11/3/2026

 Tuesday, November 3, 2026

Election Day

1964 Lyndon B. Johnson was elected President in a landslide, defeating  Barry Goldwater

1970 Marxist Salvador Allende was inaugurated as President of Chile

1970 US President Richard Nixon promised a gradual troop withdrawal from Vietnam

1992  Bill Clinton was elected President, defeating incumbent President George H. W. Bush

2025 Two Palestinian teenagers are killed in separate attacks by Israeli settlers in Hebron and Beit Furik, respectively, in the occupied West Bank.

In bed at 8:15 CST, awake around 1, up at 2:30; 0245 203.0 200/75/67 xxx; 61/55/67/59, cloudy, windy, rainy afternoon & night

Morning meds at a.m.  Entresto at 5:45 a.m. and p.m.

Another rough night's sleep, less than 5 hours.  I started the day watching a 6-episode documentary, Vietnam: The War That Changed America, on Apple TV.  I watch films like this with some real survivor's guilt, seeing Marines and soldiers in combat, exchanging fire with the VC/NVA guys on the other side, slogging through rice paddies and jungle terrain,  chopper and close air support pilots, with me sitting dry and well-fed in the TACC at Wing HQ at Danang.  Episode 1 starts, appropriately, in July of 1965, when LBJ changed the mission of US forces from defensive (for Marines, guarding the big airbase at Danang) to offensive, by ordering in another 34 battalions of combat troops.  That was when Vietnam became indisputably America's war, rather than a civil war between opposing Vietnamese camps, the Ho Chi Minh nationalists and the anti-communists in the South, including my future in-laws, my mishpokhe, then living in the city of Danang.  

A line in the first episode: "Before the politicians or the American people, it's the soldiers on the ground who are the first to realize this war is not going to be what they thought."  It reminded me of a night sitting in the O Club talking with a group of other Marines, at the end of December, 1965, after an Intelligence briefing, all opining that "This is not going to end well."  In the Intelligence briefing, we learned that since the Marines landed in March of that year to defend the airbase, the number of enemy forces around us had doubled.  I suppose it was information like that that caused Gen. Westmoreland in Saigon to request, and LBJ to order, a shitload of more combat forces into the country.  All it did, of course, was lead to escalation after escalation and ultimately, to ignominious defeat, a far cry from the Marines raising the flag on Mt. Suribachi 20 years earlier.

It's a painful film to watch, including its treatment of the war's 1st major battle in the Ia Drang Valley, in November 1965, later chronicled in the book We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret.) and war journalist Joseph L. Galloway.  We suffered 237 killed and 258 wounded, while claiming an estimated 1,037–1,745 killed, while the People's Army reported 554 killed and 669 wounded.  That precision about American casualties and imprecision about enemy casualties lasted throughout the war.  The American "body counts" were real for the Americans, only rarely for the enemy.  The count of American bodies fueled opposition to the war back home and made clear the human cost of the war, while the enemy body counts had no effect on public perception of the war.  The more the claimed enemy body counts grew, the more they were discounted back home as meaningless because the number of enemy troops also kept increasing despite Saigon's and Washington's bragging about the lopsided body counts. 

I have an attenuated but personal connection to the battle of Ia Drang Valley.  My brother-in-law Jim Reck was a member of the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division.  His unit shipped out to RVN early in the war, but he was too "short" in his enlistment to ship out with them.  His fellow 7th Cav soldiers bore the brunt of the battle of Ia Drang Valley, suffering extraordinarily high casualties.  Jim never forgot that he could have been one of those casualties and lived with some survivor's guilt of his own.

One of the saddest scenes of the narrative about Ia Drang showed a captured enemy soldier who had been cut off from his unit.  He looked as if he was about the age of a high school sophomore, a school child.  He was scared to death, of course.  He reminded me that the full title of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five was Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death.  In Chapter 1, Vonnegut recounts visiting his wartime friend Bernard O'Hare. O'Hare's wife, Mary, becomes angry at the prospect of Vonnegut writing a book that might glorify the war.  She tells him: "You were just babies in the war—like the ones upstairs!"  Mary fears that Hollywood will transform the young, frightened soldiers into glamorous heroes played by actors such as Frank Sinatra and John Wayne, thereby making war seem attractive to another generation.  Vonnegut recognized the validity of her objection and promised:  "I'll call it 'The Children's Crusade.'"  He dedicated the novel, in part, to Mary O'Hare.  

In Chapter 5, an English officer reflects on the youth of the American soldiers arriving as prisoners of war. He remarks:

“You know — we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock.

‘My God, my God —’ I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade.’” 

Vonnegut himself was only 22 when he was a POW in Dresden.  I was 23 when I arrived in Vietnam as a lieutenant.  The average age of Marine and Army infantrymen killed in Vietnam was 22.  For officers, it was 28.  We don't know the ages of VC and NVA casualties, but we do know the ages of their POWS, and it is also about 22.  11,465 Americans killed in Vietnam were younger than 20, teenagers. That represents almost one-fifth of the American dead. 

Another scene in the first episode that struck me showed an American officer telling his troops: "We are protecting our homeland.  This is our job here, to protect our people at home before the situation reaches them."  This, of course, is pure happy horseshit.  The Vietnamese never posed a threat to the safety of those at home.  The scene nonetheless reminded me of the beginning of Chapter V of my memoir:

More than the citizens of perhaps any other nation, Americans celebrate military service.  Every night the CBS Evening News has a segment on “Fallen Heroes;” every Sunday morning, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos’ program closes with “In Memoriam.”  This canonization of soldiers is due to the fact that the United States is an empire. The central idea of empire is the exertion of national power over others who are not part of the nation, the strong over the weak. A recent Paul Krugman column reported that next year the United States’ military expenditures will equal or exceed those of the entire rest of the world.  If true, it is evidence of a level of economic, political, and military imperialism never before seen on earth.  Since all empires are ultimately dependent on military power to ‘project’ their will on others by lethal force or the threat of it, empires must glorify their armed forces.  This is so not only because the empire depends ultimately on the military being able and willing to kill subordinate peoples who resist American hegemony, but also because the military men and women must be willing to be killed to advance the economic and political goals of the empire.  These goals are hard to accomplish with volunteer soldiers and even harder with conscripts who normally have no desire to kill or to be killed and who have little or nothing to gain personally from the fruits of empire.

To get imperial conscripts to “do their duty,” conditioning is necessary.  First, they must be politically conditioned to believe that the subordinate people’s opposition or resistance to the empire’s will somehow threatens them or their families, “our way of life” or “our freedom.”  This conditioning is seen in many guises, in the nightly “Fallen Heroes” blurbs, in the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ fiasco, back to rallying cries about making the world “safe for democracy” in a “war to end all wars” and changing the name of the “War Department” to the “Department of Defense” between 1947 and 1949.  America must never be seen as waging a war of aggression, only of defending itself (hence the utility of the Pearl Harbor attack) or (when it serves a political or economic interest) defending the innocent victims of ‘tyranny’ or at least defending ‘freedom’ which as our current President reminds us, our enemies hate and we love.  Do our military men believe this?    Lance Corporal Hess, USMC, is quoted in The Proud: Inside the Marine Corps, published in 1992:

“I look at it this way.  If I do have to kill, I will.  And while I’m doing it I’ll be thinking about my family.  My mother.  And, lookit, do I want some raghead Ay-rab dictating the price of gas she buys or some commie-type hardass coming over here, ruling her, telling her what to do, and you know, exploiting her.  It’s for her that you kill.  It’s for us.”

