Tuesday. September 9, 2025
D+308/233/-1229
1920 Charles Edward Clausen was born in Fort Dodge, IA
1963 Alabama Governor George Wallace served a federal injunction to stop orders of state police to bar black students from enrolling in white schools
1985 President Reagan ordered sanctions against South Africa, targeting apartheid
2021 Joe Biden announced widespread COVID-19 vaccine mandates for federal workers, contractors, and large employers, affecting 100 million people
In bed at 9:30, up at 5. 52°, wind chill 45°, high 71°, cloudy.
Meds, etc. Morning meds 7 a.m. I'm exhausted this morning, both from a not very restful night's sleep and perhaps mostly from all the activity in the basement yesterday, moving things out of what I've taken to calling 'the common area' and into the workroom and the storage room. I didn't do any heavy lifting; Geri dealt with that, mainly books, but I made many slow, achy, lumbering trips schlepping stuff from one place to another, and several dreaded trips up the basement stairs. There is little to do today, thanks mainly to my amazing wife, but I will be slow getting to it, emptying the tops of my butcherblock desk and credenza, and moving three table lamps.
From my memoir:
In March of this year, I drove to Florida to visit my Aunt Monica and my Dad who was visiting her. On the way, I listened to a ‘book on tape’ by Farley Mowat entitled “And No Birds Sang.” The book describes the author’s service in the Canadian Army in the Italian campaign of World War II. In it, he quoted a letter he received during the war from his father, himself a World War I veteran:
Keep it in mind during the days ahead that war does inexplicable things to people and no man can guess how it is going to affect him until he has had a really stiff dose of it. The most unfortunate ones after any war are not those with missing limbs. They’re the ones who have had their spiritual feet knocked out from under them. The beer halls and gutters are still full of such poor bastards from my war and nobody understands or cares what happened to them. I remember two striking examples of two men from my old company in the 4th Battalion, both damn fine fellows yet both committed suicide in the lines. They did not shoot themselves. They let the Germans do it because they had reached the end of the tether. They never knew what was the matter with them. They had become empty husks, were spiritually depleted, were burned out.
In another book, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Modris Eksteins discusses Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, or more accurately, Remarque’s psychological and spiritual condition after the War to End All Wars. He describes Remarque as
. . . a deeply disconsolate man, searching for an explanation for his dissatisfaction. And in his search, Remarque eventually hit upon the Kriegserleben, the war experience. . . “All of us were”, he said of himself and his friends in an interview in 1929, “and still are, restless, aimless, sometimes excited, sometimes indifferent, and essentially unhappy.”
. . .
Remarque himself stated the purpose of All Quiet in a brief and forceful prefatory comment:
This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure . . . It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.
Your grandfather was one of Mowat’s “most unfortunate ones,” of Remarque’s “restless, aimless, . . . essentially unhappy” men who, “though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.” I am confident that had it not been for the support of my mother and of my grandparents and Aunt Monica, he would have been one of the army of lost souls in the “beer halls and gutters.” He would not have survived on his own. In the same conversation in which he told me that it took him 25 years to ‘get over’ Iwo Jima, he also told me that the Marines did not want to ‘let him out’ or discharge him after the war because of his ‘condition’ and how hard it was for my mother to live with him. I don’t know whether he has any idea how hard those years were for Kitty and me. He has never acknowledged it to either of us. Kitty and I rarely talk of it and never at length, but in a serious conversation about 25 years ago she remarked that we had been ‘emotionally crippled from growing up with Dad.’ She was pretty accurate.
. . .
