8/30/2026

 Sunday, August 30, 2026

1956 Lake Pontchartrain Causeway opened in Louisiana, the longest continuous bridge in the world

2021 America ended its 20-year war in Afghanistan as the last military evacuation plane flew out of Kabul

2022 In Jackson, Mississippi, the city's largest water treatment plant failed, leaving 150,000 people without safe running water and closing schools and businesses

2025 The Colombian commerce ministry officialized a complete export ban of coal to Israel to prevent further atrocities in the Gaza Strip.

In bed at 9:05, up at 3:50; 0410 203.4 118/71/64 110 - back to bed and up at 7: 20: 0735 203.0 130/85/61 102.  The 0.4# weight loss was from another urine loss, but why the increase in BP an little decrease in heart rate is a mystery to me.  Today is the beginning of a hot spell after some terrific weather, 70/83/67, cloudy, thunderstorm last night, rain expected this afternoon.

Morning meds at 10 a.m.  Eliquis at 8:05 a.m. and p.m.

Every Effort. I wondered whether my initial excitement about Barbara's writing in the Prologue might have been premature.  In the first two chapters of the book, I noticed two things.  First, that she reports verbatim conversations that occurred almost two decades before the book was published.  I realize that this sort of making up stuff is sometimes done for literary effect and may be at least tolerable or acceptable, but I was surprised nothing was said in an Introduction or the Prologue itself about the use of this device.  

Second, her description of the CACO visit telling her that Bill was missing didn't ring true:

"It's nearly midnight. . . "  We were laughing at [an] old joke when there was a knock on the door.  There were two Marine officers standing in the dim hall light.  They looked like a photograph: unmoving, in dress blues, high-necked, white belts, red stripes down the sides of the pants, white gloves.

I raised an eyebrow at this, because it didn't comport with my experience as a CACO for north Philly and the northern suburbs in 1966-1967.  We didn't make calls late at night; our calls were made by one officer and a staff NCO (in my case, with GySgt Schmidt from Antigo, WI), and we wore our normal work uniform, Service Alpha, not Dress Blues.  Plus, officers didn't wear white belts, only enlisted men.  And the white gloves for a CACO call seems like a stretch.

I had a long exchange (I started to write 'conversation') with ChatGPT about this, and have concluded that I oughtn't to be completely sceptical about this.  The Marine Corps Personnel Manual in force from 1961-1967 didn't specify the composition of the team that made casualty calls, nor the hours when they could or could not be made, only that one member was to be an officer (unless none was available) and the calls should be made promptly and within 12 hours of the assigning unit being notified of the casualty.  Nor did it specify the uniform to be worn for the notification.  Furthermore, Bill was missing and not known to be dead or wounded.  Marines wouldn't want Barbara to learn of this from any source other than a Marine officer in person.  Also, Barbara wasn't at home in Marquette, MI, but rather at a hotel in Green Bay.  Some Marines had to track her down and locate her before the notification could be made.  Then some officer(s) from the Green Bay Marine Reserve Center would have to be dispatched to make the notification.  They could have opted to don their dress blues for the duty because of its significance.  The reference to "white belts" suggests to me either that she was confused that the Marines were officers, whereas they were senior NCOs, not likely, or that one of the team was an NCO and the other an officer, more likely.  In other words, what Barbara reported in the memoir is not implausible.

As has often happened, I was flabbergasted, gobsmacked by the process that ChatGPT went through to assist me on this quest.  I've read that it's possible, at least for some people, to distinguish AI output from human output; I can't do it.  Communicating with ChatGPT is like speaking to an incredibly well-informed human correspondent with total recall, indeed almost omniscience, almost God-like.  It does make some mistakes and sometimes needs to be corrected, but once it is informed of its mistake, it acknowledges it, corrects itself, and makes whatever adjustments are required to comport with the newly discovered information.  Literally astounding.

The Breakup.  A passage that made me pause and think, Natalie speaking:

A few years later, the American dream I'd come to love best was my new Mark Twain notion of a nation of everyday adventurers and vagboands and seeker and scoundrels and heroes and wiseacres and charlatans, all and each committ to individualism and granting leeway for all kinds of people, weirdos welcome.  She's a character!  Live and liet live! Everyone's entitled to their own opinion!  Takes all kinds! Keep [your city here] Weird!  A free mongrel nation getting freer for everybody over the long haul, created and continuously revised by its teeming mongrel population, where epeople might consider individuals unlike them strange or unattractive or mistaken or pitiful or stupid but not deem half of one's felllow Americans loathsome, dangerous, disgusting, or demonic because of their beliefs and feelings..  And just a few more years after that, when I found out how many Americans were losing faith in that and the other American dreams, my love redoubled.  As the country started cracking up, I felt caught in a tragic love triangle: the two Americas hating each other, me still loving them both.

Pages 276 and 277.  The above passage is simply a reflection on where we were (perhaps), where we are, and where we are headed (perhaps) and not particularly reflective of what I'm about to write, but I'm impressed with the prodigious amount of learning and work that went into the writing of this novel.  Kurt Andersen is a very impressive guy.   I suspect that he may have written this work not so much for the income it might produce (though that probably was a not-insignificant motivation), but more to sort out his own thinking about what a 21st century separation or breakup of the United States would look like, how it could be worked out, especially with the urban/non-urban divide in our country.    We see it in Wisconsin with Madison and Milwaukee being so Democratic in orientation, and most of the rest of the state being so Republican.  We see it vividly in Milwaukee with the Democratic city and county being surrounded by the staunchly Republican WOW counties: Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington.  In the novel, Natalie's Tennessee sees Nashville/Davidson County stay with the U.S., while the rural counties all become part of the Free American Republic.  I don't know yet what happens with Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga, but Nashville becomes like West Berlin before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany.  Nonetheless, the book is a clear reminder of where we are now, how deeply divided we are between the Reds and the Blues, not in all jurisdictions, but in most.    Republicans take delight in color maps that show the vast, widespread regions of the nation that are Red, and the dinky Blue areas.  Those dinky blue areas, however, represent most of the nation's cities, where vast amounts of wealth and human capital are centered.

I read several reviews of the book, and I'm glad I did.  I found considerable agreement with my judgment that the first half of the book is a bit of a long, hard, slog and that the book would have been a better and easier read if it weren't so long, at well over 500 pages - like East of Eden and Lonesome Dove, but not as engaging (at least in the first half) as either of those magna opera. (Thank you, Brother Birmingham, for my 4 years of high school Latin.😊).  Kurt Andersen is a good storyteller, but he's no John Steinbeck or Larry McMurtry.