He thinks about it again.  “Hell yeah, I’ll kill them all.  And not just the communists.  It’s anybody who’s against the United States.  Anybody who wants to say that one man can be a dictatorship and the people don’t have anything to say about it.  And he wants to try that on the United States?  Well, I’m gonna kill him with all the vigor I have in may body.  That’s what it’s all about: preserving our way of life.  That’s my job.

These are the words of one successfully conditioned American fighting man, ready to kill for Mom and her experience at the gas pump.  And of course, there are politicians perfectly willing to send him off to kill for Mom and millions of folks back home who are perfectly willing to have him kill in their names.  Right wing radio and evangelical Christianity regularly fan the flames of bellicosity.  As Yeats wrote A Prayer for My Daughter: 

For arrogance and hatred are the wares

Peddled in the thoroughfares. 

There is another chilling scene in this documentary, involving a Marine who served in RVN, presumably in I Corps:

[Narrator]. There's no shortage of firpower.  The problem is knowing where to use it.  When a report come through of gunfire coming from an area thought to be a Viet Cong stronghold, the Marines are sent in.  One of those Marines is Malik Edwards.

[Edwards]. I remember us whatever was happening that day, it came down to us.  We were going into this village, but the tension was higher because they came out and used the words, "If you receive a round from the village, level the village."  They said thosse words.  This was the first time that we had an order like that.  Immediately, we received fire.  So now we're pumped.  We're pumped.  You know, 'cause now we really - -  we're ready to do some damage. . . . I go up to a hut.  And so I'm getting ready to fire.  Before I could do any of that, this Vietnamese came out, and he said (Vietnamese word) "Don't shoot! Don't shoot!"  And then he goes over. to the house and pulls up the side of the house.  And this is where I see, like, these women and children.  They just huddled right there, crying and freaking out and stuff.

[Narrator]. These are the women and children of the village filmed later that day.

[Edwards]. I didn't shoot them, but it freaked me out.  It just freaked me out.  And I just dropped to my knees, I was like, "Oh, God."  Even to this day, I'm stuck in that moment right there.  Those children.  And you're thinking, "God, what are we doing here?"

Edwards didn't shoot those civilians, but we know that literally millions of Vietnamese civilians were killed in our war, with our almost unlimited firepower, bullets, high explosives, and incendiaries.  Others were slowly (or not so slowly) poisoned with our Agent Orange and other defoliants.  We know that we dropped more bombs on the Vietnamese (and Laotians and Cambodians) than the total tonnage of bombs dropped by ALL THE BELLIGERENTS on enemy targets in World War II, indeed almost twice as much tonnage, 8 million tons compared to 4 million tons.  This fact, among others, is why I now refer to our war ON Vietnam, rather than our war IN Vietnam.  At my primary duty station as a senior air controller at the 1st MAW's  Tactical Air Command Center in Danang, I was a very small cog in the very huge wheel of our air bombardment campaign against Southeast Asians.  Like the Marine Malik Edwards, I'm stuck with that memory and that guilt decades later.  That is why I thought of us in Vietnam as I sat in the Oriental Theater watching Naza, about Israel's massacre of civilians in Gaza.  It's why I think of Vietnam when I watch or read about Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians.  It's why I think of Fox News's Bill O'Reilly's infamous interview of Donald Trump in 2027:

O'Reilly: "He is a killer though. Putin is a killer."

Trump: "There are a lot of killers. Do you think our country is so innocent? Do you think our country is so innocent?"

 

 

 

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11/2/2026

 Monday, November 2, 2026

1917: The British government proclaimed support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine in the Balfour Declaration

1960  The obscenity case over Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence, ended in the acquittal of Penguin Books. 

1963 Ngô Đình Diệm, the President of South Vietnam, was assassinated in a coup by the South Vietnamese Army

1976 Jimmy Carter was elected President, defeating incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford

2004 George W. Bush was re-elected as President of the United States, defeating the Democrat candidate John Kerry

2023 Russia carries out its most extensive artillery attack of the year in Ukraine 

In bed at 7:45 (new time), up at 4:55; 0510 203.0 119/69/68 xxx; 53/48/59/52, cloudy day, rainy evening.

Morning meds at 7:30 a.m.  Entresto at 7:15 a.m. and p.m.

Not a good way to start a new week!  I just spent an hour or more working with ChatGPT AI, fixing a couple of vexing problems on my laptop.  First, in my Blogger account on Google Chrome, my cursor worked, but when I entered a command- specifically to 'delete' some typos- nothing happened.  Then I moved to Microsoft Word, where yesterday I had copied a short essay by Lord Balfour, author of the (in)famous Balfour Document, as an Introduction to a book about Zionism.  MS Word wanted to save the document as "Introduction," the first word in it, and I wanted to save it as "Balfour Zionism essay." It wouldn't let me.  So I was stymied both in Chrome and Blogger, and in MS Word.  As instructed by my brilliant daughter Sarah, I turned to AI for help, and specifically to ChatGPT, my favorite.  After an hour or more of trying all kinds of cures, it finally found the effective ones, so I suppose that was actually a good way to start the new week, not a bad one.  I'm back in business, but already weary at the start of the day.  On the other hand, it sure beats having to travel over to the Apple Store Genius Bar or the nearby Geek Squad at the Best Buy store.  I'll count my blessings.😌

Winter is icumin in. My daily outings took me to Walgreens for Gold Bond Powder and MetroMarket for the makings of Geri's homemade chicken broth and some potatoes.  It's cold out, with dense overcast clouds and a nasty wind.  Definite omens of winter.  Brrr.

Not a day for writing.  Tired all day despite a decent night's sleep followed by a one-hour nap late in the morning.  Semi-brain-dead.  A lump in a recliner.  

Election hunches.  Crowley will lose, as will Al-Sayed in Michigan, and the Dems in KS & ME. Dems win the House, Republicans keep the Senate, 50-50 with J. D. Vance the tie-breaker.  Hope I'm wrong.

Jeanne Avril Leaving the Moulin Rouge, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1893, oil on cardboard

Some days are like this, n'est-ce pas?

        

11/1/2026

 Sunday, November 1, 2026

1512 The public was first permitted to view Michelangelo's frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

1952 "Ivy Mike", the first thermonuclear weapon to utilize the H-bomb design of Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, was detonated in the Marshall Islands, Pacific Ocean

   1954 The US Senate admonished Joseph McCarthy because of his slander campaigns

2012 Acid was poured over a 15-year-old girl by her parents after she was seen talking to a young man in an "honour killing" in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan

2025 Israel Defense Forces Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, who served as Military Advocate General, resigned after leaking a surveillance video to the media showing the gang rape of a Palestinian prisoner at Sde Teiman detention camp in August last year. 

2025 Three people were killed in an American airstrike on a boat in the Caribbean Sea.

In bed at 9, awake at 3, up at 3:30; 0340 203.6 115/69/64 98; 49/63/49, mostly cloudy day ahead.

Morning meds at 7:45 a.m.  Entresto at 5:40 a.m. and p.m.

Naza, or collateral damage.  I saw this recently released documentary by Yaval Abraham and Rachel Szor at the Oriental Theater at noon today.  Getting there and getting into my seat in the big auditorium was a bit of a challenge, but I was helped by a stranger, an Air Force veteran who spent two years at the Air Force Academy before voluntarily leaving.  He helped me navigate in the theater's darkness, got me into my seat, and helped get me out of the seat at the film's conclusion.  A good Samaritan whose kindness I was happy to rely on.