As I look back on my life in the process of writing these letters, I realize what little contact I had with my father after I left home at 18. He wrote me two letters, one during my freshman year at college and another when I wrote home after my sophomore year that I had decided to take my commission in the Marine Corps rather than the Navy. He was taciturn at home and even more so on the telephone (“Well, let’s not run up this phone bill” marked the quick end of every long distance call.) He fled to Florida after my mother’s death in 1972 and for a period of 13 years, from 1982 till 1995, we never spoke or wrote to each other, a long silence that wasn’t broken until my grandmother’s death, when I wrote him. I mention all this simply as a preface to the (obvious) statement that I don’t know my father well. Most of my memories are from the end of World War II until 1959 when I left home, a period spanning his life from age 25 to age 39. Those were, I believe, his worst years, years that, but for the war and the Iwo Jima trauma, should have been his best years, years of establishing himself in some work, growing into maturity, enjoying his family, and building a future. Instead, they were in large measure lost and wasted years. The frequent bouts of anxiety and depression, the relentless terrorizing dreams and the out-of-control alcoholism drained him of vitality. I cannot remember him having any hobbies or recreational interests. If he had any educational or vocational interests, it didn’t show. As far as I know, he had no enthusiasm for anything. I have no memory of him ever building anything, or fixing anything, or caring very much for anything other than perhaps his car. It was my Uncle Jim who took us cousins to Comiskey Park to watch the Sox, who took us to the Brookfield Zoo, who took us to Riverview Amusement Park, who started to teach me how to drive, who played ‘catch’ with me. I don’t remember my father taking part in any of these activities or indeed in much of anything that could properly be characterized as an “activity.” By the time I left home in 1959, he reminded me of the farm worker in Robert Frost’s The Death of the Hired Hand:
Poor Silas, . . .
. . . nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope,
So now and never any different.
He was pretty much a lost soul, trapped with his own thoughts and memories and debilitating dreams, cut off from the rest of the world, including his children. I attribute his condition mostly to the war, to the Marines, and especially to the searing experiences on Iwo Jima.
The book describes the author’s service in the Canadian Army in the Italian campaign of World War II. In it, he quoted a letter he received during the war from his father, himself a World War I veteran:
"Keep it in mind during the days ahead that war does inexplicable things to people, and no man can guess how it is going to affect him until he has had a really stiff dose of it. The most unfortunate ones after any war are not those with missing limbs. They’re the ones who have had their spiritual feet knocked out from under them. The beer halls and gutters are still full of such poor bastards from my war, and nobody understands or cares what happened to them. I remember two striking examples of two men from my old company in the 4th Battalion, both damn fine fellows, yet both committed suicide in the lines. They did not shoot themselves. They let the Germans do it because they had reached the end of the tether. They never knew what was the matter with them. They had become empty husks, were spiritually depleted, were burned out."
In another book, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Modris Eksteins discusses Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, or more accurately, Remarque’s psychological and spiritual condition after the War to End All Wars. He describes Remarque as
". . . a deeply disconsolate man, searching for an explanation for his dissatisfaction. And in his search, Remarque eventually hit upon the Kriegserleben, the war experience. . . “All of us were”, he said of himself and his friends in an interview in 1929, “and still are, restless, aimless, sometimes excited, sometimes indifferent, and essentially unhappy.”
. . .
Remarque himself stated the purpose of All Quiet in a brief and forceful prefatory comment:
"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure . . . It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war."
[My Dad] was one of Mowat’s “most unfortunate ones,” of Remarque’s “restless, aimless, . . . essentially unhappy” men who, “though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.” I am confident that had it not been for the support of my mother and of my grandparents and Aunt Monica, he would have been one of the army of lost souls in the “beer halls and gutters.” He would not have survived on his own. In the same conversation in which he told me that it took him 25 years to ‘get over’ Iwo Jima, he also told me that the Marines did not want to ‘let him out’ or discharge him after the war because of his ‘condition’ and how hard it was for my mother to live with him. I don’t know whether he has any idea how hard those years were for [my little sister] and me. He has never acknowledged it to either of us. Kitty and I rarely talk of it and never at length, but in a serious conversation about 25 years ago she remarked that we had been ‘emotionally crippled from growing up with Dad.’ She was pretty accurate.
. . .
