2/6/2026

 Friday, February 6, 2026

1951 Radio commentator Paul Harvey was arrested for trying to sneak into Argonne National Laboratory, a nuclear test site located 20 miles (32 km) west of Chicago, Illinois

1956 University of Alabama suspended African-American student Autherine Lucy claiming that it could no longer provide for her safety

2018 Elon Musk's company SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy, the world's most powerful rocket

2025  President Donald Trump, signed an executive order imposing sanctions on International Criminal Court officials who assist investigations into U.S. citizens or those of its allies, namely Israel.

In bed at 10:30, up at 6:35. 31/19/35/10.

Morning meds at  a.m.     

Text exchange with CBG:

Caren Goldberg:

https://youtu.be/v_yJFbvOkXs

So nice seeing you yesterday. I really enjoyed our time together. This is my current favorite song and if you haven’t heard it, I thought you might like it too.

Charles Clausen:

Thanks, Sweetie.  Actually, I intended to text you this morning to apologize for being such a mope during our precious shared time yesterday.  As you could tell, I’m having a tough time living in my mid-80s.  I find myself living too much remembering regrets from my past life and dreads about the potential futures, pulled between a heightened appreciation of everything around me and a desire to join my Mom, Dad, my sister, and so many friends in the great beyond.  My Mom used to call that state being “Mickey the Mope” and, when I would get that way, Kitty would tell me to “SNAP OUT OF IT,” as in Cher’s great scene with Nicholas Cage in “Moonstruck.”  I’m sorry I inflicted it on you.  I thoroughly enjoyed the “Dear Time” video, and almost felt tears approaching at the lyric about “I’d trade them all for a visit with my Mom and Dad, throw the ball with my old dog.”  I’ll try to SNAP OUT OF IT.❤️

Caren: 

No apologies — I take you as you are! I do think that Dear Time is all about gratitude in the end and when I wake up during the night I try to think of all the things I’m grateful for to fall back asleep. Yesterday I was grateful for the time with you. Today I’m grateful I can go to Chai Point to celebrate the memory my mom’s friend who passed away on Sunday. And so it goes.

Charles 

You’re too kind, but thank you!♥️

Journal entry one year ago:

Anniversary thought.   Two thoughts about Paul Harvey.  First, from my memoir:

Over the next few months, the Chicago newspapers carried many stories about Hartmann and his murder of Mrs. Bush and sexual assault on my mother.  The Chicago Sun seemed to take particular delight in the story, running many, many photographs of Hartmann day after day, one with his visiting parents in the office of the warden at the Cook County Jail, one with his lawyer, another with his step-father, even one of Hartmann resting on his bed in his jail cell, with an accompanying story about his crying in his cell and being bothered that he wasn’t the focus of attention of reporters and photographers.  The text of the news stories referred to Hartmann as a “sex pervert” who confessed to “a degenerate attack” and “a fiendish attack” on my mother, but the photos all seemed calculated to generate sympathy for “pudgy” 15 year old and his family, with nary a word about the families of Gracelyn Bush and Mary Clausen.

Paul Harvey, then 29 years old, reported the crime against my mother on his radio show on WENR, with the spin “Wife of young Marine, veteran of Iwo Jima . . .” My mother’s name, address, and photograph and the nature of the crime against her were publicized to everyone in Chicago who could read a newspaper.  

Second, for a period of time, Geri worked as a personal assistant to Paul Harvey's wife, Lynne, better known to Harvey's listeners as "Angel."

 

 

 

2/5/2026

 Thursday, February 5, 2026

2019 Pope Francis admits for the first time that clerics have sexually abused nuns

2020 US Senate votes to acquit President Donald Trump 52-48 on charges of abuse of power and 53-47 on obstruction of Congress

2025  Demonstrators gathered in cities across the United States to protest the policies of  President Donald Trump, his second administration, Elon Musk and Project 2025. 

In bed at 9:30, up at 6:15 after a difficult night, up and down, on the LZB, painful hips.

Morning meds at 4 p.m.     

Breakfast with CBG.  I should have cancelled, in no condition to socialize, bad night, half-dead, wishing the other half would join up

2/4/2026

 Wednesday, February 4, 2026

D+89

1849  University of Wisconsin began in 1 room with 20 students

1938 "Our Town," the play by Thornton Wilder opened on Broadway, NYC

1938 Hitler seized control of the German army and put Nazis in key posts

1990 10 Israeli tourists were murdered near Cairo

2004 Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dormitory room

2020 Rush Limbaugh was presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Donald Trump during the State Of The Union Address

2025  Donald Trump announced a plan where the U.S. would seek "long-term ownership" of Gaza, and that the U.S. military would be in charge of Gaza's redevelopment into “The Riviera of the Middle East” for "the world's people." saying Palestinians will have no choice but to leave the territory.

2025  The U.S. State Department ordered the closure of all overseas missions of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 

2025  The Senate confirmed Pam Bondi as Attorney General, 

In bed at 9:40, up at 6:40.