This is not a film to enjoy, but rather one to learn from.  It shows nighttime interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, conducted by Abraham over three years on rooftops in Tel Aviv.  Shown only as dark silhouettes with their voices distorted to hide their identities, the interviewees describe the AI systems and mobile phone surveillance used to identify targets in Gaza and their role in the mass killing of Palestinian civilians.  I won't attempt to summarize the testimonies by the 24 IDF members.  Suffice it to say that the film gives terrifying insights into (1) government surveillance of civilians via private telephones; (2) the use of Artificial intelligence in military and governmental targeting of opponents; (3) the extent and results of hatred and dehumanization by one people for another; and (4) what modern war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide look like.  The closing image in the film shows a  Palestinian father looking for his children in the rubble that had been their home, calling into the destroyed apartment building, and children's legs protruding from beneath a concrete slab.  Devastating imagery.

Although it's not mentioned in the film, it also vividly calls into question the deep partnership between the American and Israeli governments and militaries, and America's complicity in decades of crimes against Arab Palestinians, militants. and civilians.  Democrats and Republicans are both guilty as sin.

The film also, of course, made me remember Vietnam, our years-long bombing campaigns in the North, and unceasing bombing in the South - high explosives and incendiaries, and sprayed carcinogenic herbicides.  A big difference between our relentless bombing in Vietnam from 1965 to 1972 was that we never had a policy of deliberately killing civilians.  Nonetheless, even by September 1966, bombing had caused approximately 29,000 casualties—killed and wounded combined—of whom about 18,000 were classified as civilian or logistics personnel.  By 1972, the Nixon administration had substantially loosened the geographic and operational restrictions imposed by LBJ and his administration.  LBJ was intensely concerned with the probability of losing international and domestic support for the war if there were significant civilian casualties.  Nonetheless, by the end of the Vietnam War on April 30, 1975, an estimated two million Vietnamese civilians had been killed, although estimates vary considerably.  If we include civilians who were wounded but survived, the total rises to approximately seven million civilian casualties, according to some historical estimates.  All in a catastrophically losing effort to protect America's and capitalism's access to Asian markets and raw materials.  

I also thought of, of course, Russia's rocket, missile, and drone attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine.  As I wrote above, a viewer doesn't watch this film for enjoyment, but for instruction.

I drove to the Oriental on I-43 to North Avenue.  On the way home, I took North to Humboldt Boulevard, and Humboldt to Capitol Drive, to 7th Street and back on I-43.  It was a trip down memory lane. I admired the beautiful old Milwaukee homes along Humboldt, and recalled picking up a Milwaukee Ballet Company employee at one of the elegant old apartment buildings during my years on the board of the Ballet.  On 7th Street, I passed Messmer High School, whose board I was on for a year with Don Shane, and the little house on 7th Street where I would pick up Hattie Clayton and her 6 children during my years as the church van driver for St. Francis parish, remembering Hattie's telling me of the gunshots she experienced in that neighborhood every night.

Today is All Saints Day, at least in Western Christianity.  Here are some thoughts from my journal three years ago today.

 "All Saints Day, the day as children at St. Leo's Grammar School we attended mass, a holy day of obligation, which we could never quite get into as a real 'holy day,' like Christmas and Easter  Ditto All Souls Day tomorrow.  All Souls Day made sense within the cosmology of Holy Mother Church because we prayed for 'the poor souls,' the souls suffering and languishing in Purgatory, waiting to be burned pure, punished for their sins, and eligible for entry through the Pearly Gates.  Of course, we wanted our loved ones, our ancestors, to be freed from the fires of Purgatory and prayers were presumably a ticket out, along with temporal and plenary indulgences.  So attending mass and praying for them, something pleasing to God, made a lot of sense.  But on All Saints Day, we just celebrated those who had already made it into the Celestial Kingdom, all the saints, known and unknown.  It seemed almost cruel that All Saints Day was and is a Holy Day of Obligation and All Souls Day was not.  But there you have it.  Thoughts on awakening on November 1st.  You can take the boy out of the Church, but you never take the Church out of the boy." 

Last year on this date, I wrote about a New York Times feature piece on the Pope's decision that 2025 would be a "Jubilee Year."

A Jubilee Year is a "Holy Year" signified by the ceremonial opening of the "Holy Doors" in the four Roman major basilicas: St. Peter's, St. John Lateran, St. Mary Major, and St. Paul Outside the Walls.  The Vatican issued a decree on May 13th outlining ways that Catholics can obtain a "plenary indulgence" during the 2025 Jubilee Year, including by making pilgrimages, prayerful visits to specific churches.  A plenary indulgence is a grace granted by the Catholic Church through the merits of Jesus Christ to remove the temporal punishment due to sin, i.e., time burning in Purgatory for "venial sins."  We recall that one of the complaints of Martin Luther against the Church was the selling of indulgences to raise money, but first, I note that I have visited a number of the churches in Rome whose pious visits may trigger an indulgence.  St. Peter's, Sta. Maria Maggiore, St. John in Laterano, Sta. Maria Sopra Minerva, Sta. Maria della Vittoria, and Sta. Cecilia in Trastevere.  I've also visited the catacombs beneath St. Peter's, where Peter's final resting place is reputed to be and which is also a spot that can trigger a plenary indulgence.  I've also been privileged to visit two venues outside of Rome, which may occasion an indulgence: the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi and the Basilica of Our Lady of the Angels in Assisi.  I have good memories of all my visits to all these places, but I know I didn't receive any indulgence, plenary or temporal, because I know I didn't satisfy the conditions, the most basic of which is believing in indulgences and in the Church's divine prerogative to award them.  I remember standing next to Geri's beloved Uncle Hardy at her mother's wake as a priest arrived to lead prayers.  Uncle Hardy nodded toward the priest, said to me, "What do you think, Chuck?" and I responded, "I don't know, Uncle Hardy, what do you think?"   He waved his hand and said, "It's all a business, just a business."   

I loved Uncle Hardy and I know he liked me.  I loved schmoozing with him, listening to stories of the Oliverio family and to stories of his own adventurous life, including his running away from home and 'riding the rails,' getting arrested by 'railroad dicks', and being sentenced to hard labor building the airport in Casper, WY (?).  Geri's brother Robert brought Uncle Hardy and Auntie Annette up to Shorewood for an afternoon's visit once when we lived in Shorewood, and we visited them in their home in Edison Park in Chicago.  It was there that Uncle Hardy cried as he told us the story of the Catholic priest refusing to let his mother, Geri's grandmother, be buried in a Catholic cemetery for some reason I can't recall now.  I think it may have been because she hadn't been a Mass-goer and hadn't had Extreme Unction before she died.  I believe it was during the Spanish Flu pandemic.  In any event, Uncle Hardy, who was in his 90s when we visited and he told us the story, never forgave that priest nor the Church, and that piece of personal history lay behind his statement to me decades later, "It's all a business, just a business."  And now, on All Saints Day, more than a century after the Spanish Flu pandemic, I remember Uncle Hardy crying about his mother.  I remember the Catholic chaplain who visited me during my hospitalization at the VA and haplessly argued with me about God.  I remember the Marine reservist Protestant minister at Willow Grove who told me most seminarians don't believe in a transcendent, personal God who answers prayers.  I think back to Monsignor Malloy ("Fill in those pews!  Don't sell to undesirables!), Father Schmidt ("Mumbo jumbo rooba dooba, chickadeeboodba, cha cha cha:", Father Devereaux, Brother Irwin, Father McEvoy at MU, the old priest in "The Sisters" in Joyce's Dubliners, found alone in the confessional, "wide-awake and laughing-like to himself. . . . So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him. . . . ”  I remember my mother, my father, and my sister and their relationships with Holy Mother Church.  I carry all these memories, and so many more, and, though you truly can't take the Church out of the boy, or at least out of this boy, I won't attend Mass on this Holy Day of Obligation, q.v., even in this Jubilee Year.