8/29/2026

 Saturday, August 29, 2026

1833 Britain's first Factory Act became law to regulate the labor of children and young persons in the mills and factories of the United Kingdom

1883 The first Carnegie library, financed by industrialist Andrew Carnegie, opened in Dunfermline, Scotland, as the first of 2,509 libraries built around the world

1943 Danish Navy scuttled its warships so as not to be taken by Germany

1945 WWII: US General MacArthur was amed Supreme Commander of Allied Powers in Japan

1957 Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond ended the longest-ever solo filibuster after 24 hours and 18 minutes, speaking against the Civil Rights Act

2005 Hurricane Katrina made its second and third landfalls as a Category 3 hurricane, devastating much of the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle, killing more than 1,836 people and causing over $115 billion in damage

2013 Actor Gary Sinise was named an honorary Marine by the Commandant of the Marine Corps

In bed at 9, and up at 5:05; 0525 203.4 109/65/65 98; 62/78/62, rain expected this afternoon.

Morning meds at 7:30 a.m.  Eliquis at 6 a.m and p.m.

Alex Pretti, 37, and Renee Nicole Good, 37.  I started to write as a header to this entry, How Good Citizens Grow to Hate Their Government, Not Their Country, But Its Government.  I was stirred to anger again when I watched reports of Alex Pretti's family protesting that 7 months have elapsed and nothing has been done by the federal government to bring those responsible for his murder to justice, or any kind of accountability.  The same is true for Renee Good.  Pretti's killing has become the more persistently troubling of the two, perhaps because he was a VA ICU nurse involved in an act of kindness towards a fellow Minnesotan when he was gunned down, but Good, the mother of three and a good citizen, needs to be remembered and mourned , too. 

Both were shot dead on the streets of their city by federal ICE agents who had no reason to unholster their weapons and shoot them.   The independent autopsy commissioned by Renee Good's family found three gunshot paths. One bullet struck her left forearm, another passed through her right breast, and the fatal shot entered the left side of her head near the temple and exited the right side of her head. The arm and breast wounds were described as not immediately life-threatening.

Regarding Alex Pretti, the Hennepin County medical examiner's publicly released finding says only that he died of “multiple gunshot wounds” and classified the death as a homicide; it does not publicly itemize the wounds. However, a physician who examined Pretti at the scene reported seeing at least three gunshot wounds in his back, as well as one wound in his upper-left chest and a possible wound to his neck.      

How is it possible that there has been no public accounting for these homicides by our government?  The answer is that our government has been under the control of Donald Trump and his myrmidons at the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice since January 20th, 2025.  It's possible because of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, Kristi Noem and Markwayne Mullin. 

I think back to Wayne LaPierre's notorious fund-raising letter for the NRA in 1995 attacking federal law enforcement agencies and the recently-enacted ban on automatic rifles.  It warned NRA members about: “jack-booted government thugs, wearing black, armed to the teeth” who, the letter said, could “break down a door, open fire with an automatic weapon, and kill or maim law-abiding citizens.”  He also referred to federal agents wearing “Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms.”  Who does this language remind us of?  The big difference?  Back then, LaPierre was attacking the Clinton Administration, Janet Reno, and the ATF, and the nation was reeling from Waco and Ruby Ridge, though a few days after the letter was distributed, the Oklahoma City bombing of the Murragh federal office building occurred.

 Thinking of these murders and their cover-ups while reading Kurt Andersen's The Breakup is a painful and frightening experience, reminding me of where our nation seems to be heading, and why.  

LTMW as I parted the curains this morning, I looked out on half a dozen healthy-looking tom turkeys enjoying some breakfast under our bird feeders and elsewhere on our front lawn.  Some are showing signs of moulting, others aren't.  They are mighty strong looking creatures, with nasty spurs on their legs.  I say 'half a dozen' but they were part of a larger posse of younger and more mature birds, some looking pretty feisty, like that big tom the other day, doing his male dominance strutting circles around the one next to him.  Such interesting creatures, with such interesting phyical features and behaviors.  Interesting too to see them competing with our chipmunks, squirrels, bunnies, and occasioally whitetail deer for the sunflower, safflower, and millet seeds under our feeds.

Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran - Trump's version of a "forever war."  Peter Baker has an opinion piece in this morning's New York Times, For Trump, the Iran War Is Stuck Between Combat and Genuine Peace.

President Trump the other day posted a heroic image of himself backed by an aircraft carrier, warplanes and American flags. In the lower left corner was former President George W. Bush and a sign, “Mission Not Accomplished 2001-2021.” In the other corner was a sign referencing himself saying “Mission Accomplished 2026.  Except that it is not. Mr. Trump’s war in Iran, which hit the six-month mark on Friday, is anything but accomplished. Half a year in, the conflict has deteriorated into a quagmire of the president’s own making with no clear goals, no obvious strategy and no end in sight. Mr. Trump, who came to power running against Mr. Bush’s “forever wars,” has staked his presidency on his own version.

For Mr. Trump, it may be the worst of both worlds. He finds himself stuck in a maddening purgatory between full-fledged combat and genuine peace. He is reluctant to resume an all-out bombardment despite his thunderous threats, yet has been unable so far to broker an agreement to end the war on satisfactory terms. He has no victory to take credit for, yet is paying the political price in terms of the toll on the American economy and his party’s chances in the fall elections.

This sort of in-between stasis could in theory extend for a long time, a far cry from the four-to-six-week lightning strike that Mr. Trump predicted when he ordered Operation Epic Fury at the end of February. With no breakthrough in sight, both sides are testing the other’s staying power . . .  

How many outrageously expensive, debilitating, devastating strategic losses must our nation endure before we realize that something has been wrong in post-WWII America for decades., and is only getting worse? Should I have started my list with Korea?  Was it a strategic win in the sense that we repelled a communist invasion from the North and South Korea has thrived, free from dictatorial rule by North Korean communists?  Or was it a strategic loss in the sense that there has never been a peace treaty between the two Koreas, and about 2,200,000 American troops have been stationed south of the DMZ over the 73 years since the truce was signed, almost all on "unaccompanied tours", i.e., without their families?  If this was a big victory, it was a Pyrrhic one.  Of course, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq were even worse outcomes.  What will we say down the road about this war with Iran?

Every Effort.  I started reading Barbara Mullen Keenan's book about her experiences after her husband Bill was shot down over Laos.  I bought a used copy of the out-of-print book for $6 from Abe Books.  It was published 40 years ago, and 20 years after "Moon" was shot down.  Reading it has been a bit of an emotional trip already, though I'm not yet through with the first chapter.  She dedicated the book to Bill, and wrote in her "Acknowledgments," that it was intended as a tribute to all who shared in the experience of our long war in Southeast Asia.  

Reading her Prologue, I thought to myself that the Prologue alone was worth more than the price I paid for the book, though the value of the $6 and the value of the book and the memories associated with it are incommensuable.  She was a patriotic, volunteer worker for the Voice of American, stationed in Thailand, when she first met Bill in Japan during one of his overseas tours.  They were two young American patriots, and she started out her Prologue thus:

There was no indication during m growing-up years in Michigan that I would one day publicly oppose the President of the United States.  In fact, I remember the day I first leasrned about patriotism in grammar school.  Lydia Thompson, my third grade teacher, . . . stood in front of us and smiled.  "Today," she said, " We're going to talk about patriotism." . . .[She related the story of Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 in his single-engine airplane, The Spirit of St. Louis.].  Finally she got to the point.  "You are the luckiest children in the world," she said.  . . "You are American," she announced.  "God has blessed us all.  Everyone in the world wishes he were American.  And we are the fortunate ones.  Honor this privilege, children.  Never take it for granted."

