunham). The wife’s expensive pregnancy suggests Josh was not sexually engaged.

For her initiation Sarah Jo approaches Josh in the laundry room, where he’s playing the New Man, keeping it clean. To his credit he first resists the invitation — but then submits. With Heather away selling real estate Josh steadily increases his sexual activity with Sarah Jo.

Sarah Jo is initially discomfited by his oral performance on her, but comes to relish it as they grow together. Son Zach is a greater bond between them than between his parents. Josh even proposes they take him and leave together. But Heather, on the verge of delivery,  recognizes the chain Josh gave Sarah Jo. Confronted, Josh confesses his affair and angrily expels Sarah Jo. That cool New Man turns into a blithering betraying loser that his strut and warm energy hid for so long.

Shaken both by her sister’s and her own betrayal, Sarah Jo opts not to flee the sharp stick of romantic disappointment but to toughen herself by comprehensive experience. She proceeds to work through two poster-size lists of sexual practices. Now she is the aggressor, the user — but still not always successful. She doesn’t get her “necrophilia.” Her plan to use Josh’s buddy Yuli as recipient of her blow job — the metaphor of which Josh taught her — is thwarted by shared cocaine, that other “blow.” 

Josh also introduces Sarah Jo to internet porn. There she discovers her porn hero, Vance LeRoy, “king” of the tattooed studs. Her fan letter leads to his video message encouraging her to stop her trivial erotics and respect her possibility for a meaningful love affair. 

At this point this hard-headed anatomy of sexual politics reveals its true genre, romantic comedy. Sarah Jo meets the engaging Africa American Arvin when he answers her ad for someone to blow. As he’s not that casual, he brings her some drinks and wants to talk first. The free blow job doesn’t impress him, because his work on porn film crews exposes him to them daily. That career enables him to convey her letter to Vance and return with the video message. 

This could be the all-time classic “Meeting Cute” of the Rom-Com. Coupled with her new child-care job, this burgeoning romance makes for the genre’s happy ending. As for Josh, we last see him suffering in the relationship he could serially betray but not leave. That stick is not so sharp after all. 

Beyond the Jews: Philip Roth’s target in “Defender of the Faith”

  Philip Roth’s 1959 New Yorker short story, “Defender of the Faith,” curiously anticipates the controversy that would whirl around the writer’s later work. From Letting Go and Portnoy’s Complaint through his later Sabbath, Zuckerman and “Roth” persona novels, Roth was frequently criticized by the Jewish community for satirizing the Jews — as if antisemites need his help. Canadian Mordecai Richler was similarly criticized for fiction that putatively aired his people’s soiled laundry in public. As early as this story Roth anticipates and confronts that criticism. He weaves ambivalences into irony, especially when we consider the story’s various defenders of various faiths.

The eponymous character would appear to be Sheldon Grossbart, a slimy self-server who purports to defend his fellow Jews’ rights at an American army training base. But Roth is careful to undermine this character, indeed making him as repulsive to those of his faith as he is to their enemies.

Though the plot unwinds in an American army camp, the narrative frame sets the drama in the context of WW II in Europe. At the outset, First Sergeant Nathan Marx has to his surprise been rotated away from the last days of the war in Europe to train new recruits at Camp Crowder, Missouri. Away from the war, there is still a crowd, still a mass of humanity with which to contend. His war experience has moved him from horror to numbness. At the end, Marx and his men are despatched to meet their fate in the Pacific arena.  

Between those wars the story takes place in ostensibly peaceful America. But even here conflict remains, specifically between the aggressive Grossbart and his Sergeant Marx. True to his surname, Sheldon grossly trades on his Jewish identity.  At their first meeting he sits on the sergeant’s desk and tries to go by their first names. He assumes the Jewish sergeant will excuse the Jewish soldiers from the Friday evening cleaning of the barracks — and prevent the other soldiers’ resentment. 

In identifying Marx with his Karl and Harpo namesakes Grossbart assumes they share a historic kinship. He implicitly evokes the class politics of the former and the comic pathos of the latter, the quality that distinguishes the silent, magical Harpo from the slick, urban Groucho.

That sabbath intervention leaves Sergeant Marx feeling  “tender about myself…. I felt as though a hand were reaching down inside me. It had to reach so very far to touch me! It had to reach past those days in the forests of Belgium, and past the dying I’d refused to weep over; past the nights in German farmhouses whose books we’d burned to warm us; past endless stretches when I had shut off all softness I might feel for my fellows, and had managed even to deny myself the posture of a conqueror—the swagger that I, as a Jew, might well have worn as my boots whacked against the rubble of Wesel, Münster, and Braunschweig.” Marx recovers in his revived Jewish identity the connection lost in the war. His sabbath observance revives his feeling of Jewish humanitarianism. This reminder of his sensitivity and moral compass begins the positive representation of Jewishness that will balance out Grossbart’s debasement.