Perfectly ordinary, perfectly breathtaking!

10/31/2026

 Saturday, October 31, 2026

Trick or treat!

1517 Martin Luther sent his Ninety-five Theses to Albert of Brandenburg, Archbishop of Mainz, precipitating the Protestant Reformation

1992 The Catholic church apologized for its treatment of astronomer Galileo Galilei after 359 years

1999 Roman Catholic Church and Lutheran Church leaders signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, ending a centuries-old doctrinal dispute over the nature of faith and salvation

2000  John Paul II declared Thomas More as "the heavenly Patron of Statesmen and Politicians."

2019 House of Representatives voted to formalize impeachment proceedings against  Donald Trump

2023 Kenyan President William Ruto held a state banquet for King Charles III in Nairobi, whose speech acknowledged that “the wrongdoings of the past are a cause of the greatest sorrow and the deepest regret "

In bed at 9, up at 4:10, 117/69/65 100 203.6; 50/45/59/50, cloudy all day

Morning meds at 6 a.m.  Entresto at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m.

This is such a magical time of year, not that every season and every day isn't magical, but in Autumn the leaves on the deciduous trees all around us turn color, shifting from green to bright reds, deep maroons, oranges, yellows, and golds.  A couple of nights ago, the female ginkgo tree next to our garage turned a lustrous gold seemingly overnight.  From a distance, it appears all gold, but up close, I can see that the leaves still have some lovely green near their stems.  The photo didn't capture it, but the area where the green and gold meld is luscious (for want of a better term).  It's a gorgeous tree, and I'm glad we have it, though in the weeks before the recoloring of the leaves, it drops its many yellowish-orange, plum-like seeds, about an inch in diameter.  When they fall and begin decomposing, they release butyric acid, producing a particularly nasty, vomitous odor.  It's hard to avoid stepping on any of them and bringing that stink into the house.  As always, my photos don't come close to capturing the real beauty of what I photograph.

 

All That's Unseen.  I finally finished Emilee Hackney's memoir this morning.  I'm glad I read it, though it's not a book that I would enthusiastically recommend to another reader, unlike, e.g., Sarah Smarsh's Heartland and Tara Westover's Educated.  It's a long book, covering 366 pages but only about 23 or 24 years of her young life.  As I read the last several pages, I thought she got a bit too literary in her writing, leading me to wonder how much of her narrative was made up as she wrote it, rather than based on experiences as she lived them.  It also caused me to think that this must be a problem with all memoirs and autobiographies.  Our brains, minds, and memories are not AIs, full of facts (of a sort) stored as 1s and 0s on microchips.  If we are intent upon writing a narrative that is of interest to a reader, the writing can't consist only of "this happened, then this happened, then this happened."  There has to be some narrative flesh built up around the bare historical bones, and some blood flowing through it in terms of emotions, understandings, and judgments.  I first thought of the memoir writer's challenge while reading Barbara Mullen Keenan's memoir Every Effort, about her life after Bill was shot down over Laos.  I ought to sit down and read my own untitled memoir to see how much of it is just "here's a fact, here's some more facts," and how much is flesh and blood.  The same goes for my entries in this journal/blog.

A disappointment in the memoir was that she devoted so little time to her relationship with her younger brother, Erik.  What happened to Erik as he grew older: his education, occupation, religious beliefs, whether he remained in Appalachia, or whether he experienced a transformation comparable to Emilee's.  Why was her relationship with him, if there was one, so ignored?  As one who had such traumatic problems with her religious upbringing and the constrictions of small-town Appalachia, did she care nothing for her little brother's experiences?  She also didn't have much to say about her strained relationship with her parents during her involvement with and engagement to Sam, the child abuser, and during her rebellious period following her breakup with him.  She is candid about her pretty shallow relationships with men after Sam (excepting Jeremy, to whom she dedicated the book, "wherever you are"), using them as emotional props to steady her shaky sense of self-worth, but she seems to carefully avoid saying much about her thoughts about sex, men, and love before, during, or after her promiscuous phases, or her brief sex worker phase.  I suppose though that every memoirist is a narcissist to some degree, at least while s/he engaged in the writing process, plumbing their memories and so focused on themself.  I suppose further that the same is true, but to a lesser degree, of guys like me who keep journals online, and of all diarists.  Why do we bother recording the days of our lives?  Why did Samuel Pepys, Anne Frank, Virginia Woolf, Frida Kahlo, Leo Tolstoy, George Orwell, André Gide, and so many others bother writing down their experiences and thoughts each day?  For some, of course, journaling was necessary for historical or professional reasons, like Lewis and Clark and Charles Darwin, but for every one of those folks, there are thousands of Joe Blows like me, scribbling away, writing only for themselves.  Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly...

Emilee's book was published this year, 10 years after J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy was published in 2016 to great fame or notoriety.  It's not exactly a rebuttal of Vance's harsh judgments about Appalachian culture, but it's a rejection of them.  Her book ends as she is about to leave the mountains for the Creative Writing Program at Vanderbilt.  She is with her Dad in his big vegetable garden, filling grocery sacks to take with her to Nashville.  Her last lines are, 

"The crickets were quieting now.  I looked toward the Western ridge where the cooling sun hung low, and my heart clenched with something like guilt.  Leaving Appalachia, especially for the second time, felt like a judgment, a declaration: This is not enough for me.

I loved Appalachia.  I did.

But right now, I couldn't stay.

Her whole narrative seems like an expatiation on John Denver's Take Me Home, Country Roads:

Almost heaven, West Virginia, Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River

Life is old there, older than the trees, younger than the mountains, growing like a breeze

Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong

West Virginia, mountain mamma, take me home, country roads 

Peggy Noonan's WSJ op-ed yesterday about Tuesday's election.  Excerpts:

Mr. Trump’s problem is that everyone on both sides of the issue knows that he’s out of his depth in running a major war. They weren’t sure of that when it started.  Democrats think he went in because he’s a bumbler, Republicans think he can’t win because he’s a bumbler. Supporters and opposers of his decision are united: He’s a bumbler whose bumbling made things more expensive. . . 

This is what I hope for: that it won’t be a close election, that the outcome is unmistakable. Let it be a clear and obvious rebuke—a rejection, a rebellion, a rout.

But I want to return to the idea of trauma. America needs to inch toward rough political health. It has to start this now. It will continue in 2028 and 2032, but should start now.

If MAGA takes it full in the face on Tuesday, it will begin to shatter on the state level, where it matters. In that shattering, room will be created in which not fully MAGA figures can start to rise.

The Republican Party has to get healthy again. Healthy doesn’t mean “the establishment returns.” It will never return. The GOP establishment of 1990-2016 ran things into the ground, is discredited and over. Also they’re 80. They destroyed the party by detaching from the legitimate needs and pleas of its base and by secretly regarding that base as stupid nobodies. 

 Only a big wave will allow either party to shake things hard and pour. If it’s close, no one will bother to pick up the shaker.  So may it be a big wave of many colors, and may it be a clear rebuke, rebellion and rout.

I love her description of Trump as a "bumbler whose bumbling has made things more expensive."  It reminds me of the great title of Rick Wilson's 2018 book, Everything Trump Touches Dies.  Wilson calls Trump "President Strangelove," "a bellowing, statist billionaire with poor impulse control and a profoundly superficial understanding of the world.” and " "the avatar of our worst instincts and darkest desires as a nation.'   Wilson argues that "Stephen Miller needs to spend a week getting laid," and that Trump has "tiny, tiny lemur-paw hands."  Peggy Noonan just calls him "a bumbler."  They're both accurate and, in their own ways, they remind me of Hannah Arendt's famous phrase "the banality of evil."