There was much truth in what her third grade teacher told her class, then in the 1940s and 1950s when Barbara was a schoolgirl, and even now.  Many people all over the world envy Americans, our standard of living, and form of government, our relative freedom.  That we have so many people wanting to immigrate here can be no surprise.  Ditto that we have so relatively few people as expats.  And, when Barbara, and Bill, and I were young, the state of mind was commonplace that America was the greatest country in the world, and the exemplar of national goodness to the rest of the world.  Thus, she wrote of her time in the VOA:

In the late 1950s we were zealous as missionaries.  There was a sense of urgency and camaradery among those of us representing America overseas.  We wee battling against time and the spreading evil of communism in order to bring the hope of democracy to backward countries.  We were teachers of the underdeveloped: if everyone on earth couldn't be Americans, they could be like Americans.

I daresay that was the feeling of most Americans at the start of the Vietnam War, not of all, but of most. I recall the sign someone had posted above the doorway of the hooch I lived in after I graduated from living in my strongback tent in DaNang: Better Dead Than Red.  And I recall that on July 28, 1965, when Bill Mullen and I were serving in Vietnam, Johnson announced the truly consequential escalation—raising American forces from about 75,000 to 125,000, with more to follow, and more than doubling monthly draft calls. He told Americans and the world:  "We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate, but there is no one else.”  Time Magazine's January 7, 1966 Man of the Year issue, was devoted to General William Westmoreland and the escalating Vietnam War, was titled “The Guardians at the Gate,” but by the date of that issue of Time, many of us in Vietnam sensed that 'this is not going to end well."  And of course, for Bill and Barbara Mullen and their two sons, and for America, it didn't.  She ended her Prologue with this:

I thought about all this on an October afternoon in 1971 as I walked back and forth in front of the White House shifting my picket sign from one shoulder to the other.  The vision of Lydia Thompson loomed before me, her one-time smile lighting up her face.  "God bless us.  We are American."

Powerful writing about powerful experiences.   I'm looking forward, though a bit apprehensively, to reading the body of her book.

A Year Ago Today I wrote: How fortunate I am to have grown old with Geri.  We married in our 40s, energetic, active, strong, knowing nothing of what lay ahead, including some hard times that we had to get through, and now we are in our 80s, an elderly couple, old people.  We have partnered through 38 years, our children are in their 50s, and the oldest grandchild is now off to college.  We are in our 4th home, not counting Lake Mills and Seattle, each one a treasure. We were able to provide a home to my Dad for a few years and to Andy, Anh, and Peter when he was a toddler.  'O fortunati, quorum iam moenia surgunt!' Aeneas ait, et fastigia suspicit urbis. Vergil, Aeneid, I: 437-438.  I remember Brother Birmingham in our Latin 4 class, emphasizing these lines,  "O you fortunate ones, whose walls are rising," referring to the Carthaginians who had a home while Aeneas had none.  I not only had these lovely homes, but also Geri to share them with.  O fortunatus!  Indeed.

Among men aged 65 and older, about 10% are widowed; among women, the figure is about 30%.  Among those in their 80s, the figures are, of course, much higher.  O fortunati!

 

 

 

 

8/28/2026

Friday, August 28. 2026

1979 Lord Mountbatten was killed along with three companions, two of them children, by the IRA when his boat was blown up near Sligo, Ireland

2008 Barack Obama became the first African-American to be nominated by a major political party for President of the United States

2025  Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese announced the closure of the Australian embassy in Tehran, the expulsion of Iranian ambassadors from Australia, and designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization after an Australian Security Intelligence Organisation investigation links the IRGC to at least two antisemitic attacks, including the 2024 Melbourne synagogue attack and an arson attack on a kosher restaurant.

In bed at 9:30, up at 5:15; 0530 203.8 112/69/62 103; 60/80/60 sunny

Morning meds at 9:10 a.m.  Entresto at 6:40 a.m. and 7:30 p.m.

Today is Anh Hoang Clausen's 48th birthday.  Anh was born in 1978, during Jimmy Carter's presidency.  She was the last and only child of De and Bac Tuyet Hoang, born in the U.S.,  her brother and sisters all having been born in Vietnam.  De (and perhaps Bac Tuyet) was born in what became North Vietnam and fled to South Vietnam after the 1954 Geneva Accords split the country in two.  He was a devout, practicing Roman Catholic his entire life, and only in South Vietnam could he practice his religion.  He settled in Da Nang and was a high-ranking police officer there when I was stationed at the huge airbase outside the city for 8 months.  He and Bac Tuyet had 6 children there: Hung, Mai, Truc, Lan, Vung, and Vi.  De fled with his entire family after the Communist victory in 1975, going first by boat to a refugee camp in Thailand, then to a resettlement camp at Camp Pendleton, CA, and then to Appleton, WI, where they were sponsored by St. Joseph's Catholic Parish.  Anh was born in Appleton.  I am so thankful that Andy's marriage to Anh made me a shirttail member of the Hoang mishpucha.  De and Bac Tuyet are heroes of mine, exemplars of courage, resilience, and how to lead a good, purposeful, meaningful life, despite what, for most of us, would be insuperable challenges.  Their children, including Anh, have inherited their virtues, and her children, my grandchildren, will strive to emulate De's and Bac Tuyet's purposefulness, courage, and goodness.  Happy Birthday and thank you, Anh, for your purposefulness, courage, and goodness and for all the blessings you have brought into my life.

Today is also my cousin Doug's birthday, age 94.  We haven't spoken since the last time I saw him in Florida, which was either around the family get-together for my Dad's 80th birthday in 2000, or when Kitty, Geri, and I gathered to move my Dad from his house in North Port to our house in Milwaukee and Kitty's house in Phoenix, in 2002.  Doug has been burdened throughout his life with bad karma.  He was a bedwetter and difficult even as a child, a thrower of temper tantrums, and somehow always different from his brother Jim, his sister Christine, and from his close cousins, Kitty and me.  I was probably the closest to him during childhood since we were almost exactly one year apart in ages.  As we grew old, we grew apart, following very different paths.  I finished high school, went on to college, and 4 years in the Marines; Dough dropped out of De La Salle High School to join the Navy (as his brother Jim had), got in trouble in the Navy, spent time in the brig, and eventually got the boot.  He spent time in a penitentiary in California, though this was never spoken of within the family.  He got himself arrested during the family get-together for my Dad's 80th birthday, and his brother Jim & I had to bail him out of the Sarasota County Jail.  His life reminds me of lines from Robert Frost's poem, The Death of the Hired Man:

“Poor Silas, so concerned for other folk,

And nothing to look backward to with pride,

And nothing to look forward to with hope,

So now and never any different.”

and of William Blake's lines from Auguries of Innocence:

Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born.

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night.