Morning meds at 4 p.m.        

  

Why do people keep a journal, chronicle, diary, or daily notebook?

When I wrote my memoir, about 20 years ago, I started it with an epigraph by Sir Leslie Stephen from his autobiography.

Nobody ever wrote a dull autobiography.  If one may make such a bull, the very dullness would be interesting.  The autobiography has ex officio two qualifications of supreme importance in all literary work.  He is writing about a topic about which he is keenly interested, and about a topic upon which he is the highest living authority. . . Autobiography for these reasons is so generally interesting that I have frequently thought with the admirable Benvenuto Cellini that it should be considered as a duty by all eminent men; and, indeed, by men not eminent.  As every sensible man is exhorted to make his will, he should also be bound to leave to his descendants some account of his experience of life. 

 As a member of the enormous class of "men not eminent," I nonetheless followed Sir Leslie's advice to leave to my children some account of my experience of life in the form of almost 300 typed pages of memoir of my years of life up to the time they were born.  I don't know whether either of the children considered my effort worthwhile, but I myself have, more times than I could count, referred to and quoted from it in my other magnum opus, the journal I have kept for the last 3 and 1/2 years.   It now comprises probably more than 2,000 typed pages.  I don't know whether to call the work a journal, a chronicle, a diary, or just a notebook, but I'm glad I kept it up over almost 1,300 days, just as I am glad that I wrote the memoir.  In it, I have often written about my questioning of why I keep writing it. I wish I could easily retrieve those entries, but one downside of the now-extensive work is that it's not indexed or easily searchable.  In any event, I was reminded of it this morning reading the following article by Daniel Poppick in the New York Times Magazine.

        Don’t Keep a Diary. Embrace the Fragments of Real Life.   A diary can construct a false narrative, but the abstract  snippets of a notebook let reality come into focus.

“Hello, I’ve never met you before, so it really is a pleasure. I hope the feeling is mutual.” So begins my grandmother’s diary from 1939. She was 18, living at home with her parents in Brooklyn. “As you will find out henceforth, I am a ‘different’ person.”

I’ve never consistently kept a diary. On the rare occasions I’ve tried, the voice that emerges is that of a “different” person — a clunky, wooden avatar, by turns stifled and overly performative. My grandmother, who as far as I know never expressed literary ambitions, didn’t have this problem. Her diary crackles with vivid turns of phrase and snapshots of her life: riding to a dance near Eastern Parkway on a bus “packed to the margin”; watching her friends make out at a party (“They necked all evening, and I mean necked … I saw some champion mauling”); eerily prescient rumblings of the atrocities playing out overseas as Hitler advanced farther into Europe (on Sept. 9, 1939, “John Gunther reported that 1,000,000 cats + dogs have been killed by Britishes for fear they would be unable to defend themselves in case of an air raid”).

My own rare diary entries from the summer of 2008, when I was 23, make me sound like an overwhelmed executive assistant to my own memory. “S. and G. had their first child yesterday, the first of my friends to do such a thing,” I wrote in one. “Well. Now seems the time to put that to the side. There will be plenty of time for considering it later.” Elsewhere I favored embarrassing hyperbole, as when I claimed that same week that the rapper Nas “saved my life.”

Over time, a shift in approach loosened me up: Rather than keeping a diary, I started keeping notebooks. Where a diary constructs narrative, character and voice, a notebook is inherently fragmented, allowing for unexpected glimmers of serendipitous juxtaposition and lyric voltage. It is at once a less restricted form and one that renders perception more precisely. It has always been more generative for my writing, more comfortable, more surprising. Joan Didion made a similar distinction in her 1968 essay “On Keeping a Notebook.” For her, the point “has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.”

One of my notebook entries from 2018 reads, “What a random emperor you are!” The following month, “Pants: a tool like any other.” Accuracy or basic coherence is less the point than recording the music hidden behind the white noise of routine. In 2016, preparing for an impending job interview, I wrote, “Will there be opportunity for my career to develop here?” On the following page, “A poem refuses death.” (I did not get the job.) A friend’s turn of phrase, an overheard conversation on the subway, a weirdly resonant ad — all of it has a place in a notebook. “Dog afraid of noises? THUNDER SHIRT,” I wrote in 2011, recording the text of a billboard, followed by, “I offer you here a break from my voice.”

That’s what a notebook is: a break from your own voice. If diaries are where we willfully perform ourselves, notebooks project a slanted light onto our days, revealing a shadowed grain and texture that we otherwise might not notice. It is a place where we can drop the act that we put on — even in the privacy of our own thoughts, we are often playing a part. “Our notebooks give us away,” Didion writes, “for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’”

On this score, I only partially agree. Our notebooks do give us away, but they also reveal something about where we stand in relation to our time and place. Take Sei Shonagon’s “The Pillow Book,” written just before the year 1,000 — the notebook that she kept while serving as a lady-in-waiting in the cloistered luxury of Japan’s imperial court. “The Pillow Book” is perhaps best known for its detailed, gossipy, beautiful lists: “Things now useless that recall a glorious past,” “Things that quicken the heart,” “People who feel smug,” “Spectacles” and “Wind instruments,” to name just a few. It does not reflect the widespread poverty of its time, nor the fact that Shonagon was eventually forced to leave the court and most likely lived in poverty herself — but we can’t know for sure, because there is no definitive historical record. “The Pillow Book,” like all autobiographical writing, is limited in its view.

