5/5/2026

 Tuesday, May 5, 2026

1916 US Marines invaded the Dominican Republic and stayed until 1924

1965 First large-scale US Army ground units arrived in South Vietnam

2022 WHO study of excess deaths worldwide said 15 million more people had died than normal, far above the official COVID-19 death toll of 6 million 

2025 The Vatican announced that it would convert and donate a Popemobile into a mobile health clinic for wounded children in Gaza, Palestine, in accordance with one of Pope Francis' final wishes.

In bed at 8:30, onto the LZB in the middle of the night, up at 4:22; 0435 128/75/85. 120 204.8; 43/35/55/42, mostly cloudy day ahead.

Morning meds at 6 a.m., with half dose of Bisoprolol at 5 a.m.  At 5:05 a.m., my AppleWatch jiggled and gave me a "low heart rate" warning, registering a heart rate of 34.  What does this mean in light of what Dr. Singh has told me about "false readings because of the ventricular tachycardi???

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  I finished it this morning, wondering why I had devoted as much time as I did to it.  In the last chapter of the noevel, Joyce uses Stephen Dedalus to articulate Joyce's theory of Beauty, based on Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas:  Pulchra sunt quae visa placent, or that is beautfiul the apprehension of which pleases.  That said, a reader has to wonder why Joyce wrote the way he did, the incoherent, circular, stream of consciousness, head-scratching, hard to follow way that he did.  He didn't do it when he wrote Dubliners, but he started with in Portrait, went full-bore in Ulysses, and became completely incomprehensible in Finnegan's Wake.  Did he really think he was making something beaufiful?  I guess he did.  Maybe he thought only a handful of people were able to truly appreciate "real" breauty, meaning he himself and a few literary dilettantes, perhaps the types that got into Deconstruction and a lot of the post-Modernism stuff impossible for most of us to grasp.  The Ezra Pound types.  In any case, this poor child from St. Leo parish on the south side of Chicago gets lost pretty easily in a verbal thicket of non-sequiturs of the type Joyce loves.  I'm the same way with most contemporary poetry that is incomprehensible.  The poets must think their work is beautfiul because it is to them, but for readers other than them, it's meaningless.  What's the point?   Consider this "poem" by Gertrude Stein.  It's a small excerpt from Tender Buttons, published in 1914, 2 years before the publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

GLAZED GLITTER.

Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover.

The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very charming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing.

There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be breakages in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color chosen. It was chosen yesterday, that showed spitting and perhaps washing and polishing. It certainly showed no obligation and perhaps if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving.

Does this have any meaning, to a reader or even to Stein? 

When is a "ceasefire" not a ceasefire?  The Americans and Iranians are shooting at each other in the Persian Gulf/Strait of Hormuz.   SecDef/SecWar Pete Hegseth and the President say that these acts don't exceed 'the threshold of hostilities' necessary to invalidate the ceasefire, or something like that.   He also says that the 'battle for Hormuz' is "separate and distinct" from the war with Iran.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

 “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. . . . Political language – annd with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. . . . “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. . . . In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. ― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

 

Callou callay!  A gorgeous Baltimore oriole on the suet feeder this afternoon.  Time to put out some oranges. 

 

5/4/2026

 Monday, May 4, 2026

D+179/105

1535 Five Carthusian monks were hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn, London, for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as head of the Church of England

1977 US Catholic bishops rescinded automatic excommunications for divorced and remarried Catholics (receiving communion but still outlawed it if the previous marriages were not annulled by Church tribunals)

1990 Latvia's parliament voted 138-0 (1 abstention) for Independence

2001 The Milwaukee Art Museum addition, the first Santiago Calatrava-designed structure in the United States, opened to the public

2021 Mexico's President Andrés Manuel López Obrador made a historic apology to the Mayan people for abuses against them in the five centuries since the Spanish conquest 

2023 WHO declared COVID-19 over as a global health emergency, but it remainsed a significant threat, with seven million known deaths and a real total likely 20 million

In bed at 9, awake at 4, moved to LZB, up at 6; 0430 112/63/53 120 206.0; 65/42/72/46, sunny with elevated concern for wildfire conditions..  

Morning meds at 8 a.m.,  and half dose of Bisoprolol at  6:40 a.m.  

We watched the documenary on the100th anniversary of The New Yorker last night.  It included a comment by art, theater, and cultural critic Hilton Als: Throughout the city there is beauty, if you pay attention and are really looking, to which I thought, how true, and for every city, every hamlet, every rural area.  It reminded me of our back yard, of all the trees all over the place, of the spring flowers now in bloom and the summer and fall flowers to come, of the elegant, interesting homes throughout the area.  Als is correct that we have to pay attention and really look about us, and throughout much of our lives, we are too busy with the daily affairs of life to do that.  The same is true of our vision of other people; there is hidden beauty in them too, but we rarely get to see it.

I took a ride up to Random Lake this afternoon, via I-43, Hy.57, Jay Road, Ozaukee Couty 3, Hilltop Road (a favorite view of Wisconsin countryside), Camp Awana Road, Hy. 144 back to Hy. 57 to back home.  The weather was sunny and uncommonly warm, in the low 70s, but it'll be 20° cooler tomorrow and the rest of the week.  I listened to chapter 5 of Portrait while driving through the countryside.