I have so many memories of growing up with Dough, as best buddies, so very alike and so very many ways, yet our lives took such divergent paths.  Was it because he was a bad guy and I was a good guy?  Not hardly, as we used to oxymoronically say.  Chromosomes, genes, biochemistry, circumstances, and simple luck all played a role, I'm sure.  I'm drawn back, as I so often am, to the perplexing issue of free will vs. determinism, to the question of how responsible we really are for who and what we are.  

The Breakup by Kurt Andersen.  I'm still struggling with whether to continue pass the midpoint of this novel.  I started looking for reviews of the book and found this current review in the New York Times: 

Our docents through this new American life are a family called the Zimbalists, whose own lines of fracture mirror the nation’s, as they are very much aware. In 2044, the family moved from Tennessee to San Francisco so that Asher Zimbalist could take a job running a hazily defined “Institute” on behalf of a person who may be that most elusive of species, the altruistic billionaire. But Asher’s wife, Natalie, couldn’t bear the culture shock. She’s a poet, of all things, though one who has earned some cultural infamy as a sort of plainspoken, Lionel Shriver-coded abuser of liberal pieties; six months ago, she moved back to Tennessee.

So have they broken up for good? Is politics to blame? They themselves aren’t sure (nor are their two children), and now their hand is forced by the imminence of a long-planned tour of prospective colleges for their younger child, Logan. This tour will take them through the newly reconfigured heartland of America.

It’s a good setup. What’s puzzling is that more than 300 pages of the novel go by before the engine of the Zimbalist family car, and thus of the novel’s plot, finally turns over, and the much-touted road trip begins. Before that comes a vast and dramatically static stretch of what speculative-fiction circles often call “world-building” — a full, inventive, elaborately detailed portrait of Andersen’s vision of the next 19 years of American history. It’s fun to read, 

Until it becomes simply tedious.  I have to put a book aside when I'm this far into it, but I'm still struggling.

They also serve who only stand and wait.  These are lines from John Milton's Sonnet XIX, On his blindness. "When I consider how my light is spent."   I am reminded of them because I received in today's mail Barbara Mullen Keenan's memoir, Every Effort.  Barbara was the wife of my friends in MWHG-1 in DaNang, Bill "Moon" Mullen.  Moon was shot down over Laos attacking forces on the Ho Chi Minh Trail on April 28, 1966, by which time I had been transferred up to MACS-6 on Okinawa.  We learned of it only by scuttlebutt, but reliable scuttlebutt.  He was 31 years old and his remains have never been recovered.  He left back in Massachusetts where he was from his wife Barbara and two sons. Barbara wrote Every Effort about her harrowing experiences after receving the telegram informing her that he was missing.  I wrote about this more than 20 years ago in my memoir, but learned only recently where I could get a copy of Barbara's book, which arrived today.  I have frequently written, both here and on FaceBook about the suffering of the loved ones of those of us who have served in the military, the parents, spouses, children, siblings and others.  The KIA, WIA, and MIA statistics are always understated because they never list the loved ones who are hurt when a serviceman or woman is a casualty.  I learned this most intimately and intensely when I served as a CACO for north Philadelphia when I returned from Vietnam myself.  The book came with a photo of Barbara.

From my memoir: At the beginning of May, the war became more personal to those of us who had come to Camp Schwab from the wing headquarters in DaNang.  We received news that our friend Bill “Moon” Mullen had been shot down over Laos.  The American government refused to admit that we were conducting operations in Laos but we all knew it.  The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran through Laos and our aircraft regularly bombed it.  On April 29th, 1966, Moon flew an A4E to a bombing mission in the most heavily defended area of the trail, the area around the Mia Gia Pass.  His plane was the last in the formation.  It was hit by anti-aircraft fire as he pulled away from the target.  The plane went down, but the other pilots picked up radio beeper signals from the ground where his plane went down.  The circling pilots radioed instruction to him, which he complied with, indicating he had ejected safely.  Soon, the radio on the ground was still active, but instructions from the air were not being followed.  It appeared Moon had died or lost consciousness or had been captured or killed.  He was never found.  It was never learned whether he had been captured or killed or died from injuries from the anti-aircraft fire or the ejection.  The 1973 Paris treaty provided for return of POWs held by the VC and by North Vietnam, but not those held by Laotian communists.    In 1994, I ran my fingers over his name on the Vietnam Wall in Washington.  He is still listed as among the ‘missing.’

Moon Mullen was well liked and highly respected by all of us in the headquarters squadron in DaNang.  He regularly flew missions with his old A4 squadron based in Chu Lai though he was assigned to the Intelligence section of Wing headquarters.  Unlike some others, he never looked down his nose on those of us who were not aviators.  He was a captain and a few years older than most of us.  He had just turned 31 when he was shot down; most of us were first lieutenants in our mid 20s.  When we could talk him into it, ‘by popular demand,’ Moon would stand up next to the bar or his table at the officers’ club and sing, always the same song – 

Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling

     From glen to glen, and down the mountain side.

The summer’s gone, and all the roses falling,

     It’s you, it’s you must go and I must bide.

But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow,

     Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow,

It’s I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow,—

     Oh, Danny boy, O Danny boy, I love you so! 

But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying,

     If I am dead, as dead I well may be,

Ye’ll come and find the place where I am lying,

     And kneel and say an Avè there for me.

And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me,

      And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be,

For you will bend and tell me that you love me,

      And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me! 

When Moon sang Danny Boy, we all shut up.  The juke box would be turned down or unplugged and the Righteous Brothers, Simon and Garfunkel, and the Mamas and Papas would give way to Moon Mullen, a capella.

I suspect most, perhaps all of us thought Moon was probably dead; I did.  We may have even hoped that he was dead rather than living as a captive in a cave in a mountain in Laos or sick and abused in a jungle prison.  I don’t know what we thought because we did not talk about it.  We didn’t talk about it, but we all thought about it, about him.  We thought of him as we drank each night at the officers’ club.  We thought of him as we watched the gung ho grunts go through their training before heading south, some to die, some to lose limbs, some perhaps to be among the missing, most to return alive but messed up in their heads and hearts to one degree or another.  I think of Moon every time I hear Danny Boy.  For many years, I hated to hear the song.  My eyes would start burning when I heard it, especially the lyrics If I am dead, as dead I well may be, Ye’ll come and find the place where I am lying . . .”  It would take me a while to ‘come back’ after hearing it, and I never sang it, though it had been one of my favorites before May, 1966.

