House of Eratosthenes

1. Effort applied to a task that goes well above-and-beyond the level of merely plodding along. Like you give a damn.
2. Evidence of this.
3. Benefits of the successfully completed task that go beyond the initially stated objective, which could not have been delivered if it weren’t for some Give-A-Damn in the effort applied.

Note that these three definitions overlap somewhat.

In business, parenthood and house-shopping I’ve been throwing this word into conversation when it seems there is no other phrase that describes this important concept, and it occurs to me this is one of many places where we hurt ourselves with our choices about what words need inventing and what words don’t. We need to start giving a damn about Give-A-Damn.

I realized I was derelict in my failure to add this to my “make new word” list, when I stumbled across this risible Memorial Day slideshow of “Best and Worst War Movies” over on NY Daily News. I haven’t much of a quibble with the “best” ones, but the “worst” end of the list is…here, I’ll bottom-line it: Pearl Harbor is a “worst” movie, and so is A Bridge Too Far, along with Patton.

Those last two are on our movie shelf because they’re packed chock-full-silly with Give-A-Damn. The Michael Bay monstrosity, not so much…I will never see that one again, much less own it. I know of no effort to describe saliently why it is, exactly, that Pearl Harbor sucks. But I can bottom-line it for you: Aside from the marvelous footage of the bomb dropping on the deck, it’s completely lacking in Give-A-Damn. It doesn’t belong on any list alongside Bridge Too Far or Patton. It isn’t even in the same universe.

As I pointed out on the Hello Kitty of Blogging, the problem with the list is that it was compiled (anonymously) by a damn hipster. I can’t prove it, but I think that’s the issue: Some under-thirty-five hipster, an American Castrati, who understands Give-A-Damn about as well as Mark Twain’s metaphorical pig understands the day of the week. That is my primary complaint against the hipster culture, why we will never have a need for it that will match any trace portion of its vast abundance: The hipster lifestyle does not understand, much less appreciate, Give-A-Damn.

The rest of us are going to have to compensate for their apathy and ignorance. Memorial Day is a great day to take notice of this. It’s Act-Like-You-Give-A-Damn day.

ThatIsAll.

I’ve long maintained that this is why Hollywood can never make another good Civil War movie. You’d think there’d be a thousand of these a year — virtuous Progressives go South to battle skinny guys with big beltbuckles who sound like George W. Bush and fear black people. The script practically writes itself!

But no. They’ve done the 54th Massachusetts — it’s got Morgan Freeman and everything — but that’s it. I’m convinced this is because the Civil War sounds amazingly cheesy to modern ears. Lots of those guys really did march off to war thinking “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” How the hell do you get that into the multiplex? It’s just too full of give-a-damn.
- Severian | 05/30/2011 @ 09:54
And by hipster, I assume you really mean “hipster douchebag”, because it’s so rare to find one who is not the other.
- Uncle Kenny | 05/30/2011 @ 10:16
Severian, I hadn’t quite thought of it that way, but now that you do put fingers to keyboard, that does make sense. About Civil War movies, I mean.

Part of the reason for the phenomenon you observe is more general though – the Civil War just seems so ridiculous today. 650,000 men…many of them related to someone on the other side, dying gruesome painful deaths at places like Gettysburg and Shiloh…for what? For the right to own slaves, of course.

Well, *of course,* it’s not QUITE that simple, but even if you delve into the more complex issues of states’ rights and whether slavery was to be permitted in the new western territories and all that…it still doesn’t square well with today’s live-and-let-live mentality embraced by so many in the political middle (as well as modern Libertarians). The idea of going to war and tearing the country apart and killing your countrymen by the hundreds of thousands over such controversies seems so….trite. So absurd. So silly.

Going to war with Japan and Germany makes sense to the modern mind. Going to war to throw out the redcoats kinda-sorta-makes sense today. (I’m trying to speak from the mindset of the average American, not necessarily my own.) But over the things that started the Civil War? (And let’s face it…you have to do a LOT of reading to really understand the root causes of the conflict; saying “slavery” over and over again is a gross oversimplification.)

Since the real causes of the war are hard to envision today, you can imagine the difficulty in making a movie about said causes leading to said conflict, especially one that is A) anywhere near historically accurate, B) doesn’t whitewash Abraham Lincoln and other Union leaders and C) doesn’t turn the Confederacy into nasty evil Stars-and-Bars waving proto-Nazis. (I’ve read a number of those Politically Incorrect Guides now, all of which suggest that you and I didn’t exactly get the whole story in 7th grade history class.)
- cylarz | 05/30/2011 @ 13:43
I went back and read the NYT article when I had a bit more time later in the day. The entire set of “best” and “worst” opinion pieces left me asking, “Are you freaking kidding me? Are these people on crack?”