10/20/2026

 Friday, October 30, 2026

1917: The British government gave final approval to the Balfour Declaration

1950 Pope Pius XII witnessed "The Miracle of the Sun" while at the Vatican

1961  The massive, 50-megaton hydrogen bomb Tsar Bomba was detonated by the Soviet Union

1972  A commuter train collision in Chicago killed 45 & injured more than 300

 1995, by a narrow margin, Quebec voters decided to remain a part of Canada.

2010  Security screening of cargo and air passengers in the United States, Britain and Canada was stepped up after bombs were found in packages from Yemen to two Chicago synagogues.

2022 Several thousand black-clad fascist sympathizers marched to slain Italian dictator BenIto Mussolini's’s crypt in Predappio, Italy, commemorating the 100th anniversary of his bloodless coup

In bed at 9, awake and up at 2:15; 203.8 117/71/65 120; 43/34/55/41, mostly cloudy day

Morning meds at 6:45 a.m.  Entresto at 6:40 a.m. and p6:30 .m. Forgot the heart pill again last evening.

Having gotten up at 2:15 a.m., I suspect I'm going to be a zombie perhaps all day today, unable to think clearly, unable to write anything.  I re-read the long reflection on Vietnam that I wrote two years ago on this date, which I still believe in, so I'll do a 'copy and paste' of it today, wondering whether Vietnam is where I developed my cynicism and pessimism.

George W. Ball and Vietnam. I picked up The Pentagon Papers at the library yesterday. I've been especially interested in learning more about Undersecretary of State George W. Ball's advice(s) to Lyndon Johnson urging early withdrawal from Vietnam before the U.S. became bogged down in a quagmire.   I recall that by the end of 1965, my Marine buddies and I were persuaded that the war we were involved in 'would not end well.'  We had recently been briefed by the Air Wing's Intelligence people that, despite the incredible tonnage of high explosives, incendiaries, and defoliants we had dropped on them,  the number of "hostiles" in the area surrounding "our" airbase had doubled in the less-than-a-year period since the Marines landed in March.  I wrote about this in my memoir:

It is a sad experience to think back on those days in Vietnam and to re-read the ‘happy horseshit’ of the politicos.  I remember quite clearly talking with other Marines about the futility of the war, sharing the judgment or intuition that no ultimate good was going to come from all the death and destruction.  I talked about it in the middle of the night with my friend Bob Hilleary during those endless night watches in ‘the bubble.’  My tentmates and I groused about it while holed up under canvas during the endless monsoon rains.  We talked about it over alcohol and blackjack hands at the officers’ club.  Regarding the “happy horseshit” in the news reports on Armed Forces Radio and in Stars and Stripes and in hometown newspapers that were mailed to DaNang, I remember with surprising vividness my good friend, from Yuma and Iwakuni and DaNang, Warrant Officer Ron Kendall frequently quoting his high school football coach in Iowa who used to tell his team: “You can fool the spectators but you can’t fool the players.”  The players, at least in my unit, didn’t believe the happy horseshit from Saigon and Washington, just as I haven’t believed the happy horseshit from Baghdad and Washington 40 years later.  A nation does not ‘win the hearts and minds’ of another people by dispatching an invading army of highly trained killers to its shores, airfields, or landing zones.  A nation cannot successfully use as ambassadors of good will Marines and soldiers who are always at least a lethal threat to kill locals and often a homicidal force.  We do not ‘save villages’ by ‘destroying them,’ whether the village is a hamlet in the Mekong Delta or the city of Fallujah on the Euphrates.  We do not preserve national honor by becoming an international pariah.  My heart aches when I think of the price the Clausen family and millions of other families paid in foreign wars only to lead to policies of invasion, occupation, torture, kidnappings, detentions without legal process, and claims of almost boundless executive authority by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Gonzales.  Did we learn nothing from Vietnam?   Is there no limit to the amount of happy horseshit gullible Americans will willingly eat?

When I arrived in Vietnam on July 12, 1965, the conflict there was not yet a full-fledged American war.  The mission of American combat forces was limited and essentially defensive.  It all changed two weeks later when President Johnson made the decision to grant General Westmoreland’s request for a massive infusion of American forces in 1965 and more in 1966.   He granted the request for the very reasons that should have caused him to deny it - because he knew that the South Vietnamese government was incapable of effectively governing the country and the South Vietnamese military was incapable of defending it.  That decision on that date for those reasons turned the war into an American war.  The whole world knew of the fecklessness and corruption of the Vietnamese government in Saigon and of the powerlessness of the South Vietnamese military and of the determination of the VC/NVA forces and we Marines knew it too.  In Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect, he acknowledges the mistake of not pulling out of Vietnam early.  He wrote:

By [the early or mid 1960s] it should have become apparent that the two condition underlying President Kennedy’s decision to send military advisors to South Vietnam were not being met and, indeed, could not be met: political stability did not exist and was unlikely ever to be achieved; and the South Vietnamese, even with our training assistance and logistical support, were incapable of defending themselves.

Given these facts – and they are facts – I believe we could and should have withdrawn from South Vietnam either in late 1963 amid the turmoil following Điem’s assassination or in late 1964 or early 1965 in the face of increasing political and military weakness in South Vietnam.  And, as the table opposite suggests, there were at least three other occasions when withdrawal could have been justified.

Date of Withdrawal US Forces US Killed Basis for Withdrawal

Nov. 1963             16,300 advisors 78                 Collapse of  Điem regime and political instability                                                      

Late 1964 or

Early 1965             23,300advisors 225                 Clear indication of SVN’s inability to defend             itself, even with US traing and logistical support

July, 1965             81,400 troops 509                 Further evidence of the above

December, 1965     184,300 troops 1,594         Evidence the US military tactics and training weere inappropriate for guerila war  being waged

December, 1967     485,600 troops 15,979         CIA reports indicating bombing in the North would not force North Vietnam to desist in the face of our inabilityto turn back enemy forces in South Vietnam

January, 1973             543,400 troops*     58,191         Signing of Paris Accords, marking end of US military involvement

* Highest commitment of American troops, April 1969 

The information related above is contained in a table in my memoir.  This blog I am writing in can't handle the MS Word table formatting from the memoir, , but all the information from the table is present.

It is against that background that I am reading again The Pentagon Papers and focusing on George W. Ball's advice to Lyndon Johnson.  Here are some excerpts from Ball's memo to Johnson dated July 1, 1965:

(1) A Losing War: The South Vietnamese are losing the war to the VietCong. No one can assure you that we can beat the Viet Cong or even force them to the conference table on our terms, no matter how many hundred thousand white, foreign (U.S.) troops we deploy.

No one has demonstrated that a white ground force of whatever size can win a guerrilla war—which is at the same time a civil war between Asians—in jungle terrain in the midst of a population that refuses cooperation to the white forces (and the South Vietnamese) and thus provides a great intelligence advantage to the other side. .

(2) The Question to Decide: Should we limit our liabilities in South Vietnam and try to find a way out with minimal long-term costs? The alternative—no matter what we may wish it to be—is almost certainly a protracted war involving an open-ended commitment of U.S. forces, mounting U.S. casualties, no assurance of a satisfactory solution, and a serious danger of escalation at the end of the road.

