life's grand parade

"Alex Comfort was a pacifist and conscientious objector during World War II. If you ever find volume 3 of the collected essays, letters and journalism of George Orwell, you will find a poem Comfort wrote called “Letter to an American Visitor” which is anti-patriotic and anti-the war effort. Orwell wrote a rebuttal, also in verse, and then wrote a letter to Comfort saying essentially “obviously I disagree with you and hate what you stand for, but your poem was way better than mine”. Which it was. I read this in my early teens, and it blew my tiny little mind when I later realised that the pacifist Alex Comfort who Orwell was so angry at in the 1940s was the same guy who wrote The Joy of Sex."