I think Moon Mullen was for us emblematic of the ambiguous character of the war itself.  He was neither alive nor dead, just ‘missing.’  He went down in a country (of sorts) where our government wouldn’t even admit we were fighting, though every Tom, Dick and Harry knew we were.   The terrain he was bombing was not land that we would ever in any sense ‘take’ or ‘capture’ or ‘seize’ or ‘hold.’  It would be used for years as a principal line of communication and logistics between North Vietnam and forces in the south, and for years pilots would fly missions trying to slow the flow of men and materials southward and for years pilots would be shot down over that land.  Indeed, when Nixon’s so-called ‘peace with honor’ was negotiated in Paris in 1973, there was no written agreement for the identification and repatriation or return of the bodies of pilots shot down over Laos.  The treaty only bound “the parties hereof and the signatories hereto,” which did not include the government of Laos which was not ‘officially’ involved in the war.  What happened to Moon Mullen and his family,  the long, inconclusive waiting, the deceptions, the ultimate loss, was a microcosm of what was happening to American, and to Vietnam.  I believe we knew that as we poisoned ourselves at the club each night and as we looked on those infantry Marines so intensely preparing for what awaited them in Vietnam.  More Danny Boys, more Moons.

GOING AFTER CACCIATO

Tim O’Brien

They did not know even the simple things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice.  They did not know the feeling of taking a place and keeping it, securing a village and then raising the flag and calling it a victory.  No sense of order or momentum.  No front, no rear, no trenches laid out in neat parallels.  No Patton rushing for the Rhine, no beachheads to storm and win and hold for the duration.  They did not have targets.  They did not have a cause.  They did not know if it was a war of ideology or economics or hegemony or spite.  On a given day, they did not know where they were in Quang Ngai, or how being there might influence larger outcomes.  They did not know the names of most villages.  They did not know what villages were critical.  They did not know strategies.  They did not know the terms of the war, its architecture, the rules of fair play.  When they took prisoners, which was rare, they did not know the questions to ask, whether to release a suspect or beat on him.  They did not know how to feel.  Whether, when seeing a dead Vietnamese, to be happy or sad or relieved; whether, in times of quiet, to be apprehensive or content; whether to engage the enemy or elude him.  They did not know how to feel when they saw villages burning.  Revenge?  Loss?  Peace of mind or anguish?  They did not know.  They knew the old myths about Quang Ngai – tales passed down from old timer to newcomer – but they did not know which stories to believe.  Magic, mystery, ghosts and incense, whispers in the dark, strange tongues and strange smells, uncertainties never articulated in war stories, emotion squandered on ignorance.  They did not know good from evil.

Around the time I found out about Moon, I received orders back to the States, to I&I (Inspector-Instructor) duty with a reserve unit near Philadelphia.  I would leave Okinawa on June 10, 1966, a little less than a year after I had arrived at Iwakuni.  The normal Far East tour was 13 months; I was going home a month early because they needed me at my next duty station.  If Moon Mullen had had the same good fortune, he would not have been on his mission over Laos on April 29th.  He was shot down only two weeks before the date on which he was to return to the States.  I am reminded of John Kennedy’s wisdom:

There is always inequity in life.  Some men are killed in war and some men are wounded, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco.  It’s very hard in military or personal life to assure complete equality.  Life is unfair.

I was finally going home, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.  It had been a year since I had seen your mother and her family and my family.  I had spent a year in the company of men, not just men, but Marines.  I had lived in a tent, a ‘tin hut’ and BOQs and spent just about every night I wasn’t working at an officers’ club smoking and drinking and gambling and week by week becoming more skeptical of the likelihood of achieving success in our Grand Mission and more contemptuous of our government.  I hadn’t been engaged in close combat, like the grunts and the pilots, but there was no pretending that we were not engaged in the death and destruction business.  I was not a different person from the one who had left a year before, but I was surely a changed person.  I was sadder inside and deeply cynical about our government, its truthfulness and its competence, its goodwill and its good faith.  I had no faith in the war or in our government or in the government of South Vietnam, even in the middle of 1966.  I still had a deep sense of identification with the Marine Corps, or perhaps more accurately, with Marines, which I have even to this day (‘Once a Marine, always a Marine’ and all that), but I increasingly despaired that any good would come from all the killing.  And, of course, I had just learned that Moon Mullen was (or was not) dead.  I was not ebullient as I left Camp Schwab to return to the States – unsettled and anxious would better describe how I felt.

 The Odyssey.  I went up to the North Shore Cinema this afternoon to watch this flick, my first visit to a theater in a year of more.  The last one I saw was Oppenheimer, another magnum opus.  The movie is almost 3 hours long, but I only stayed for the first 90 minutes or so.   There is some pretty stunning cinematography in it, but the plot, notwithstanding its nature as a Homeric classic, and the dialogue just weren't my cup of tea.  On top of that, I found it impossible to understand some of the dialogue, indeed all of the dialogue spoken by the women in the cast.  I did enjoy the shipboard scenes, but that was about all. 

8/27/2026

 Thursday, August 27, 2026

1979 Lord Mountbatten was killed along with three companions, two of them children, by the IRA when his boat was blown up near Sligo, Ireland

2008 Barack Obama became the first African-American to be nominated by a major political party for President of the United States

2025 Danish foreign minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen summoned the U.S. chargé d'affaires in Copenhagen after individuals linked to Donald Trump conducted covert influence activities in Greenland.

2025. Two people were killed, an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old, and 30 more injured, including at least four critically, in a mass shooting at the Annunciation Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States in an alleged anti-Catholic hate crime. The suspect died by suicide at the scene

In bed at 9:30, up at 6.15; 0630 116/75/64 116 204.0;  63/76/63, mostly sunny day ahead,  

Morning meds at 7:40 a.m.  Entresto at 6:30 a.m. and p.m.

Good news, very bad news.  I enjoyed a full night's sleep last night, but I missed my 8 a.m. VA appointment for an echocardiogram.  I thought it was at 11:30.  I cannot rely on my memory. F word.  This isn't the first recent example of this.  These mental lapses worry and depress me.  I seem to have slowed down, both mentally and physically lately.  Is this possible, considering how slow-witted and slow-gaited I've been for so long? Am I imagining this, or is the downhill slope growing steeper?  Why should this be a surprise?  Old age, a privilege, a blessing, and a curse.

LTMW, at 7:45 this morning, I saw two male wild turkeys, one apparently much larger than the other, with a very long and very red snood hanging down over his bill or beak, and his tail feathers spread and looking ragged.  The larger bird continually circled the smaller one as the smaller one calmly filled up on birdseed.  After a few minutes of strutting, the larger bird assumed its normal size.  I was witnessing male dominance behavior by what appeared to be the larger bird.  When the smaller bird didn't challenge him, he settled down, his snood shrank, tail feathers resumed their normal positions, and body feathers unpuffed.  Quite a show!  The raggedness of the tail feathers is because we are in the moulting season.  A few minutes later, a few additional toms arrived on our lawn, for a total of six.

The Breakup.     I start the day at page 238, 44% through the novel, hoping to pass the midpoint today.  The story has alerted me to another worry about our new world: the use of drones by terrorist groups. Kurt Andersen has drones used lethally and effectively against pro-union American civilian targets in the "disunion" or secessionist war in the 2030s.  I think again this morning of why this novel seems so difficult for me to read: it's all about breakup or death, of the nation and of a marriage. . . By 3, I've reached the midpoint of the novel, page 272,  and am considering quitting.  It's getting truly tedious, too clever by half.