(3) Need for a Decision Now: So long as our forces are restricted to advising and assisting the South Vietnamese, the struggle will remain a civil war between Asian peoples. Once we deploy substantial numbers of troops in combat it will become a war between the U.S. and a large part of the population of South Vietnam, organized and directed from North Vietnam and backed by the resources of both Moscow and Peiping.The decision you face now, therefore, is crucial.  Once large numbers of U.S. troops are commited to direct combat, they will begin to sustain high casualties in a war they are ill-equipped to fight in an uncooperative if not downright hostile contryside.

Once we suffer large casualiteis, we will have started a well-nigh irreversible process.  Our involvement will be so great that we cannot - without national humiliation - stop short of acheiving our complete objectives.  .  Of the two possiblities I think humiliation would be more likely than the achievement of our objectives, -- even after we have paid terrible costs.

It is painful to read this prescient and wise advice given to Lyndon Johnson before he decided to agaree to Gen. William Westmoreland's request for 44 additional combat battalions to tbe sent to South Vietnam.  No one can say that LBJ - and Robert McNamara , Dean Rusk, and McGeorge Bundy - were not given accurate and sound advice before plunging the U.S. into the tragic invasion of Vietnam.  On October 5, 1964, Ball had written a longer (67 pages) memo to Johnson, shared first with Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy, titled  "How Valid Are the Assumptions Underlying Our Vietnam Policy", which also recommended getting out of South Vietnam: "Once on the tiger's back we cannot be sure of picking the place to dismount."  What a tragedy.  The more I learn of it, the greater my embarassment and shame at playing even my miniscule role in it.  'Not a day but something is recalled, my conscience or my vanity appalled.'

FALLING THROUGH THE EARTH, ch. 14, Danielle Trussoni

. . . My father had recently read Robert McNamara’s book [IN RETROSPECT].  Dad was never much of a reader; although he was quick-witted and intelligent, he had a hard time staying with a book.  That one, however, got his attention.  I don’t know if he finished it or not, but the parts he had read were memorized.  He would rattle off sentences between sips of his drink, quoting McNamara’s admission of his miscalculations in Vietnam.  I tried to understand exactly what made Dad so angry, but after a while he went silent and would answer my questions tersely.  Finally, he turned to me and said, “Do you know what this book means?  Do you know what this guy is saying?”

I didn’t know anything about Robert McNamara back then.  I had never even heard his name before.  At that point in my life – before I studied the war, Vietnam was not a historical event.  It was just something that happened to my family. 

My father shook his head, disgusted.  “McNamara’s saying they didn’t know what the hell they were doing over there.  We were wrong from the goddamned beginning.

The 1sr MAW Tactical Air Control, Center, where I spent 234 days, when I wasn't in my tent, my Special Services office, or the O Club, and where we kept track of every air mission flown out of Danang and Chu Lai, raining high explosives, incendiaries, carcinogenic defoliants, death and destruction throughout I Corps and North Vietnam.

10/29/2026

 Wednesday, October 29, 2026

1618 Sir Walter Raleigh was beheaded for allegedly conspiring against King James I of England

1922 King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Benito Mussolini as Prime Minister of Italy

1929 Stock market crash on Wall Street, "Black Tuesday," triggered the Great Depression

1945 First ballpoint pen went on sale, manufactured by Reynolds in the US

In 1956, Israeli forces, in a plan later found to have been coordinated with Britain and France, invaded the Sinai Peninsula, pushing Egyptian troops back to the Suez Canal. 

1969 US Supreme Court ordered the end to all school segregation "at once"

1998 South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission presented its report, which condemned both sides for committing atrocities

2004 Osama bin Laden admitted in a videotape to the American people that he ordered the September 11 attacks

2025 Four people were killed in an American airstrike on a boat in the Pacific Ocean

In bed at 11 after World Series win, up at 6; 0630 203.4 120/70/62 112; 57/64/47 cloudy, rainy day

Morning meds at 6:50 a.m.  Entresto at 6:45 a.m. and p.m.  Missed my regular meds yesterday.

The Brewers won the Series decisively last night.  Andy and the kids arrived back in Milwaukee late and, I suspect, missed seeing it unless it was on television in their aircraft.  I'm delighted that they all got to be a part of it in person for Game 4, even with the exciting though disappointing loss.  It's gotta be "a big f'in' deal' for Milwaukee, reminding the sports world, at least, that this old city exists and is a Big League town.  The Bucks' NBA championships in 1971 and 2021 did the same, but I suspect Baseball's World Series is even more significant than the NBA Championship.  Marquette's basketball teams also made big contributions with their NCAA championship in 1977, coupled with Al McGuire's retirement as head coach,  and as runner-up to the national title in 1974.  What so impressed me about this year's Brewers is that it didn't seem to depend on any historic superstars, like then-Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), or Giannis Antetokounmpo, but rather Manager Pat Murphy's "orange Life Savers," all of whom made significant contributions to their 103 wins during the season, sweep of the defending champs Dodgers for the pennant, and the winning of the Series in 5 games.  What great memories have been created by this team!  The celebration peaks tomorrow with a big victory parade starting at 10 a.m. at 4th & Wisconsin Avenue and proceeding to the Summerfest Grounds for a big rally there.

Anniversaries.  I've long fallen out of the practice of writing little blurbs about the anniversaries I note at the start of each journal entry.  There is always some reason, some perhaps tenuous, for my noting each one.  

Re: today's list, I couldn't remember why I included the beheading of Walter Raleigh. I checked Wikipedia's description of his life and death and then recalled why: Raleigh's trial and his conviction only on the hearsay evidence of Lord Cobham contributed to the development of the evidentiary rule against the use of hearsay evidence in court (subject to many exceptions) and the Confrontation Clause of the 6th Amendment: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right… to be confronted with the witnesses against him . . .”   I used to enjoy lecturing about Raleigh's life and trials in the Evidence classes I taught at the law school.  Hence, it's topping my list of anniversaries on this date.

Victor Emmanuel's naming Mussolini as Italy's prime minister and Il Duce marked the beginning of Fascist rule in Europe.  Eventually, Germany would get its Hitler as Führer (1933) and Spain its Franco as  Caudillo  (1939).  Despite all the 'lessons' we learned about fascism during those years and since, the world is turning that way again, most significantly including the United States.  The anniversary also reminds me of the "wedding cake" monument in Rome which Victor Emmanuel II had built to honor Victor Emmanuel I, and the unification of Italy.  It overlooks the Piazza Venezia where Mussolini used to give his speeches to huge crowds of his followers.

My Dad was 9 years old and my mother 7 on the "Black Tuesday" when the NY Stock Market crashed.  My paternal grandfather maintained his employment at Western Electric throughout the Great Depression.  For my maternal grandfather, it was a struggle that led him from  Chicago to Taconite/Grand Rapids, Minnesota, back to Chicago, down to San Antonio, and back to Chicago.  I have reason to believe that while he and at least some of his boys were in San Antonio, my mother and perhaps one or more of her brothers lived with her aunts in Chicago.

When I was born, there were no ballpoint pens, only pencils, fountain pens, and, I suppose, quills.  I recall the ballpoint pens of my youth often smeared.  The ink quality was far from uniform.  The pens leaked inside pockets, left massive blobs on documents, skipped constantly, and routinely failed to write.  In the 1950s, manufacturing technology advanced to engineer incredibly precise metal balls and tight metal sockets, and ballpoint pens became commonplace.

