Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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My grandfather was a bomber pilot stationed on the Aleutian Islands during World War II. With not much in the way of local entertainment, the USO on base would provide what they could. This included a lot of books, and my grandfather either bought or stole the 20th anniversary anthology of a popular periodical that remained in his library until he died. I have a deep love of old books, but that apparently runs in my family, because upon the death of my grandmother (who outlived her husband by 10 years) this anthology was one of only two old books from their library I was able to claim.
In it, there's a wonderful article titled "My Five Best Dinner Companions".
I love how, in 1924, le petit caporal is the obvious choice they feel a need to dismiss immediately. They pick Socrates, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Pepys, Montaigne, and Lincoln. Read the short article here.
Myself, any time I am given hypothetical time travel powers, I feel a moral obligation to pick Homer so we can get the missing poems from the Epic Cycle. If my sole purpose was for my own enjoyment, I'd pick Robert Heinlein, and talk with him about our alma mater, politics and space travel. For the sake of an entertaining dinner amongst my friends, though, the only option is Samuel Clemens. That is to say, if anyone wasn't entertained by Mark Twain at dinner, I wouldn't count them as my friend.
Who would you pick?
Xenophon, Ernst Junger, Frederick II, Julius Caesar, HL Mencken. I particularly look forward to Junger introducing the other four to mescaline after dinner.
Seems like the dinner discussion would be pretty heavy on military strategy. You wouldn't bring a more contemporary perspective into the mix with someone like MacArthur or McChrystal, or would you expect Junger to offer that?
All of the four military men had highly philosophical outlooks (even Caesar wrote poems and works on grammar/rhetoric, which are now lost), and I suspect they'd rather discuss more abstract things they learned from their experiences in war, exploration, and statecraft. Junger could hold court explaining industrialized warfare to them, but he'd be too modest to go on at great length, and having Mencken would probably shut down any longwinded boasting from the emperors pretty quickly.
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