Oh, how I am carried back to my youth by Portrait of the Artist!  From Chapter 4:

Every morning he hallowed himself anew in the presence of some holy image or mystery. His day began with an heroic offering of its every moment of thought or action for the intentions of the sovereign pontiff and with an early mass. . . His daily life was laid out in devotional areas. By means of ejaculations and prayers he stored up ungrudgingly for the souls in purgatory centuries of days and quarantines and years; yet the spiritual triumph which he felt in achieving with ease so many fabulous ages of canonical penances did not wholly reward his zeal of prayer, since he could never know how much temporal punishment he had remitted by way of suffrage for the agonising souls . . . On each of the seven days of the week he further prayed that one of the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost might descend upon his soul and drive out of it day by day the seven deadly sins which had defiled it in the past; and he prayed for each gift on its appointed day, confident that it would descend upon him, though it seemed strange to him at times that wisdom and understanding and knowledge were so distinct in their nature that each should be prayed for apart from the others. Yet he believed that at some future stage of his spiritual progress this difficulty would be removed when his sinful soul had been raised up from its weakness and enlightened by the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity. He believed this all the more, and with trepidation, because of the divine gloom and silence wherein dwelt the unseen Paraclete, Whose symbols were a dove and a mighty wind, to sin against Whom was a sin beyond forgiveness, the eternal mysterious secret Being to Whom, as God, the priests offered up mass once a year, robed in the scarlet of the tongues of fire.

Those endless Catholic religion classes taught by the Sisters of Providence and the Irish Christian Brothers!  Those so-called Theology classes taught by the Jesuits, all based on St. Thomas Aquinas!  That off-putting terminology (Paraclete Parakeet), all that Latin (Tantum Ergo makes your hair grow!) All those lists (7 gifts of the Holy Ghosst, 7 deadly sins, sanctifying grace vs. actual grace, . .), the mysteries of Faith,   Nobody could beat this kind of stuff into your heads and consciousness like the Irish religious and they carried their dedication and tenacity to America, and to my parish on the south side of Chicago in the 1040s and 1950s.  And no one could write about it more tellingly than James Joyce.  I hardly knew whether to laugh or cry as I read and listened to the descriiptions above in Chapter 4.

I tend to be hard in my judgments about Catholic education, harder than I should be.  The 40s and 50s were not the 2020s.  I grew up at the end of the Pre-Vatican II Church, the Church of Pius XII, not the Church of John XXIII.  I was born at the end of the Great Depression, just before Pearl Harbor and World War II.  The Sisters of Providence who taught me dealt with classes of 40 to 50 studends, boys on one side of the room, girls on the other.  They had rather little formal education themselves and little preparation for teaching those huge classes other than what they themselves experienced in their own Catholic education.   It was a hard life and many didn't do very well.   I remember especially my teacher in 5th or 6th grade who couldn't deal with the stress(es) and had to be replaced early in the Fall semester.  There are many good memoirs in print about life in the convent, some of which I've read, like Karen Armstrong's Through the Narrow Gate: My Climb Out of  Darkness, and Removing the Habit of God: Sister Christine's Story by Susan Bassler Pickford.   They are powerful, touching stories of girls and young women struggling with their relationship with God.  When I joined St. Francis of Assisi parish in the 1990s and became active in parish and Church affairs, I found that the most admirable members of the parish (in addition to my friend Troy Major and Roland Wright) were a few religious sisters.  I regret losing my relationships with them when I left the parish after falling out with the provincial leadership of the Capuchins during the child sex abuse scandals.

On the othjer hand, in the 5th and concluding chapter, Joyce relates Stephen Dedalus's and his friends' arguments in college about Thomistic philosophy, Irish identity, the definition of Beauty, Art, and suchlike, much of it in Latin.  I have a hard time reading and/or listening to Joyce, and this chapter is particularly difficult for me.  Much of the dialogue is just words that float over my head.  I'll finish the book, probably tonight or tomorrow morning, but I'm not enjoying it except for the parts where he exposes the wretchedness of the Irish Catholic Church.

  

5/3/2026

 Sunday, May 3, 2026

1921 Northern Ireland was created under the UK Government of Ireland Act partitioning off six north-eastern counties with a Protestant majority

1926 US Marines landed in Nicaragua (9 months after leaving), stayed until 1933

1960 The Anne Frank House opened in Amsterdam, the Netherlands

2007 Peter Charles Clausen was born at West Allis Memorial Hospital to his mother Anh Hoang Clausen and his father, Andrew Charles Clausen

In bed at 9ish, up at 5:30; 0545 155/78/54 119 204.0; 46/32/63/43, windy, overcast. 

Morning meds at 10 a.m., and Bisoprolol at 6:45 a.m.    

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  My back started acting up so I went back to back this morning and listened to, rather than read, where I am in Portrait, Chapter 3.  I had forgotten what a superb job Joyce did in providing to the reading world an example of the Irish Catholic Church's teaching on Heaven and Hell, sin and its eternal consequences, and mostly, God's just punishment of his children who die not in a state of sanctifying grace, i.e., with at least one mortal sin on their soul.  Growing up in that Church was living and being formed in a Reign of Terror.  I relate to and react to Joyce's writing about it so intensely because I grew up in that Church.  The American Catholic Church that I grew up in was an Irish Catholic Church.  Most of the hierarchs were Irishmen, and perhaps they still are.  Our archbishop in Chicago was Samuel Stritch, as Irish as Paddy's pig, as we used to say.  Our parish pastor at St. Leo the Great parish was the Rt. Rev. Patrick J. Malloy, another Irishman.  My teachers at Leo High School were the Irish Christian Brothers, mostly Irishmen.  And, of course, my own blessed mother, Mary Healy Clausen, was the daughter of Dennis Healy and Catherine O'Shea Healy, both Irish immigrants.  Here's just some of what I wrote of growing up in the Irish Catholic Church in the chapter of my memoir I titled "Born in the Bosom of the Church":

There is a story about Jesus in the gospels of Mark and Luke that receives too little attention from the professional Church, the priests and nuns and eminences with satin beanies and palatial residences.  Mark tells it like this:

People were bringing little children [or toddlers] to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them.  But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.  Surely whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”  And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

Luke has the disciples even more authoritarian and off-putting than Mark: “when the disciples saw them, they sternly ordered them not to do it . . .”