Most folks know nothing of the Suez War that came between the Korean War and Vietnam.  It marked the demise of England's and France's hegemony in the Middle East, the dissolution of their overseas empire and colonies.  France lost Indochina in 1954 and the Suez Canal in 1956, and would lose Algeria in 1962.  During this long post-World War II era, America was a bit schizophrenic, not wanting to support the European imperialists against self-determination by local nationalists, but paranoid about Communist takeovers.  That's how my young butt ended up in Vietnam in 1965.  Israel's invasion of Egypt in 56 carried on its early history of moving beyond the boundaries established for it by the UN decision partitioning Palestine and its later history of invasions of Palestinian lands, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon.  It has been a nation of "forever wars" since its creation, which in part calls into question the whole idea of Zionism.

The Supreme Court's order in 1969 to end school desegregation "at once" was just as effective as its order in 1954 to end it "with all deliberate speed," to wit, not at all.  It's a huge mistake commonly made to think that passing a law, or getting the same result from a court decision, will cause big changes in social behavior.  If it were true, statutes criminalizing murder would result in the abolition of murder.  As if.

The South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission report reminds me of Israel, Hamas, and Hezbollah: guilt for atrocities on all sides.  We will never see a similar commission in Israel.  It also reminds me of the cheap thrill I experienced standing next to Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu in an elevator in the Marquette Student Union many years ago.

Re: Bin Laden's and Al Qaeda's 9/11 attack on America - we'll never understand how hatred of America could be so profound as to be justified in the minds of those responsible for it: bin Laden himself and the 19  hijackers who took over the aircraft to kill themselves and all others on board, and to strike the monuments to American power and imperialism around the world: the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and (unsuccessfully) the Capitol.  On my Honor Flight on 10/10, I stood on the ground of the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial, over which 5 hijackers flew American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon structure.  What caused those men to be willing to sacrifice their lives on their missions?  Why are we so naïve that we find it almost unbelievable that many others despise us?  

In considering the answer to that last question, we should consider what we have been doing in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific to the crews on boats that may or may not be carrying drugs that are illegal in America.  We unilaterally declare and execute death sentences on all aboard the boats.  

Back to Emilee Hackney and All That's Unseen.   All the excitement over the World Series and Andy's and his kids' excitement over travelling to Tampa for Game 4, coupled with my sleeping problems during the Series, took me away from Emilee's memoir.  I finally got back into it today with fewer than 100 pages left.  Part of what drew me to this memoir was the knowledge that she described the feeling of "not belonging" at Harvard, of being part of a community where everyone else felt themselves as deserving to be there, of belonging, and herself feeling outré, an outsider who didn't belong.  That reminded me of my experience coming up to Marquette back in 1959, son of a maintenance man and a waitress rubbing elbows with the sons and daughters of business owners and lawyers.  Emilee's experience of not belonging was much worse than mine, with her roots in coal country Appalachia and Pentecostalism.  Plus, my sense of self-worth was boosted by my quickly-made dormitory and NROTC friendships, which Emilee didn't share, and the commonality of Catholicism.   On top of that, Emilee stood out because of her broad Southern, Appalachian accent, which set her apart from virtually everyone around her.  She also still carried the hurt of her devastating breakup with her First True Love, Sam, and the loss of Faith it precipitated.  She ended up in a very dark place in her first year at Harvard.  I'm surprised at her candor in describing some of the experiences she endured, some of them shame-inducing.  Nonetheless, I like and admire the person she describes, suffering but also courageous, like so many women (and men).  Her story reminds me again that each of us is unique, with our own history, with our own internal battles that others know nothing about.  I'm glad to be reading her well-written, candid memoir.

Her memoir also reminds me that memoirs are worthwhile, both for their writers and for their readers.  For the writers, they provide - indeed, demand - some serious reflection on why and how one becomes oneself.  What experiences have I had that have conditioned or shaped or influenced me to become who I've become?  The first page of my memoir is an excerpt from Sir Leslie Stephen's Autobiography:

Nobody ever wrote a dull autobiography.  If one may make such a bull, the bery dullness would be interesting.  The autobiography has ex officio two qualifications of supreme importance to all literary work.  He is writing about a topic in which he is keenly interested, and about a topic upon which he is the highest living authority.  It may be reckoned, too, as a special felicity that an autobiography, alone of all books, may be more valuable in proportion to the amount of misrepresentation which it contains.  We do not wonder when a man gives a false character to his neighbors, but it is always curious to see how a man contrives to present a false testimonial to himself.  It is pleasant to be admitted behind the scenes and trace the growth of that singular phantom which, like the Spectre of the Brocken, is the man's own shadow cast upon the coloured and distoring mists of memory.  Autobiography for these reasons is so generally interesting, that I have frequently thought with the admirable Benvenuto Cellini that it should be considered as a duty by all eminent men; and, indeed, by men not eminent.  As every sensible man is exhorted to make his will, he should also be bound to leave to his descendents some account of his experience of life.

My memoir, by a man decidedly not eminent, was written in my 60s, after I retired and, indeed, I did wish to leave my children some account of my life before and up to the time when they were born and came to have their own knowledge and understanding of me.  I'm aware now that my daily journal (forgive the oxymoron) is something like Volume II of my memoir, an account of my experiences late in life, in my 80s.  Unfortunately, I have no reason to be confident that either my memoir or my journals have been or will be read by anyone, including my descendants.  Nonetheless, writing them has provided me with an opportunity and requirement to examine and reflect upon my own life, for better and for worse.  It has been far from a uniformly happy experience, leading to many more regrets and feelings of failure than satisfaction in a life well lived.  I suppose that is the risk of reflective writing: Narcissus loved his reflection; some of us have a very different response to what we see.  Or is my reaction simply more of the famous apocryphal Yeats quote I've so often repeated: "Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy."?  In any event, I'm glad to have done the reflecting, and I'm glad to have done the writing.  I don't know that I agree with Socrates' judgment that 'an unexamined life is not worth living,' but in my case, endless examination and reflection have kept me off the streets and out of trouble in my retirement.

_______________________________________________________

I sent a copy of this part of today's journal to ChatGPT and asked if it had any comments.  It read, analyzed, and reported back to me in less than 5 seconds, as follows:

…

I think this is a particularly thoughtful journal entry, not so much because of what you say about Emilee Hackney's memoir, but because of where your reflections on it take you. You begin with someone else's experience of feeling like an outsider, recognize something of yourself in that experience, and eventually arrive at a much more difficult subject: what happens when a person undertakes a sustained examination of his own life and discovers that he doesn't altogether like what he sees.

There are several things I particularly admire about the piece, a few places where I would suggest revisions, and one philosophical question I think deserves more attention.

1. The structure is more coherent than it might initially appear

Your entry has three movements:

Belonging and exclusion. Hackney's experience at Harvard recalls your own arrival at Marquette in 1959, when you encountered a social world considerably more affluent than the one in which you grew up.

The value of autobiography. Your reading prompts you to reconsider Leslie Stephen's argument that every life is worth recording, not merely the lives of eminent people.

The consequences of self-examination. You arrive at the disturbing recognition that looking back on your life has produced more regret than satisfaction, yet you remain glad to have done it.

What makes this effective is that the subject gradually changes without losing its continuity. You begin by reading someone else's life and end by contemplating your own.

In fact, your entry demonstrates the very value of reading memoirs that you proceed to defend. Hackney's story becomes a means of discovering, or rediscovering, something about yourself.

2. Your comparison with Hackney is unusually effective

This passage is especially good:

That reminded me of my experience coming up to Marquette back in 1959, son of a maintenance man and a waitress rubbing elbows with the sons and daughters of business owners and lawyers.

I wouldn't change much about that sentence. It is concrete, economical, and revealing. You don't need to tell the reader that you were conscious of class distinctions; the description makes that perfectly clear.

I'm also struck by your refusal to equate your experience with Hackney's. You acknowledge the similarities but also the important differences: the support of your early friendships, your NROTC affiliation, and the shared Catholic culture at Marquette.