Best: Platoon? You’re kidding me, right? It’s a depressing, boring movie about Americans in Vietnam. Why anyone would want to make a movie about that sad, pointless, misbegotten, miserable conflict in the first place is beyond me, but every sing Vietnam-themed movie I’ve ever seen always seems to be set in or around 1968 or 1969, which I guess was considered the worst part of the conflict, when we’re talking about a war that dragged on over twenty years. Why so few about the early or late years of the conflict? And why always this theme of “oh what’s the use of it all?” It rarely if ever seems to be a positive portrayal of American GIs, portraying them at-best as victims of the evil politicians and Pentagon brass back home, at worst as Ghenghis Khan-ish baby killers like John Kerry described.

Worst: Patton? Again, are you freaking KIDDING me? True, the movie did seem to have an awful lot of George C Scott standing around watching tanks drive by, but come on. For years and years it was lauded as a realistic portrayal not only of the WWII in North Africa and Europe, but also of Patton personally and his leadership style. I mean, they even left in the part about him going off on a young shell-shocked GI, so you can’t even claim it’s a whitewash of Patton’s memory.

Whoever wrote that article has got a mighty strange taste in war movies. They didn’t even mention good ones like “We Were Soldiers,” or some others that were truly awful like “The Thin Red Line.” Instead we’re treated to a montage of films made back in the 50s that nobody alive today even remembers watching when they were new. And I’ve got to ask – what the hell was Hollywood doing making movies about some war…while said war was *still going on* ? I mean, don’t you want to see how this whole thing turns out, maybe let a few more years go by so it fades from the national consciousness a bit…BEFORE filing actors in helmets and calling it entertainment? Geez…
- cylarz | 05/30/2011 @ 23:36
I think, back then, there was such a thing as a national morale level. Since about 1968 there has been a conservative morale level and a liberal morale level; back then, we were more united because “Give-A-Damn” was valued, universally, and so there was a trust in place that has been fractured since. Post-Alinsky, we’ve had to to wrestle with a meme of “Some people don’t have Give-A-Damn and so they don’t want anybody else to have it either.”

Reading your comment, I also had occasion to think about “The Sullivans,” which was made while the war was still on. This was one of the best, but didn’t even make the list. I believe the contents of the film, answer your question; the thinking might have been that, if the war did not conclude favorably to the Allied forces, nobody would be able to watch movies anymore anyway, so we may as well put some serious thought “now,” while we can, into why we’re fighting and what fine young men are being sent off to do that fighting. We’d just lived through the Great Depression, during which time movies became the most important way for people to comisserate about such things.
- mkfreeberg | 05/31/2011 @ 05:47
And why always this theme of “oh what’s the use of it all?”

Boomer narcissism, my friend… Boomer narcissism. Since they can’t think of any cause for which they, personally, would sacrifice anything*, they assume that there simply are no sacrifice-worthy causes.

Read Mark Steyn’s review of “Saving Private Ryan” if you get a chance. It really changed my opinion of that movie considerably. Basically, he says that once you get past the mind-blowing Normandy scene, SPR is two hours of the same old tedious Boomer whining in the key of “what is it all for?” Tom Hanks’s character concludes that “maybe saving Private Ryan is the one good thing we’ll do in all this mess”… to which Steyn replies (paraphrase), “um, what about the whole ‘defeating Nazism’ thing?” Again, because Spielberg can’t think of anything for which he, personally, would go off to war, he assumes there’s nothing worth fighting for.
- Severian | 05/31/2011 @ 09:26
*footnote to above:

Unless you count “tasty food” and “toilets that actually flush” and “saving money at WalMart” as sacrifices… in which case they’re willing to give the last full measure of devotion to the cause of showing the world how morally superior they are to everyone else.
- Severian | 05/31/2011 @ 09:28
Tom Hanks’s character concludes that “maybe saving Private Ryan is the one good thing we’ll do in all this mess”… to which Steyn replies (paraphrase), “um, what about the whole ‘defeating Nazism’ thing?”

I hadn’t thought of it that way, and I’ll go over and read the review as you suggested. Before I head off though, I just recalled one other scene about that movie (besides the opening battle) that stuck out to me:

Remember the part where the team is headed across the French countryside on foot…and they run across a German radar station? Most of the team (which always seems to include a guy from Brooklyn in these kinds of movies)…wanted to bypass the radar and press ahead with the primary mission, i.e. saving Private Ryan. But Tom Hanks’ character says something like, “Why? So the Germans in there can ambush the next team of Americans that pass by?” “But that’s not the mission,” one of them says back. “Our mission is to win this war,” the captain answers.

At that point it’s a foregone conclusion of what will happen next, and the team grudgingly prepares to attack.

I think the character in that film which did irritate the hell out of me was not Tom Hanks’ character, but rather that weenie who kept whimpering and cowering behind everything while his buddies are running out of ammo and getting shot and fighting for their lives against knife-wielding German GIs. That one scene toward the end of the film in particular, just really bugged me…an American died because this idiot refused to help his comrade. Was I supposed to be proud of the character because he finally found his spine and shot an unarmed German POW a few minutes later in the film?
- cylarz | 05/31/2011 @ 10:04
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