It’s a great tale of Jesus’ warmth and physical affection – “he took them up in his arms . . .”   The aspect of the story that I am focusing on here, however, is that it is the disciples of Jesus, the ‘true believers,’ the ‘in crowd’ that stood between the children and Jesus.  It was the people closest to him who built a wall around him, attempting to fence Jesus in and fence the innocents out.  I reveal my hostility toward clericalism in admitting that I can’t help thinking of those disciples as the ecclesial ancestors of the Church’s clerical caste, the professional God-guys, or at least the pharisaical ones, of whom I have known a good many.

With our home life on the Good Ship Clausen so precarious and sometimes stormy, my mother’s stabilizing keel notwithstanding, the major influence on Kitty and me other than our family was the Catholic Church.  This influence was exercised mainly through parochial schooling at St. Leo’s Grammar School for both of us and Leo High School for me and Visitation High School for Kitty.  The grammar school was run by the Sisters of Providence headquartered outside Notre Dame, Indiana.  Leo was run by the Irish Christian Brothers and “Vis” by the Sinsinawa Dominicans with their motherhouse south of Platteville, Wisconsin.  

. . .

    The most popular priest was a young fellow named Father Burke.  He was friendly and open without any hint of being manipulative or predatory.  I remember only two things about him.  One, that I liked him.  Two, that he was delegated to come into our 7th and 8th classes before summer vacation to give us the temple-of-the-Holy-Ghost-avoidance-of-occasions-of-sin talks.  In large part because the American Catholic Church was so thoroughly an Irish Catholic entity, the avoidance of ‘the solitary vice,’ of ‘self-abuse,’ of anything having to do with s-e-x was about as important as defeating Godless Communism and keeping the “undesirables” out of our neighborhoods.  Father Burke told us boys (the girls of course were in another classroom waiting to get their temple-of-the-Holy-Ghost-never-BE-an-occasion-of-sin-for-a-boy talk) that staying in a bathtub or shower any longer than was necessary to remove the dirt from our bodies was inviting damnation.  Better a soiled body than a sullied soul.  

    Growing up Irish American Catholic in the 1940s and 1950s in Chicago was a schizophrenic    experience.  While we received occasional infusions of “God so loved the world . . .” the main teaching of the Church, which is to say the professional God-guys, was fear of eternal damnation.  The Church touted the Little Flower and St. Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds when it needed a little romanticism and sentimentalism, but its regular indoctrination came right from the same Calvinistic hellhole that Jonathan Edwards drew from when he wrote his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon.  The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber, the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them; the flames do now rage and glow. There was precious little difference between 16th and 17th century Puritan moral theology and the Irish Catholic moral theology of the mid-20th century.  Damn near every sin more grievous than disobeying your mother was a mortal sin and if you died with one mortal sin on your soul, the eternal fires of Hell awaited you.  Do you know how long eternity is, boys and girls?  Imagine holding a lighted match under your finger for one second.  For ten seconds.  For ten minutes!  Ten hours!! TEN THOUSAND MILLION GAZILLION YEARS!!!!!   And that’s not one one trillionth of one one trillionth of ETERNITY!    And, to make growing up more interesting, any boy or girl could get into this kind of trouble as soon as they reach “the age of reason” which the God-guys decided was 7 years old.  This teaching was enough to keep a pubescent boy awake at night praying for no wet dreams, especially before he fell asleep.

    At least if one did slip into a sin of the flesh meriting burning in Hell for all eternity, the sin could be forgiven by coming alongside Father Devereaux and being grappled.  One sin and only one sin was unforgivable: hating the Holy Ghost.  I believe I learned this in the 5th or 6th grade from one of the Sisters of Providence who had it on the highest authority:

"Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come."-- (Matt. 12:31-32)

As soon as I learned of this unforgivable sin and that I must never say “I hate the Holy Ghost”, I was constantly pursued by the Evil One tempting me to say “I hate the Holy Ghost.”  I was a 10 or 11 year old neurotic haunted by the soft siren call “Go on, say it.  Say you hate the Holy Ghost.  Go on, say it.”  I still remember the terrible day I was dispatched by my teacher, Sister Mary Chalkdust, to take the wastebasket downstairs and empty it.  All the way down the back steps at St. Leo Grammar School I struggled against my obsessive wrestling against thinking the words “I hate the Holy Ghost.”  No.  Don’t say it.  It’s unforgivable!  No use.  I thought the words in a complete sentence: “I hate the Holy Ghost.”  I was done for and I hadn’t even kissed a girl yet. 

. . . 

    I can now half-laugh at the absurdities that were beaten into my head and my heart as a child under the spiritual authority of Pope Pius XII, Cardinal Stritch, Monsignor Malloy, and the Sisters of Providence, but of course it wasn’t one bit humorous as I lived through it.  Along with the horrors of living each day in this world with my father’s abysmal unhappiness and alcoholism, I had the Church doing all in its power to convince me that there was no hope for me (or my family) even in the next world.  I cannot think of all that hellfire and damnation brainwashing that we went though other than as, at best, the sick visions of some deeply neurotic people and, at worst, as willful child abuse by  those who knew they were speaking untruths.   The deeply neurotics included many of the priests and nuns as is evidenced in Karen Armstrong’s wonderful biography about her life in a convent Through the Narrow Gate, Andrew Greeley’s Uncertain Trumpet, and by other writings about life within the clerical and religious castes.  The child abusers included many others, popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, nuns and brothers, who were willing to toe the party line of the official Church for career reasons and/or for social control reasons knowing that what they said was pure bullshit.    

. . .

    Whose purpose was served by having children believe that the ground they walked on was a moral minefield and that at any moment they could stumble into eternal perdition?  When the disciples saw the people bringing little children to him, they sternly ordered them not to do it.  What was accomplished other than the creating of more neurotics whose lives were driven by fear rather than love?  Those who benefited from the Moral Reign of Terror, of course, were those in the clerical or priestly caste.  Those of us in mortal fear of eternal damnation had one practical way out, and that was to repair to the confessional to be shriven by a priest.  Absolution was the ticket to Heaven and the priestly caste had monopoly power over the tickets.  The popes and the bishops, for their part, owned the railroad.

The disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”  He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.  Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.  Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”

“If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea.  Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks!”  Matt. 18:1-7

Woe indeed.  Stumbling blocks indeed.  What anguish we suffered if we believed, and believe I did.  What threats we endured if we couldn’t believe, a sin against Faith.  Repression, suppression, oppression were the hallmarks of the Irish Catholic Church and the American Church was an Irish Church.  Wonderment about matters religious that might deviate from the Teachings of the Church?  Sinful.  Normal maturing through emerging sexuality in childhood and adolescence?  Sinful.   Failing to toe the line with all the laws of the Church, like “making your Easter duty?”  Sinful.

    As I look back on those days, what strikes me more than the spiritual and emotional pain the Church put us through is what the Church didn’t do.  It didn’t help us.  It didn’t help us grow up.  Not emotionally, not spiritually, not religiously.  It was in great measure negative and life-denying.  Having grown up in that cold Irish spiritual environment, William Blake’s church poems immediately appealed to me, poems like Garden of Love.

I went to the Garden of Love, 

And saw what I never had seen; 

A Chapel was built in the midst, 

Where I used to play on the green. 

And the gates of this Chapel were shut 

And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door; 

So I turned to the Garden of Love 

That so many sweet flowers bore. 

And I saw it was filled with graves, 

And tombstones where flowers should be; 

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, 

And binding with briars my joys and desires. 

and The Little Vagabond

Dear Mother, dear Mother, the Church is cold, 

But the Ale-house is healthy & pleasant & warm; 

Besides I can tell where I am used well, 

Such usage in Heaven will never do well. 

But if at the Church they would give us some Ale, 

And a pleasant fire our souls to regale, 

We'd sing and we'd pray all the live-long day, 

Nor ever once wish from the Church to stray. 

Then the Parson might preach, & drink, & sing, 

And we'd be as happy as birds in the spring; 

And modest Dame Lurch, who is always at Church, 

Would not have bandy children, nor fasting, nor birch. 

And God, like a father rejoicing to see 

His children as pleasant and happy as he, 

Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the Barrel, 

But kiss him, & give him both drink and apparel. 

In the Irish American Church of my youth, however, there was no “God like a father rejoicing to see His children as pleasant and happy as he.”  It was a Church of little joy, little delight, little peace, little awe, but no lack of dogmas, doctrines, rituals and rules, sins and sufferings.

If the Church was cruel to its children ‘born in the bosom of the Church,’ it was no less cruel to adults, especially mothers. . . 

. . . 

    I have scratched the surface of some of the besetting sins of the Church I knew as a child and a youth: clericalism, legalism, authoritarianism, sexism coupled with a morbid sexual obsessiveness,  racism,  secrecy and superstition.  It was an institution marked by pride and arrogance and an addiction to power and control.  St. Paul admonished the Colossian Christian community “as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.”  These virtues were for the sheep, Pius X’s ‘docile flock,’ not for the shepherds.  The besetting sins of the Church existed long before the mid-20th century and well beyond the archdiocese of Chicago.  Some of them pre-dated but became fixed by the first Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 and they were still around at and after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.  

    It was my experiences with the official Church, the Church as power structure and Establishment that started me on the road to philosophical anarchism, a personal philosophical rejection of the notion of Authority.  Power and gospel values do not coexist comfortably.  That is the essential contradiction within the official Church, an inherent contradiction at the very heart of the Church.  My later experiences with the United States government during the Vietnam War and with all sorts of governmental and other power structures confirmed a deep-seated rejection of anyone’s or any entity’s claim to Authority, at least outside of a parent/small child relationship.  It was Pius X’s power play in asserting papal infallibility in the First Vatican Council that led Lord Acton, one of a handful of British peers who was Roman Catholic and an opponent of the Pope’s power grab, to pen the famous ‘Acton’s axiom’:

If there is any presumption, it is . . . against holders of power, increasing as the power increases . . . Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.  There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

To which I say “Amen.”

A page from my holographic watercolor sketchbook Live in the Time of Covid, living with the pandemic under Trump

I could have put sections of Joyce's Chapter 3 in today's journal, but the journal is a collection of reflection of thoughts I have thought and and of writings I have written about my life, not Joyce's.  One of the great things about keeping a journal is that there are no rules.  Personal journals are personal, just a form of diary.  I wish I started journaling long before I was in my 80s and coming apart.  I did journal on some of our trips to Europe and I've often picked them up and reread them to recall things I had long forgotten.  But I suppose it's only on vacations and in retirement that we have the time and motivation to be scribbling in notebooks and writing thoughts on laptops.

The Heart Surgery.  Geri and I had a long, serious, detailed, and good conversation this mornning about my upcoming heart surgery (and the recommended bladder surgery) and why the decision to have the surgery or to cancel it is not an easy one.

 

 

  

 

 

 

5/2/2026

 Saturday, May 2, 2026

1929 Billie Holiday (14) and her mother were arrested for prostitution following a raid on a brothel in Harlem, New York City

1938 Thornton Wilder won the  Pulitzer Prize  "Our Town

1949 Arthur Miller won the Pulitzer Prize for "Death of a Salesman"

1978  Sharon Celek Kevil was born

2025 A Gaza-bound activist humanitarian aid ship catches fire and issues an SOS after what its organizers alleged was an Israeli drone attack off the coast of Malta in international waters.

2025 Donald Trump signs an executive order calling for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to stop directly funding NPR and PBS, and for government agencies to stop indirectly funding them.

In bed at 7with bad back pain again, right side, up at 6.  0625 145/78/51 117 205.4; 35/51/32, mostly sunny.   

Morning meds at 7:30 a.m., and half dose of Bisoprolol at 6:43 a.m.

My day started with a text from Sarah:  "The boys would like to say 'good morning!'