As I look back on my life in the process of writing [this memoir], I realize what little contact I had with my father after I left home at 18. He wrote me two letters, one during my freshman year at college and another when I wrote home after my sophomore year that I had decided to take my commission in the Marine Corps rather than the Navy. He was taciturn at home and even more so on the telephone (“Well, let’s not run up this phone bill” marked the quick end of every long-distance call.) He fled to Florida after my mother’s death in 1972, and for a period of 13 years, from 1982 till 1995, we never spoke or wrote to each other, a long silence that wasn’t broken until my grandmother’s death, when I wrote him. I mention all this simply as a preface to the (obvious) statement that I don’t know my father well. Most of my memories are from the end of World War II until 1959, when I left home, a period spanning his life from age 25 to age 39. Those were, I believe, his worst years, years that, but for the war and the Iwo Jima trauma, should have been his best years, years of establishing himself in some work, growing into maturity, enjoying his family, and building a future. Instead, they were in large measure lost and wasted years. The frequent bouts of anxiety and depression, the relentless terrorizing dreams and the out-of-control alcoholism drained him of vitality. I cannot remember him having any hobbies or recreational interests. If he had any educational or vocational interests, it didn’t show. As far as I know, he had no enthusiasm for anything. I have no memory of him ever building anything, or fixing anything, or caring very much for anything other than perhaps his car. It was my Uncle Jim who took us cousins to Comiskey Park to watch the Sox, who took us to the Brookfield Zoo, who took us to Riverview Amusement Park, who started to teach me how to drive, who played ‘catch’ with me. I don’t remember my father taking part in any of these activities or indeed in much of anything that could properly be characterized as an “activity.” By the time I left home in 1959, he reminded me of the farm worker in Robert Frost’s The Death of the Hired Hand:
Poor Silas, . . .
. . . nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope,
So now and never any different.
He was pretty much a lost soul, trapped with his own thoughts and memories and debilitating dreams, cut off from the rest of the world, including his children. I attribute his condition mostly to the war, to the Marines, and especially to the searing experiences on Iwo Jima.
[End of memoir text]
I relate these experiences of one man and his small family after wartime combat experience, but suggest to any reader who may have stuck with this post this long that the tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians, living through the horrors in Gaza and in Ukraine, are subject to the same or very similar devastating stresses as my father. Those who survive the wars may not survive so well what follows. For many of the soldiers and many civilian survivors, the wars will end only with their own deaths.
Why the Dems can't win on the crime issue
Anh Hoang Clausen This past week Andy and I celebrated 20 years of our marriage. Over the years we've weathered challenges and experienced many joys in the midsts of it all. Marriage and building a family has been a journey of learning what true sacrificial love looks like and feels like, what it means to be Christ for each other. Each day is a renewal of our vows when we say with our actions and heart, "I do!" over and over again. I love this man with all of my heart ❤️Today is also one the biggest days of his career as he leaves to pick up a colleague and drive to Madison to argue a case in front of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The justices select to hear only 14 cases a year so this is huge. Andy said he isn't nervous and slept like a baby last night, meanwhile I am a wreck. Please say a prayer for him this morning if you can.
Anne Clausen Thank you so much for letting me know. He hadn’t told me and a Mom needs to know these things so she can keep him strong in her mind and heart until she knows he has completed his task and has done well.
You are the best wife and mom! I couldn’t have asked for more for him. ❤️❤️
Charles D. Clausen I love that man with all my heart, too! And, like his Mom, I too wasn't told of the oral argument today. I'm glad he's not nervous, but, like you, now I'm a wreck too. I'm reminded of a time 45 years ago or more when his Mom and I took him to the old Children's Hospital at 17th and Wisconsin for a delicate outpatient procedure. Andy was calm as a cucumber the whole time, while I, in the waiting room, was a nervous wreck.🥵 Andy was focused on the brunch we were going to enjoy after the procedure. What a guy, then and now.
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