Facebook & Instagram.  Meta's $17 billion settlement is surprisingly small relative to the company.  Meta is currently valued at roughly $1.4–$1.45 trillion.  So: $17 billion ÷ $1.45 trillion ≈ 1.17%.  In other words, the settlement represents only about 1.2% of Meta's market value.

Another revealing comparison is earnings. Meta earned about $60.5 billion in 2025, so $17 billion is roughly 28% of one year's profit.

And even that overstates the immediate financial burden. The settlement is payable over 10 years, and roughly $5.3 billion is conditional on actions taken by TikTok and YouTube. Reuters describes the financial effect on Meta as quite manageable.

So although $17 billion sounds enormous—and is historically an enormous corporate settlement—it is not remotely an existential financial penalty for Meta.

Bill Gates Warns A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit: In an hourlong interview, he said his industry was downplaying the risks, which he believes include mass unemployment and bioterrorism.  NYTimes, August 26, 2027 by Karen Weise

Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, is loudly warning that artificial intelligence poses a grave threat to jobs and human life, and that urgently addressing the risks should be “the world’s top priority.”  In an hourlong interview with The New York Times last week, Mr. Gates said the tech industry was knowingly downplaying those threats because there was too much money on the line.

“In private, people who understand how good this stuff is, and how much better it’s getting, they’re very worried,” he said. But few tech executives, Mr. Gates said, are willing to publicly admit that. “They’re now saying to each other: ‘Hey, man, don’t say that. It’s bad for us — the next trillion dollars we’re trying to raise.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Gates published a nearly 6,000-word essay on his personal website laying out his concerns about A.I. and offering solutions, such as new taxes and bans. He said he was motivated to speak now because recent improvements in A.I. had far surpassed his expectations and because the industry had ignored technology milestones — like A.I.’s escaping the control of its creators or making recipes for bioweapons — that it once said would warrant more caution.

I think of Gates' warnings about AI along with Kurt Anderson's warning about cheap drones and AI in the hands of terrorists, domestic and otherwise, and shudder.   I think of these warnings on the day we learned that Ratko Mladic, "the butcher of Bosnia," has died in the hospital ward of the United Nations Detention Unit in Scheveningen, The Hague, Netherlands. He had been in deteriorating health for years and had suffered several strokes.  Mladić had been held there since 2011, after spending nearly 16 years as a fugitive. In 2017, the UN war-crimes tribunal sentenced him to life imprisonment for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, most notably for directing the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys and for his role in the siege of Sarajevo. His conviction and life sentence were upheld in 2021.  I think of Mladic, Slobodan Milosovic, Serbia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, because I remember the civil war(s) that led to and followed the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s,  If the US were to breakup, as Kurt Andersen imagines, would we see the same kind of ruthless killings as were seen in Yugoslavia, or could it be accomplished as the Czechs and the Slovaks accomplished their separations in 1993, almost bloodlessly.  We're may not find out during my dwindling lifetime, but I fear for my children and grandchildren.

My extraordinary, incredible, dutiful and beautiful, unbelievable wife of the last 40 years, 82 and 1/2 years old, working with her nearby spade and a handsaw, digging up for transplant, and separating, a giant hosta plant in the garden behind our house.  Yesterday, we drove up to Home Depot where she purchased another 10 bags of mulch to spread around her various gardens, unloading them from my Volvo herself.  Wonder Woman! My hero, inspiration, and raison d’être.  She tops my gratitude list today (and every day.)

Trump has issued an executive order renaming Lake Ontario Lake America.  He adds this ridiculous action to his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America.  In the presser following the signing of the EO, he complained again of Canada having "ripped us off" for decades, even though our trade relations have been entirely governed by bilateral treaties, including one that he negotiated and called the USMCA.   Trump praised the USMCA extraordinarily lavishly, and repeatedly. This wasn't a case of his merely signing it and moving on. He presented replacing NAFTA with USMCA as one of the signature accomplishments of his first term.

When announcing the agreement on October 1, 2018, Trump called it “the most important trade deal we’ve ever made by far” and said it was “a brand new deal” based on “fairness and reciprocity.”

In September 2019, he called it “a great trade deal — the greatest we’ve ever had,” adding that it was “phenomenal for farmers,” good for manufacturers, and “good for everybody.”

In Milwaukee in July 2019, he described USMCA as “the most modern, cutting-edge trade agreement in history,” with “the strongest protections for the American worker ever put in any trade agreement.”

In December 2019, he went further and called it “the greatest trade deal of them all.”

At the January 2020 signing ceremony, his administration characterized it as “the largest, fairest, most balanced, and modern trade agreement ever achieved.”

After it took effect, Trump continued praising it, saying in September 2020: “We have a great trade deal right now.”

He didn't merely accept USMCA reluctantly: he personally claimed ownership of it, repeatedly portrayed it as superior to NAFTA, and at times literally called it the greatest trade agreement ever made.  Now he complains that Canada has been ripping us off for decades.  Unbelievable.  We are led by a wicked lunatic.

While tidying up my desk this afternoon, I came upon two treasures, one the only photo that exists of my maternal grandmother, Catherine O'Shea Healy, and my official photo taken when I was promoted to captain in the Marines.  In the ancient photo, Catherine is the beautiful young woman on the left, alas, doomed to die young and leave my mother motherless at age 6.  My early promotion to the rank of captain in 1966 after only slightly more than 3 years as a lieutenant was due to the immense buildup of forces once the invasion of Vietnam and commitment to fight there were practically irreversible.  I noted my tie appropriately boosted by a Spiffy.  Ah, memories of long ago.

8/26/2025

 Wednesday, August 26, 2026

2018 Archbishop Carlo Vigano, former US Vatican Ambassador, claimed Pope Francis knew of and ignored sex abuse allegations against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick

2021 Two bomb blasts from suicide bombers at Kabul Airport, Afghanistan, killed at least 60 civilians and 13 US soldiers amid efforts to evacuate citizens out of the country

2025. 1 person was killed, 6  others wounded in a mass shooting near Interstate 35 in Minneapolis

In bed at 9:10, up at 5:1; 0530 203.2 115/70/69 XXX; 66/79/66. Another beautiful, sunny day ahead, but the sun rose at 6:10, and at 6:30 it's still a little dark outside because of cloud cover over Lake Michigan.  Nonetheless, the birds, chipmunks, and squirrels are arriving in numbers for breakfast at the Clausen Cafe.

Morning meds at 8 a.m. and Entresto at 6:25 a.m. and 6:20 p.m.

The Breakup.  I'm up to page 165, or 30% through the book, and beginning to think I may finish it, that I'm not doing a close reading of all of it, especially portions devoted to the thoughts of a tortoise.  These lines on pages 16-161 sure caught my attention last night:

The reaction in America to the Vietnam War and to civil rights blew open the fissures that grew into the chasm that finally produced our second civil war, the twist-ending callback to the first..  I saw it all coming.  All the obvious big things in Trump's second term . . .  When I visited [the Lincoln Memorial] as a kid, I didn't read the whole Second Inaugural Address on the wall next to giant Lincoln, which he'd delivered at the Capitol five weeks before the war ended and six weeks before one of the performative losers killed him.  I do remember searching for the error carved in stone - his "high hope for the eufure," and thinking then, Wow, here I am in the future.  This time I read every word . . . "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds."      