And I would like to say that after six or so years of on-again-off-again trying, I think I may have finally figured out how to bake a loaf of (good) sourdough bread.

I replied: "Ooooh, I love both photos!  I do miss Lilly and Blanche and all the furry companions I‘ve had throughout my life.  And as it happens, I have become a big fan of sourdough bread, especially toasted.  I’m glad for you, and a bit envious. And FYI, I’m scheduled for some heart surgery on June 15th, a catheter ablation to try to correct an arrythmia problem I have developed.  It requires an overnight hospital stay and I hope it doesn’t coincide with your visit.❤️

Anne Clausen:

Good morning, Max and Freddy! What big boys you are now. Very handsome as well. 

Now for something REALLY handsome: that bread. To die for! (I wish Maria were here to see it. She always lived your baking adventures!)

Chuck, I wish you well with your catheter ablation. I hope it is successful and that there are no problems. I also hope your overnight stay is warm and comfy. Take care. 

“Liked” not “lived” in the sentence about Maria. 

Charles Clausen:

Thanks, Anne.  I very much appreciate your good wishes.  It’ll be my third hospital stay this year, plus two day surgeries and a few ER visits.  As they say, not for wimps.  I hope you are doing well.

Unintended consequences.  This morning's New York Times includes a feature story on Japanese bathhouses, or sento, Not Even Japanese Bathhouses Are Immune From Shocks of Iran War, by River Akira Davis and Kiuko Notoya.  It relates that public bathhouses, an already diminishing institution in Japan in our era of private bathtubs and showers in private homes, are in danger of going out of business because of the high cost of oil due to Netanyahu's and Trump's war on Iran.  Reading the article and seeing its photos brings back memories of my too-short stays in Japan  and then on Okinawa in 1965 and 1966.  Most of my time in Japan was spent in the town of Iwakuni, about 25 miles south of Hiroshima, where there is a Marine Corps Air Station, a former Japanese Imperial Air Force base.  The orders overseas that I received at MCAS Yuma, AZ, designated the Marine Air Control Squadron at Iwakuni as my destination, but by the time I arrived there, the unit had already been deployed to the huge air base outside Danang, South Vietnam.  There was a tiny rear echelon still at Iwakuni under the charge of my buddy from Yuma, Warrant Officer Ron Kendall, and Ron appointed me the investigating officer for an accidental death of an enlisted man in our unit.  His head had been crushed as he tried to repair his car.  That investigation, and the scarcity of air transport equipment, kept me in Iwakuni and away from Vietnam for about 3 weeks.  I returned a few months later to deal with the dress uniforms and other stuff I had shipped from the States for my 13 month tour of duty, unaccompanied by family.  That visit was supposed to be for only 2 or 3 days, but ended up taking a week because of "space unavailable" for the return trip to RVN.  Still later, probably in 1966, I was sent on temporary duty for a week to the huge American naval bases at Yokosuka,  35 miles south of Yokohama.  Yokosuka was and is the largest US naval installation in the world, and I was sent there to attend "Crypto school," i.e, to learn all I could about crytography in a week.  It was part of my duties as the Top Secret Control Officer for Marine Wing Headquarters Squadron 1 in Danang.  I wish I could say I learned much about Japanese life and culture during my 4 or 5 weeks in Japan, but alas, I didn't.  I Yokosuka I spent all of my time working inside the moutain innards where the Crypto School was located, or resting in the BOQ, and in Iwakuni, when we weren't working or sleeping, we were usually in the Officers' Club on base or in the officers' bar in town, and the shadow of Vietnam hung over everything and everywhere.  I did, however, get to more than one bathhouse and more than one massage parlor, usually as part of recovering from hangovers from the night before.  So I learned that the Japanese are pretty fastidious about cleanliness and that they think the American practice of getting into a tub to clean up is ass-backwards.  They clean up by washing and showering before they get into a tub.  The tub is for soaking and socializing.  I was reminded of this, and so much more, by the article in this morning's Times.  I was reminded, too, to telling my Dad, once, that I enjoyed my time in Japan and the little time I got to spend with Japanese people, and his reaction.  After Iwo Jima, and all his experiences in the Marine during World War II, he had no use for Japan or its people.  Wars do that to people, though in the case of Vietnam, there was often an unavoidable ambivalence because, after all, we were there to help the Vietnamese, right?  Kind of like George III was helping the colonists, some of whom were rebelling against him because  "when push comes to shove, I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love."  But I deviate from the point: Japan's bathhouses are in danger of finally disappearing because of Bibi Netanyahu's and Donald Trump's war against Iran.  Such a small world we live in where such unintended consequences occur.  Or will they disappear because only the very old still use them, people my age and will they ultimately disappear with those very people, who still enjoyed soaking in a tub of 104° water while schmoozing with the neighbors rather than peering into a smartphone or a computer screeen?

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  I've started rereading this early book of James Joyce.  I'm not sure why, but I think it's to re-exerience his description of growing up Irish Catholic, as I did.  I'm just about through with the first chapter and I'm getting my fill of it, at least in the parts where he describes school masters inflicting corporal punishment on school boys , sometimes for misbehavior but also for failing to accurately conjugate Latin verbs or to decline Latin nouns, pronouns, adjectives, or adverbs.  Oh, those good old days of Brother Hennessey telling us to "face the birdies" as he whacked us on the ass with his drumstick, or Brother O'Keefe smacking us across our hands with  his thick ruler-thing, or Brother Charles Borromeo Irwin hitting the back of our heads  for any reason whatsoever.  Or poor young Brother Comack who almost broke his hand punching the blackboard in anger because he some poor bastard wasn't able to answer his question in class.  And no surprise when I read many years later that Charles Borromeo Irwin was credibly accused of sexually exploiting some some guy.  Our teachers were denominated the ICBs or Irish Christian Brothers, but we knew them as the International Child Beaters and James Joyce reminds me of those days.

