Mr. Calderón, whose spiky everyday surrealism suggests the young Edward Albee in an unusually laid-back mood, presents a universe in which all activities, from Christmas rituals to the practices of war, have been depleted of content.
"Although I recognize that the standard practices of war are changing, our brave warriors who face life and death situations deserve the most distinguished medals the United States military awards.
These changes in the practice of war went hand in hand with a considerable expansion in the power of governments.
The second reason for the decline in allegiance to the Theory is largely independent of changes in the practice of war.
The practice of war is as natural as voting; both are fundamental applications of force, "naked and raw, the Power of the Rods and the Ax".
The pillaging of Europe's great cities was a practice of war as common as the rape of an enemy's womenfolk for hundreds of years, and the last century has witnessed such savagery on an unprecedented scale.
Yet at the same time, the practice of war has changed profoundly, particularly over the last few centuries, with the development of civilian armies, the application of mass-production techniques to armaments, the rise of semiautonomous military-industrial complexes.
Unlike the European practice of war, where peasant and proletarian infantrymen — largely detached from their families, who had long since given them up to the army and its institutions — and a tiny cadre of professional officers fought professional battles with a professional code of soldiering, the American Civil War soldier was often embedded in an ongoing family life.
That was not naive exactly, writes William Langewiesche, an American journalist, rather the scientists were saying: "If you knew what we know about these devices, the practice of war must stop .By contrast, the fact that there has been no second nuclear war in the intervening 60 years seems a modest success.
Unlike the European practice of war, where peasant and proletarian infantrymen largely detached from their families, who had long since given them up to the army and its institutions and a tiny cadre of professional officers fought professional battles with a professional code of soldiering, the American Civil War soldier was often embedded in an ongoing family life.
Raised by his father to believe that the practice of war is obsolete, the immature soldier — and, by extension, the reader — is instructed through a series of deep space combat missions that war is not only unavoidable, it is vital and even noble.