The lines brought back memories from sometime in the 1980s of my former student Bob Berman, then an attorney in the Justice Department's Voting Rights division, picking me up at National Airport.  I was there with Tom Hooper of Channel 6 to study a consumer law clinic at George Washington University Law School, operated as a partnership between the law school and a local DC television station.  Bob took us to the Lincoln Memorial at night, when we were the only people there, and I remember standing next to the huge statue of Lincoln, contemplating the iconic words of his Second Inaugural engraved on one of the walls.  One of my warmest memories.  Bob Berman left the DOJ early in the George W. Bush administration, when Bush's people eviscerated the Voting Rights division, transferring Bob and the other highly experienced voting rights litigators to divisions totally alien to their interests, experience, and expertise.  Sound familiar, Pam Bondi?

I am enjoying The Breaksup more as I get into it.  I like the principal characters, Asher Zimbalist and Natalie Frederick.  He's an economist and a scientist; she's a poet.  Perhaps not surprisingly, I like her character better than his, though he's not unlikeable.  In one chapter I read early today, Natalie cited the Moloch section of Alan Ginsberg's 1955 poem Howl as anticipating Artificial Intelligence:

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!  Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

I say, truthfully, that I'm increasingly enjoying this novel, but I don't mean to diminish its brutal aspect, which is that it ruthlessly chronicles what a sick, deeply divided society we are living in today.  It is set in 1945 America, and refers often to a civil war of sorts in 1936 America, but what it depicts most vividly is how screwed up we are today with our identity politics, polarization, social and political pathologies, mutual hatreds, dis- and misinformation, inability to distinguish between truth and fantasy, commonplace violence, etc.  It's bone-chilling.

I started reading this book with the notion that Kurt Andersen was a nouveau novelist, a journalist dipping his toe into novel-writing.  I was very mistaken.  He's an accomplished writer and a deep thinker.  I'm very impressed by this knowledge of both scientific matters and literary matters.  He's very much 'for real.'

Email exchange this morning with Katie Keenan McChrystal

HI, Katie. I think you probably remember me from when you were a little tyke. I saw on Facebook that today is your Mom's birthday and I've been hoping to contact her since I first became aware of her Facebook presence and location somewhere in the Milwaukee area. I tried unsuccessfully to send her a message on FB, got no response, and wondered whether she might prefer not to connect again with me. I hope that's not the case, but if she would like to reconnect after many years, I would love to see her again. Would you please let her know I'm still kickin'. I celebrated my 85 birthday two days ago and have outlived too many of my family and friends. The older I get, the more I cherish friendships, especially one as old as I had with both your Mom and your Dad. Thanks, Katie.

Hi Chuck!  It is great to hear from you and I’m sure that my mom would LOVE to hear from you!  I will pass along your information to her.  Please also feel free to call or text her.  Her number is 414-339-4099 and I will let her know that I have given you her number. 

I hope that all is well with your family!  My daughter, Finley, is 13 and loves hearing stories of my childhood.  Many stories involve your family, and especially your kids and Geri’s, who were all my favorite babysitters!

Wishing you a very happy birthday and I hope that you and my mom can connect soon!

Best,  Kate

Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis

 

8/25/2026

 Tuesday, August 25, 2026

1814 British forces destroyed the Library of Congress, containing 3,000 books

1916 US Department of the Interior formed the National Park Service

1944 German commander Dietrich von Choltitz surrendered Paris to the Free French forces, disobeying Adolf Hitler's orders to destroy the city

1950 "Rashomon," a Japanese film directed by Akira Kurosawa, was released

2017 President Donald Trump pardoned Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had been convicted of contempt of court for racial profiling

In bed at 9:30 and up at 6:30; 0650 203.2 116/76/72 XXX; 61/78/57, mostly sunny days ahead.

Morning meds at 11:50 a.m.  Entresto at 7:50 a.m. and p.m.

January 19, 1946 - August 25, 2026

Rounding the far turn, heading into the home stretch.  For some reason, my 85th birthday seems even more significant to me than my 80th was.  I suppose it's just because I've survived the first half (actually more than half) of my 80s.  AI tells me that only 28% of American men in my age cohort continue to live for 85 years. 72% have already died.   I still have a remaining life expectancy (merely an average, of course) of 5.7 years, which, if I last that long, would get me past my 90th birthday.  I have long thought that I don't want to live that long, and that is still true, but I wonder.   

The other day, I watched a short YouTube interview of Viktor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning, in which he described talking with a patient who complained about suffering from living too long.  He had survived his wife.  Frankl asked him how his wife would have reacted if he had died before her, and the man said she would probably suffer greatly from losing him.  Frankl suggested that he see his long life as the sacrifice he was making to spare his wife that suffering. He said the patient found some comfort in that thought; that it gave his long life some meaning.  I don't know whether or to what extent that story relates to Geri and me, but it did make me think.

Then this morning, I watched a short Charlie Rose interview of William F. Buckley in his old age during which Buckley said that he didn't want to live any longer, that he wasn't about to commit suicide, but that he "was tired of living."  In the interview, Rose asked the elderly Buckley whether he wished he were 20 again. Buckley replied:  “No, absolutely not.”  He said that even if there were a pill that could make him 25 years younger, he wouldn't take it. When Rose asked why, Buckley answered: “Because I’m tired of life.” Rose, apparently somewhat taken aback, asked, “Are you really?” Buckley replied: “Yeah. I really am. I’m utterly prepared to stop living on.”  He went on to speak of the weariness and repetition of continued life and essentially asked what there was left to hang on for.

Rose's interview occurred in March, 2006, in honor of Buckley's 80th birthday.  Buckley's wife Pat was chronically and seriously ill, and died on April 15, 2007, at age 80.  Buckley died in February 2008 at age 82, after suffering from emphysema and diabetes for years.

How often have I thought over the last few years that I'm tired of living, especially when I was sick, and most especially when I was experiencing long-term serious pain and disability?   Old age is such an interesting time of life, not necessarily welcome or pleasant, but nevertheless interesting.  It has, alas, too many burdens, hardships, and indignities, but it has also brought me a keener appreciation of life, of the uniqueness and depth of human beings, their histories and characters, the beauty of the natural world and even of much of people's alterations of it,  not only the trees and birds and bunnies, but also farm fields and farm houses, homes and other sturctures in the cities and elsewhere, all over.  This morning I had a brunch of strained Greek yoghurt and grapes and wondered, marvelled, what's the word?, over the convoluted, sturdy structure of a grape stem!