That ancient kinship dwindles as Grossbart exploits it. Even at that first service “I thought I heard Grossbart cackle, ‘Let the goyim clean the floors!’” He later purports to advocate for lantzmen Larry Fishbein and Mickey Halpern, but that only hides his self-service. In their supposed interest he writes a formal complaint — fraudulently, in his father’s name — against the non-kosher food. In a phone call from a superior, Captain Barrett deflects the political complaint: “‘Sir?’ he said. ‘Sir—Marx, here, tells me Jews have a tendency to be pushy. He says he thinks we can settle it right here in the company.’” Roth puts the generalized charge of Jewish pushiness into the mouth of a lying, unsympathetic Gentile officer. 

To excuse his belligerence Grossbart has the chutzpah to cite the war he resists: “‘That’s what happened in Germany,’ Grossbart was saying, loud enough for me to hear. ‘They didn’t stick together. They let themselves get pushed around.’” But Captain Barrett trumps that: “‘Look, Grossbart…. Who does more for the Jews—you, by throwing up over a lousy piece of sausage, a piece of first-cut meat, or Marx, by killing those Nazi bastards? If I was a Jew, Grossbart, I’d kiss this man’s feet. He’s a goddam hero, and he eats what we give him.’” Yet Grossbart keeps playing the victim card: “I don’t want to start trouble. That’s the first thing they toss up to us.” Another Grossbart letter putatively from his father strategically exalts Sergeant Marx for his efforts. 

After a brief pause in his campaign Grossbart maneuvers a weekend pass supposedly to attend an aunt’s seder in St Louis. Reminded that Passover has passed, he avows she plans a special ceremonial meal for him. He expands the request to include his two compatriots. In another defence of Jewish values Marx questions his reluctance to submit to Grossbart’s demands: “But my grandmother knew—mercy overrides justice. I should have known it, too. Who was Nathan Marx to be such a penny pincher with kindness? Surely, I thought, the Messiah himself—if He should ever come—won’t niggle over nickels and dimes. God willing, he’ll hug and kiss.” 

Having  granted the three their weekend pass, Marx learns the entire request was a lie. The promised gefilte fish turns into a Chinese egg roll. Marx throws out Grossbart’s gift, which delights one happy soldier the next morn: ”’Egg roll!’ he shouted. ‘Holy Christ, Chinese goddam egg roll!’” The oath makes the revelation comically religious. 

In Grossbart’s climactic fraud he evades the draft to the Pacific theatre. He gets only himself exempted, not his two coreligionists. Marx counters with his own deception. With a Grossbartian ploy he has Grossbart reinstated supposedly at his own request. At this Grossbart drops all pretence of kinship. In fake concern for his father, Grossbart attacks his erstwhile comrade Marx: “He hasn’t had enough troubles in a lifetime, you’ve got to add to them. I curse the day I ever met you, Marx! Shulman told me what happened over there. There’s no limit to your anti-Semitism, is there? The damage you’ve done here isn’t enough. You have to make a special phone call! You really want me dead!”

As the soldiers prepare for their possibly one-way trip to war, Marx resists “with all my will an impulse to turn and seek pardon for my vindictiveness.” Unlike Grossbart Marx has a conscience — and the ethical grounds here to suppress it. With his interference and false phone claim the sergeant has truly defended his faith as an American, a Jew, a soldier. To counter Grossbart’s selfish wiles he practices one. 

Roth clearly subordinates defending the faith to defending the values. That is the true difference between “a company of soldiers here, and … a company of boys,” as Captain Barrett remarked at the outset. The faith does not protect its abusers and malpractitioners. Roth uses Grossbart to remind us we can judge a Jew without judging the Jews. In Marx's subversion of his coreligionist Roth rebuts the traditional calumny that Jews place their own people against their state of citizenship and therefore cannot be trusted. 

The WW II setting provides a macro version of the title. America and its Allies defend their national values, their “faith.” The characterization of the officers may undercut that assumption, expanding Roth’s target from the Jews to include the gentiles too, indeed Western Civilization. Captain Barrett — whose name implies self-exposure — reveals his own instinctive bigotry: “‘Marx, I’d fight side by side with a nigger if the fella proved to me he was a man. I pride myself,’ he said, looking out the window, ‘that I’ve got an open mind. … Consequently, Sergeant, nobody gets special treatment here, for the good or the bad.’ He turned from the window and pointed a finger at me. ‘You’re a Jewish fella, am I right, Marx?’” The repeated "fella" reveals the good officer's detachment from any Other.

        Even the captain’s military manliness is undermined by “the buttons straining to hold his blouse across his belly.” That “blouse” jars against the military uniform. So too the primeval Corporal Robert LaHill, “a dark, burly fellow whose hair curled out of his clothes wherever it could. He had a glaze in his eyes that made one think of caves and dinosaurs.“  Roth here presents a spectrum of prejudice/civilization -- as he does a spectrum of defenders of the faith.

For the army as for the individual soldier the highest motive is to be guarded against the baser instincts of self-service, delusion and prejudice. There are many false “defenders of the faith” but their failings don’t detract from those of honest virtue. Here the principled pragmatic Sergeant Marx is the true defender of the faith, both against its fraudulent abuser and the somewhat ambivalent institution Marx serves.