    Lazy idle little loafer! cried the prefect of studies.  Broke my glasses!  An old schoolboy trick!  Our with your hand this moment!

    Stephen closed his eyes and held out in the air his trembling hand with the palm upwards.  He felt the prefect of studies touch it for a moment at the fingers to straighten it and then the swish of the sleeve of the soutane as the pandybat was lifted to strike.  A hot burning stinging tingling blow like the loud crack of a broken stick made his trembling hand crumple together like a leaf in the fire: and at the sound and the pain scalding tears were driven into his eye.

 

5/1/2026

Friday, May 1, 2026

1943 Food rationing began in the United States during World War II

1961 Fidel Castro announced there would be no more elections in Cuba

2003 In what became known as the "Mission Accomplished" speech, U.S. President George W. Bush declared that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended" on board the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of California

2011 Pope John Paul II was beatified by his successor, Pope Benedict XVI

2020 Armed protesters against stay-at-home-orders gathered at the State Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, as Governor Gretchen Whitmer reinstated the State of Emergency

2025 District Court Judge ruled that US Trump cannot use the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants, deeming the previous use of this power as having been improperly invoked. 

In bed at 9:30, up at 4:30; 125/61/E, 3 mnutes later 139/74/30 129 204.8; 3643/36, cloudy all day. 

Morning meds at 7 a.m., and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 5:30 a.m.

I woke up with a bad back.  I hoped that a hot shower might alleviate the pain, but no luck, so I put a 5% Lidocaine patch on it.  It kept me from attending the memorial service for our next-door neighbor, John McGregor, at Fox Point Lutheran Church with Geri, but thankfully, it was lifestreamed from the church.  This was the same church in which I attended the funeral for Brad Carr in 1996.  Brad died of cancer at age 50.  I had first met him when Anne and I lived in Juneau Village, during my first two years of law school.  I met him at a party in the apartment of Ron Warren, a law school classmate of mine for one years.  Ron was a physical therapist at Mount Sinai Hospital and worked full time during law school, which probably contributed mightily to his flunking out after our first year.  In any event, Brad Carr was a guest at the party and we met.  I can't remember our next meeting, or when we became friends of a sort, but we did.  I think Brad was teaching and an assistant basketball coach at a Milwaukee high school when I first met him, but he was a born politician and he soon became an aide to Milwaukee's long-term mayor Henry Maier, and the part-time, weekend sportscaster for WISN-TV, Channel 12.  Eventually he became a part-time law student, and eventually a lawyer doing a lot of municipal business which, alas, got him in some bribery trouble which cost him his law license in 1991.  Less than 5 years later, he died at age 50.  I suppose it's hyperbolic, but I think of him as a bit like Icarus, one with tremendous potential but who flew too close to the sun.  He was young, Black, handsome, intelligent, articulate, good-looking, a great tv screen presence, politically well-connected, a lawyer, but too hungry.  My good neighbor John McGregor wasn't the opposite of Brad, but very different.  He was born into the Stratton family, of Briggs and Stratton.  The family changed its name to McGregor from Schlesinger during one of the world wars, because of widespread anti-German animus.  He grew up wealthy, attending Milwaukee Country Day School, and Stanford University, but only after he recovered from polio that left him with some deformity and pain for the rest of his life.  He devoted his life to his family, and to his work in real estate development, and local charities, including Children's Hospital and the Schlitz Audubon Center.  He was a kind, gentle, and generous guy and a truly great neighbor.  He inspired (and shamed) me with his disciplined daily walks and recumbent bike rides.  We were born within weeks of each other in 1941 and, although we were never close personal or social friends (alas), my life was diminished by his death from leukemia.

I watched the entire memorial service on livestream from Fox Point Lutheran Church on Santa Monica Boulevard.  I enjoyed the eulogies given by a friend and by his son, Skip, and everything they said about John rang true.  I didn't get much out of the religious parts of the service, except for the duo who sang Panis Angelicus, which has been one of my favorite hymns for decades, probably since I was a kid.  The singers, ka baritone and a soprano, were both superb.

Panis angelicus
Fit panis hominum
Dat panis coelicus
Figuris terminum
O res mirabilis
Manducat dominum
Pauper, pauper
Servus et humilis

May the Bread of Angels
Become bread for mankind;
The Bread of Heaven puts
All foreshadowings to an end;
Oh, thing miraculous!
The body of the Lord will nourish
the poor, the poor,
the servile, and the humble.

 

4/30/2026

 Thursday, April 30, 2026

1975 Saigon fell & became Ho Chi Minh City

1977 Human rights group Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo began protesting at the forced disappearances of thousands, under the Argentine dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla

2015 Bernie Sanders announced he would seek the Democratic nomination for President

2021 45 were killed and 150 injured in a crush of people at the Israeli Lag B'Omer festival at Mount Meron

2025 The United States and Ukraine signed the Ukraine–United States Mineral Resources Agreement to share profits from the future sales of Ukraine's mineral and energy reserves

In bed by 10, up at 6:15; 0625 138/73/47 110 205.4; 38/45/35, sunny

Morning meds at 9 a.m.; Bisoprolol half-dose at 7 a.m.