As I wrote this reflection, Geri had CNN News on in the background.  The regular reporting was interrupted with the announcement that America has lost a national treasure: Dolly Parton has died at age 80.  I knew she had been ill for some time, and that she's been at the dying age for some time, but nonetheless I teared up a little when I heard the news.  I note that her husband, Carl Dean, died on March 3, 2025.  She reduced her work schedule considerably, announcing “I just kind of got worn down and worn out, grieving over Carl…” I have long loved her music and liked her as a human being.  I thought it would be hard not to like her or to love much of the music she wrote and sang.  I think of everything from the iconic I Will Always Love You, which she wrote for Porter Waggoner when she left his show, to the terrific Why'd You Come In Here A'Lookin' Like That. Yesterday I wrote about restarting my daily 'gratitude journal,' and I started out thinking about my gratitude for singers, especially female country singers, and of course I put Dolly at the top of my list.  Today, I'm grateful for the memory of her and grateful that her music was recorded and that I have so much of it available to me, loaded into my laptop and on my favorite playlist on my iPhone.  She was one of a kind, a force of nature, an example of big-heartedness and love of life for all of us, a giant who was barely 5 feet tall and 100 pounds.  The metaphor "a light has gone out in the world' is so true of Dolly.  RIP

And here I am, having outlived Dolly and Bill Buckley by 5 years and still kicking, having outlived my beloved sister by 8 years and my beloved mother by 34 years.  How does this happen?  It reminds us, as JFK did, that life is unfair.

Text exchange with CBG this morning:

Caren Goldberg:  Hi Chuck — I wanted to check in with you and see how you’re doing. We have been traveling and when I get back from my trip over the weekend I’d like to find a time to see you. In the meantime, how have you been doing, how’s Geri, and what have you been reading?

Charles Clausen:  Hi, Sweetie (you know the history of that greeting😊). It is so good to hear from you.  I’m doing OK.  Yesterday was my 85th birthday, Sarah and her husband called from Germany and we had a long chat, Andy came over with a birthday card drawn by my talented granddaughter Lizzie, and a bottle of wine, and Geri grilled a ribeye steak for my birthday dinner.  My heart symptoms remain much improved since the catheter ablation, though I’m going into the VA Thursday for an echocardiogram just to make sure the procedure hasn’t caused any damage, to wit, ‘mitral valve regurgitation’😳😱. The doc doesn’t think so, but he wants to be sure.  Since you and I last chatted, we were visited by my law school buddy for the last almost 60 years, Larry Anderson and his wife, up from Atlanta.  We keep in touch regularly by text, email, and phone.  We were seated alphabetically and Larry usually sat right in front of me in all our required classes.  It led to a lifelong friendship.  Geri has been doing a lot of gardening and is still regularly knitting hats for a project at Temple Emanuel.  I’ve continued my reading binge since Theo of Golden, but I currently having to struggle through Kurt Andersen’s The Breakup, a dystopian tale of America in 2045, after a violence-induced ‘velvet divorce’ between 11 Red states, and the other 39. Before that, I read East of Eden for the first time, Tom Lake and The Dutch House by Ann Patchett, Buckeye by Tom Ryan, and an interesting memoir by a faculty member at the Duke University. Divinity School, Everything Happens For a Reason, in which she dismisses the truth of what her title suggests.   I’m scheduled for a Stars and Stripes Honor Flight to Washington on October 10th with Andy as my escort/‘guardian’.  I have my fingers crossed that I’m not making a mistake agreeing to go, but I have a few reasons to go ahead and risk it.  Sorry for the TMI, but I’ll look forward to seeing you when you return.❤️

 Charles Clausen:  And, I forgot, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, which made me wonder about her life as an undergraduate at Bennington College.

Caren Goldberg:  Happy birthday my dear friend! I can’t believe I missed it but wishing you all the good health and happiness possible! Sounds like it was a great birthday day. I’m so happy to hear you are feeling better and I’m thrilled to hear you’re going on an Honor Flight. I think it will be an amazing experience. You are certainly reading up a storm! I recently read Whistler by Ann Patchett and really enjoyed it. Are you free to meet me on September 1st at Maxfields at 10:45 for a late breakfast, early lunch, brunch type thing?

Charles Clausen:   I watched a long conversation between Ann Patchett and Laura Dern on YouTube this morning.  Very interesting. A favorite author and a favorite actress, each a very likable human being.  And, as it happens, I am free on the 1st at 10:45 and will meet you at Maxfield’s. Looking forward to seeing you. 

A little virtue signaling?  I stopped watching football many years ago.  It was sometime after New England Patriots Daryl Stingley was paralyzed in 1978 by a tackle from the Oakland Raiders' safety, Jack Tatum, a notoriously hard hitter during a pre-season game.  Stingley became a quadriplegic for life and died at age 55.  It was more than a quarter century later that I stopped watching NFL games when it became clear that many players were affected by CTE,  chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disorder linked to repeated blows or impacts to the head, including concussions and subconcussive hits AND when the league, i.e. the franchise owners, refused to admit that playing football was the cause.  In this morning's New York Times, there is this news:

New research shows that 25 percent of all former N.F.L. players who died during a recent six-year period had the degenerative brain disease known as C.T.E. — a tally that does not include the nearly three-quarters of deceased players who were not tested for the disease, which can be diagnosed only posthumously.

“That is clearly a minimum; the true percentage has to be higher,” said David Michaels, who was head of OSHA from 2009 to 2017, just as C.T.E. emerged as a health issue in football. “Whatever it is, the number is astoundingly high.”

Another former OSHA official, the chief scientist Adam Finkel, called it “apocalyptically high,” noting that Russian roulette carries better odds. To him, a risk of 1 in 100 would be an “epidemic.” But 25 percent?  “We never see things that are this dire,” he said..

Yet OSHA has never addressed football, has never made recommendations to make it safer, even as hundreds of former N.F.L. players — workers, with a union — have been diagnosed with C.T.E., or chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

“In most cases,” the agency said in a statement, “OSHA does not take enforcement action with regard to professional athletes.” . . . 

But former OSHA administrators said that the N.F.L. is too powerful and football is too popular to be regulated. As a governmental agency under the direction of politicians, OSHA has to pick its priorities.

“I recognized when I ran OSHA that intervention in football, in telling the league to make changes, even if OSHA had the expertise, would essentially be detrimental to the agency,” Mr. Michaels said. “The public would not welcome OSHA telling the N.F.L. how the game has to be played. And that would hurt the agency’s ability to protect workers who desperately need OSHA.”

Mr. Parker said that OSHA was unlikely to act on its own.

“For OSHA to get involved, the ideal situation would be a congressional mandate — not because they necessarily need one legally, but because it would be the best way to ensure that they really had the government’s backing to take action,” Mr. Parker said

There is a scientific hurdle, too. What could OSHA even do to reduce the likelihood of C.T.E.? With some workplace issues, OSHA can make simple solutions to mitigate major risks — increase ventilation in a factory, require protective gear, add safeguards to machinery — without eliminating the essence of the business.

I'm reminded of one of Dolly Parton's great lyrics, one from 9 to 5: It's a rich man's game  / no matter what you call it / and you spend your life putting money in his wallet.