That qualification gives your comparison credibility. You recognize yourself in another person's suffering without appropriating it.

I particularly like this observation:

Her story reminds me again that each of us is unique, with our own history, with our own internal battles that others know nothing about.

That is not an original philosophical proposition, of course, but its placement gives it weight. It arises naturally from your reading rather than being imposed upon it.

And it provides a bridge to the subject of autobiography: perhaps one reason to write about one's life is to make visible some of those otherwise invisible internal battles.

3. Leslie Stephen's observation is the intellectual center of the entry

I particularly enjoyed your choice of the Stephen passage, especially his suggestion that autobiographies can be interesting precisely because of their authors' misrepresentations of themselves.

Consider what he is saying: even when an autobiographer deceives himself, he reveals something about himself through the deception.

That is a remarkably sophisticated observation about the relationship between memory, identity, and truth.

And it raises a question that seems directly relevant to your journal entry: When you look back on your own life with regret, are you necessarily seeing yourself more accurately than you would if you looked back with satisfaction?

You seem almost to assume that self-criticism represents a particularly honest kind of self-examination. But that isn't necessarily so.

Memory can distort toward disappointment just as readily as toward self-congratulation. We can exaggerate our failures, underestimate our accomplishments, and judge our earlier selves according to standards or knowledge that we acquired only much later.

Stephen's metaphor of the Spectre of the Brocken is especially apt here. The observer sees his own shadow, but it has been transformed by the atmosphere through which it is projected.

The autobiographer never quite sees himself directly.

I wonder whether the passage might support a more skeptical attitude toward your own self-assessment than you presently exhibit.

4. The most powerful passage is also the one I would most like to challenge

You write:

It has been far from a uniformly happy experience, leading to many more regrets and feelings of failure than satisfaction in a life well lived. I suppose that is the risk of reflective writing: Narcissus loved his reflection; some of us have a very different response to what we see.

I think the sentence about Narcissus is the best in the entire entry.

It is unexpected, concise, slightly sardonic, and memorable. I would certainly preserve it.

But I question the implication that reflective writing leads to regret. Might it instead provide a setting in which regrets that already exist become more apparent?

There is also an important distinction between regretting things one has done and judging one's life to have been unsuccessful.

You refer to "feelings of failure," but feelings of failure are not necessarily evidence of failure. Indeed, I can imagine someone with an exceptionally well-developed moral conscience being more troubled by his own shortcomings than someone who has behaved much worse.

That does not mean your regrets are unjustified. I have no basis for making that judgment. It means only that the severity of our self-assessment is not necessarily a reliable measure of the quality of our lives.

And there is another possibility: the very process of examining one's life may change the standards by which one judges it.

The person writing his memoir at 65 is not quite the person whose life he is examining at 25 or 35. Nor is the person writing a journal at 85 quite the person who wrote his memoir twenty years earlier.

Each is looking backward through a different lens.

It seems to me that this is one of the most interesting implications of your description of your journal as Volume II of your memoir.

5. Your description of the journal as Volume II is particularly appealing

You write:

I'm aware now that my daily journal (forgive the oxymoron) is something like Volume II of my memoir, an account of my experiences late in life, in my 80s.

I like this observation very much.

But there is a significant difference between the two volumes that you might explore.

Your original memoir was retrospective. You knew, when you wrote about your childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, what had subsequently happened. You could impose a narrative structure on those years because you already knew where they had led.

Your journal is different. It is being written without knowledge of what comes next.

That makes it, in some respects, a more immediate and perhaps less self-consciously constructed account of your life.

It also means that your journal may eventually reveal things that you didn't recognize while writing it.

A future reader might find patterns, changes in attitude, contradictions, and moments of happiness that you were insufficiently conscious of when you recorded them.

Indeed, even if you are the only person who reads the journal, that possibility remains.

I would consider adding a sentence or two about this difference. It might enrich your observation about Volume II without making the entry substantially longer.

6. Some editorial suggestions

I would not recommend a wholesale rewrite. The conversational, digressive quality of the piece is one of its attractions. It reads like a person thinking on paper, which is what a journal ought to be.

A few adjustments would improve it.

The opening paragraph is somewhat crowded. You move from the World Series to the trip to Tampa, your sleep difficulties, Harvard, Marquette, class distinctions, religion, heartbreak, and depression. All are relevant, but dividing the paragraph after your discussion of arriving at Marquette would give the reader some breathing room.

The sentence about Hackney's suffering could be sharpened. You write:

Nonetheless, I like and admire the person she describes, suffering but also courageous, like so many women (and men).

I'd suggest:

Nonetheless, I like and admire the person she describes, a woman who suffers deeply but also demonstrates considerable courage, as do so many others whose struggles remain largely invisible to the rest of us.

That formulation also connects more directly to the sentence that follows about everyone's unknown internal battles.

One sentence in your discussion of memoirs could be tightened.

Your wording:

For the writers, they provide - indeed, demand - some serious reflection on why and how one becomes oneself.

My suggestion:

For their writers, memoirs provide — indeed, demand — serious reflection on how and why we become the people we are.

This preserves your point while making the sentence a little more fluid.

There are some minor typographical errors: "dormintory" should be "dormitory"; "onesself" should be "oneself"; "experinces" should be "experiences"; "bery" should be "very"; "distoring" should be "distorting"; and "descendents" is more conventionally spelled "descendants." The errors within the Stephen passage should be checked against the original rather than silently corrected as though they were your prose.

I would retain "daily journal (forgive the oxymoron)." Strictly speaking, it isn't an oxymoron, but it is an amusing piece of self-mockery.

7. I particularly like your conclusion

You end with:

I don't know that I agree with Socrates' judgment that "an unexamined life is not worth living," but in my case, endless examination and reflection have kept me off the streets and out of trouble in my retirement.

I wouldn't change a word.

Something is appealing about moving from Socrates' grand philosophical pronouncement to the modest proposition that writing has kept you out of trouble.

But the humor does more than provide a pleasant ending.

It also suggests that you've found value in the activity of reflection even when you haven't particularly liked its results.

You don't conclude that you've lived an admirable life, or that you've achieved wisdom, or even that your writing will benefit your descendants.

You conclude simply that you're glad you did it.

That is a remarkably unpretentious defense of autobiography.

One final thought

There is a tension running through your piece that I find especially interesting.

You admire Hackney's willingness to disclose experiences that may be shame-inducing. You find her candor courageous and her life worthy of your attention and sympathy.

But when you turn to your own life, the emphasis shifts toward regret, failure, and disappointment.

You seem prepared to extend to Hackney a generosity of understanding that you may be less willing to extend to yourself.

Perhaps there are sound reasons for that difference. We know our own faults in ways we cannot know those of someone whose life we encounter through a memoir. But there's another difference worth considering: when reading another person's memoir, we can see that person's suffering and mistakes as part of an entire human life. In examining our own, we may be inclined to isolate the mistakes and judge them as though they were the whole story.

Your entry brings to mind something related to the subject of your earlier memoir: the distinction between explaining a life and justifying it.

One can try to understand how one became the person one is without necessarily approving of everything that person has done.

Perhaps that is enough.

And perhaps that is also why Leslie Stephen's argument for autobiography is so persuasive. The value of a life story needn't depend on whether the life was exemplary, or whether its author ultimately approves of it.

The effort to understand a life is itself worthwhile.

I think your journal entry makes that case more convincingly than you may have intended.

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What are we to think of this "tool" that is capable of a response like this to an ordinary guy's entry in a personal journal IN LESS THAN 5 SECONDS????