Apocalypse Now Redux.  There are many times when I wish I were smarter, more on the ball, less obtuse, a person with greater insight and understanding of what's going on.  Those times include when I don't get jokes on SNL, or on late night monologues, or when I read a poem that is comepletely indecipherable to me, or see a movie that I don't understand.  I sort of have that feeling about Apocalypse Now.  I think I get the big picture, i.e., that it's an indictment of American popular culture, and of our national hubris about our role in the world and what great things can be wrought with our immense military and economic weight.  It's no secret of course that the movie is a clever adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the jungles of the then-Belgian Congo to the jungles of Indochina, and from European economic exploitation to American military exploitation, from the hypocrisy of Western European civilization to the hypocrisy of American 'exceptionalism,' etc.  I especially enjoyed Col. Kurtz pointing out the hypocrisy of our military and poltitical leaders forbidding our airmen from writing "Fuck" on the fuselage of our aircreaft that drop napalm and white phosphorous bombs on human beings: "We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!"  When I was in Vietnam, seven days a week for 33 weeks or so, I and my team kept track of thousands, I suppose tens of thousands, of our aircraft leaving and (mostly) returning from missions during which  they dropped fire, and high explosives, and poisons on tens of thousands of human beings,  human beings we were taught in our churches and many schools were "children of God," and "our brothers and sisters," and "our fellow men," and we did it with as much emotion and moral compunction or qualm as if we were keeping track of a factory's inventory of nuts, bolts, or sheet metal.  We flew into Vietnam with our rifles, heavy artillery, bullets, bombs, and herbicides and as if we had a perfect right to do so.  In the 'land of the free and home of the brave,' our government plucked young men off our streets, out of their workplaces, and out of their schools to train them to become killers of strange men and women and children thousands of miles away, men who posed a threat to our young men only because our government put them 'in harm's way.'  Anyone who knows me at all knows how I feel about our government and what it did in and to Vietnam, what it did to the young men it sent to Vietnam, and to their families.  Thus, it's obvious that in the main I am glad that John Milius wrote Apocalypse Now and that Francis Coppola turned it into the movie that showed at least some of what the war was like.  That said, however, I wonder whether they went overboard in their depiction.  I write 'I wonder' because I don't have a strong judgment about it.  To be sure, they depicted a hell on earth, and for those victimized by it, war can surely be a hell on earth.  And the most vivid image of Hell is fire, but the semi-ubiquity of fire in the movie seemed really gratuitious.  And what are we to make of the ritual slaughter of Col. Kurtz, much like the simultaneous ritual slaughter of a water buffalo by the montangards?  And what of the idea that the government has professional assassins in the special services?  Capt. Willard already had six assassinations notched on his .45 when he received the mission to assassinate Col. Kurtz.  And what of the assignmen to one man, armed only with a .45 pistol, to travel into Cambodia to kill Kurtz, who was surrounded by an army of loyal montangards?  I know these comments are incoherent, that they don't make much sense, and one doesn't follow from another, but it seemed to me on second viewing that the film doesn't quite hang together, that it sort of falls apart once Willard arrives at Kurtz's camp. It's probably me being not smart enough or educated enough to get it as a work of genius, but I don't understand the title, Apocalypse Now.  Wikipedia says "apocalypse" has come to mean a catastrophe "but the Greek word apokálypsis, from which it is derived, means a revelation."  I don't get what, in the plot of the movie, was the catastrophe, or what was the revelation.  Was it Kurtz's insight about the wisdom of the NVA/VC fores who chopped off the arms of the children who had been vaccinated against polio by his American special forces?    That 'wisdom' seems to be that moral restraint is a liability in war, that the end justifies the means, and that in order to win, one must embrace or at least accept horror as a means and to use it without hesitation.  Is this the point of the movie?  Or is it a rejection of that?  How about the means the Americans used?  Assassination.  Ritual slaughter.  How about Willard's murdering the girl with the puppy in the sampan?

This was an act of murder by the hero of this film, as was his butchering by machete of Colonel Kurtz.  What are we to think of these acts?  What are we to think of the other 6 assassinatins that Captain Willard commtted before Kurtz?  What are we to think of the general, the colonel, and the CIA agent who ordered it?  Who were the heroes in this film?  Were there any?  Maybe "Chief"?  

 

4/29/2026

 Wednesday, April 29, 2026

1970 US and South Vietnamese forces launched an incursion into Cambodia

1975 US began to evacuate its citizens from Saigon in Operation Frequent Wind in response to advancing North Vietnamese forces, bringing an end to the Vietnam War

1992 Jury acquitted Los Angeles Police Department officers on charges of excessive force in the beating of Rodney King; the decision sparked massive riots in the city

2022 World's longest glass-bottomed bridge, the Bach Long (White Dragon), 632m long, opened in Moc Chau Island mountain park and resort, Vietnam

In bed at7, not due to sleepiness, but attempting to lessen the right-side back pain that had plagued me all day, got up at 6 a.m.  0610 132/74/54 120 207.2; 62/53/62/49/

Morning meds at 11 a.m., half-dose of Bisoprolol at a6:40 .m.   

Heart of Darkness.  I've read Parts I and II of the novel, and started the concluding Part III, about to meet Mr. Kurtz. . .  

I finished the book mid-afternoon.  I think it's a novelistic expression of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's famous lines from The Gulag Archipelago: 

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”

Marlowe, the narrator, is the hero/protagonist of the novel, but the central character is the enigmatic Kurtz, who appears in only a relatively few pages of the entire book.  Kurtz is the mystery man.  He is described as brilliant, poetic, good-natured, and altogether admirable early in the tale, but turns out to be a greedy, self-centered despot by the end of the book, the character who looks back on his life, shortly before his death, and utters the famous words: "The horror.  The horror."  Actually, it appears that he is not only reflecting on his own life, with its cataclysmic fall from grace, but also on European colonialism, and exploitation, of the rest of the world, using the Belgian Congo as an exemplar.  Marlowe is a bit harder to characterize.  He is nowhere near the tyrannical murderer that Kurtz became from his unconstrained life in the jungle, but it's clear he recognizes the Solzhenitsyn duality in himself and presumably all human beings.  He feels a strange loyalty to Kurtz I suppose only because he recognizes his duality, the On the Waterfront Terry Malloy quality: “You don’t understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender, I could’ve been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.”  Of courser, Kurtz wasn't 'a bum,' but rather a king, a ruler of the middle of the jungle where he lived.  The plot of the novel ends with Marlowe returning to the London, "a river-bound imperial city", a dark place on a dark river, which pretends to be civilized but whose inhabitants, at least the powerful among them, are no more civilized than the "savages" exploited by Kurtz.  He returns some letter that Kurtz had entrusted to him before he died to Kurtz's fiancée, and lies to her.  He tells her that Kurtz's last words were not "The horror.  The horror", but rather the fiancée's name.  It's an enigmatic ending to an enigmatic story.  

Among the things I enjoyed about the novel(la), in addition to Joseph Conrad's clear writing style, was it's clear relevance to the morality of imperialism, consumerism, and capitalism.  The Congo was a private property of King Leopold of Belgium from 1885 to 1908.

 In September 1908, Belgium formally annexed the Congo Free State (CFS) from King Leopold II, transitioning it into the Belgian Congo. This significant political shift occurred after years of international and domestic pressure due to widespread reports of atrocities committed under Leopold's rule, which had resulted in the deaths of an estimated ten million Congolese. Initially established as a personal fiefdom by Leopold, the CFS had been characterized by brutal exploitation and forced labor, particularly in the collection of rubber and ivory. However, following the annexation, there was a noted decrease in the most severe abuses, although colonial rule continued to exert political and economic control over the Congolese people.

Reading the novel prompted me to go to the North Shore Library and to pick up a copy of the DVD of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.  It was the first Vietnam War movie I ever watched, back in 1983, 17 years after I departed that beautiful but accursed county.  I got the 'redux' version of the film which is even longer than the 3 hour originally-released version.  Will I have the emotional stamina to watch all of it?  We'll see.

I note that today is the anniversary of our invasion of Cambodia in 1970, which I still remember, especially the reactions in the U.S. and on college campuses.  From the chapter in my memoir, 1958 - 1970:

I have mentioned that the Marquette campus was quiescent in terms of the [Vietnam] war.  There were intermittent calls for the ouster of the ROTC units and occasional antiwar letters to the editor in the Marquette Tribune, but visiting the Marquette campus in the late 1960s and the Madison campus was like being in two different countries, only one of which was involved in an unpopular war.  The only ripple on the otherwise calm sea of oblivion that was the Marquette campus came after the May 4, 1970 gunning down of four Kent State students during a campus demonstration against the American invasion of Cambodia.  

                  

More than 400 college campuses across the country were roiled by Nixon’s Cambodia incursion and the killing of the Kent State students.  At Marquette there were anonymous bomb threats that almost certainly had more to do with disrupting final examinations than with any moral or political outrage over Cambodia or Kent State.  Dean Boden asked me, a couple of other men with military backgrounds, and two former Milwaukee cops to stay at the law school from closing time on the night of the threatened bombing until 8 the following morning.  We agreed of course and of course there was no bombing.  (I still wonder what it was he thought we could do if there was a bomber afoot intent on blowing up the law school.)  

It is a curious thing to compare the radicalism and highly activist opposition to the war at Madison and the lack of it at Marquette.  The longer the war continued, the more apparent it became to most people that there was no longer any justification – if there ever had been – for the suffering resulting from the continued American intervention.  People were being killed and horribly injured by the tens of thousands.  The land was salted with unexploded bombs and other ordnance and with thousands of anti-personnel land mines.  The soil and water and people were being poisoned daily by the dioxin and other chemical defoliants sprayed by American C130s and other aircraft.  The war was a continuing atrocity carried on by the American government in the name of the American people, carried on by an overwhelmingly “Christian” people against mostly Buddhist and animist people.  Students on “secular” campuses could see the immorality of the war,  why not Catholic students?  Why did Catholic students sit on their hands while so many Protestants and Jews and ‘non-believers’ were raising clenched fists against the government?

The answer, I think, lay in the Catholic school system and the authoritarian structure of the Church, i.e., American (which was to say, Irish-) Catholic culture.  Most of the students at Marquette and Holy Cross and Notre Dame and so on came from Catholic high schools and Catholic elementary schools.  They were raised on a philosophy of “do what the good sisters tell you,” “do what the good fathers tell you,” “do what the bishops and cardinals and popes tell you.”  Whether directly or indirectly they had been schooled on the poppycock from chapter 13 of Paul’s epistle to the Romans:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.  Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.  For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.  Do you wish to have no fear of the authority?  Then do what is good.  But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain!  It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer.  Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience.  For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, busy with this very thing. 

How could the Roman authorities – and imperial warmongers of whatever era - not love this guy?   Once the Church got into bed with the emperors after the conversion of Constantine, this passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans really came into its own in terms of keeping Christians in line: obey the Roman authorities and obey your bishops and you’ll stay out of trouble and go to Heaven.  From Paul through Constantine through the Catholic grade schools and high schools to the Catholic campuses during the Vietnam War: pray, pay, and obey.  The most active war and draft resisters at Madison were not Catholic or even Christian students from Wisconsin’s cities and villages and farms.  They were Jews from the East Coast, post-Holocaust Jews who, no surprise, hardly accepted the notion that “those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.”  Neither did I, but the Catholic culture ingrained in me by the parish priests, the Sisters of Providence, the Irish Christian Brothers and the Jesuits, the culture that prepared me for Marine Corps enculturation, ensured that I would not be one to march against the war.  Alas.

 Today is also the anniversary of the beginning of the evacuation from Saigon in 1975, Saigon that was soon to become Ho Chi Minh City.  I'll never forget that day either, not only the evacuation of our embassy personnel and thousands of Vietnamese afraid for their lives as the NVA/VC army enteree the city, but the profound national shame and embarassment over the war we had foolishly begun 10 years before, only to lose so ignominiously.

The Vietnam War was the nation's longest and costliest conflict of the Cold War. Over 8.7 million Americans served in the Armed Forces during the Vietnam era from 1964 to 197.   More than 3.4 million were deployed to Southeast Asia, and approximately 2.7 million of those served in the Republic of Vietnam.  More than 58,000 of them were killed.  More than 300,000 were wounded.  Even more were injured in ways that didn't rate a Purple Heart.  Most of us left Vietnam without visible wounds, but Vietnam never left us.