The same is true of my own notebooks. In 2020, I wrote, “Come for the death-knell, stay for the preserves.” I don’t remember writing this, and while it might sound like nonsense, the joke about death and preservation reflects a feeling that I do remember having early in the pandemic about the very real possibility of societal collapse. In these abstract fragments, real life comes into focus.

It is an impulse that many of us share: to put something of our experience into language before time and mortality render us mute. By the end of the summer of 1939, my grandmother’s diary entries became sparse, containing almost no detail about her days. An entire entry from the end of the summer reads, “Today England declared war on Germany /// Germany invaded Poland, therefore the above.”

Can the sundry details, cherry-picked quotations, dream logic and yawning gaps in our diaries and notebooks speak to the violence of our own moment in history? To answer, we have to record not only who we are but also what we observe, and read between the lines.

And this essay by Maria Popova about Joan Didion's essay On Keeping a Notebook: 

As a lover — and keeper — of diaries and notebooks, I find myself returning again and again to the question of what compels us — what propels us — to record our impressions of the present moment in all their fragile subjectivity. From Joan Didion’s 1968 anthology Slouching Towards Bethlehem (public library) — the same volume that gave us her timeless meditation on self-respect — comes a wonderful essay titled “On Keeping a Notebook,” in which Didion considers precisely that. Though the essay was originally written nearly half a century ago, the insights at its heart apply to much of our modern record-keeping, from blogging to Twitter to Instagram.

After citing a seemingly arbitrary vignette she had found scribbled in an old notebook, Didion asks:

Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.  […]

The point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.

To that end, she confesses a lifelong failure at keeping a diary:

I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.

What, then, does matter?

How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there: dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat-check counter in Pavillon (one middle-aged man shows his hat check to another and says, ‘That’s my old football number’); impressions of Bettina Aptheker and Benjamin Sonnenberg and Teddy (‘Mr. Acapulco’) Stauffer; careful aperçus about tennis bums and failed fashion models and Greek shipping heiresses, one of whom taught me a significant lesson (a lesson I could have learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but perhaps we all must meet the very rich for ourselves) by asking, when I arrived to interview her in her orchid-filled sitting room on the second day of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether it was snowing outside. I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. I have no real business with what one stranger said to another at the hat-check counter in Pavillon; in fact I suspect that the line ‘That’s my old football number’ touched not my own imagination at all, but merely some memory of something once read, probably ‘The Eighty-Yard Run.’ Nor is my concern with a woman in a dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper in a Wilmington bar. My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

It is a difficult point to admit. We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing. (‘You’re the least important person in the room and don’t forget it,’ Jessica Mitford’s governess would hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion; I copied that into my notebook because it is only recently that I have been able to enter a room without hearing some such phrase in my inner ear.) Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people’s favorite dresses, other people’s trout.

Once again, Didion returns to the egoic driver of the motive to write:

And so we do. But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.

Ultimately, Didion sees the deepest value of the notebook as a reconciliation tool for the self and all of its iterations:

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

[…]

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.

The rest of Slouching Towards Bethlehem is brimming with the same kind of uncompromising insight, sharp and soft at the same time, on everything from morality to marriage to self-respect. Complement this particular portion with celebrated writers on the creative benefits of keeping a diary.

 About 2,000 pages of my journals chronicles, notebooks, morning musings, or whatever in the white binders.

July 30, 2022 to January 31, 2026

On the right are my watercolor sketchbooks chronicling Trump's reign from the outbreak of the Covid pandemic till the end of his first term of office.

1/31/2026

 Saturday, January 31, 2026

def

ft5

In bed at 10:10, up at 6:25.  16/0/24/12

Meds, etc. Morning meds at  a.m.   

Aw23$$     

k

2/3/2026

 Tuesday, February 3, 2026

1931 Arkansas legislature passed a motion to pray for the soul of journalist H. L. Mencken after he called the state the "apex of moronia"

1959 Plane crash known as "The Day the Music Died" killed musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, J. P. Richardson (aka The Big Bopper), and the pilot near Clear Lake, Iowa

1994 President Bill Clinton lifted the US trade embargo against Vietnam

2025  El Salvador offered to jail ‘American criminals,’ including U.S. citizens.  Marco Rubio said 'the U.S. was grateful for the offer

In bed at 10, up at 7.  14/7/23/11

Morning meds at  11 a.m.  

What a strange coincidence.  Yesterday, I chatted with Larry Anderson for half an hour or so during which we discussed, among much other stuff, my Dad's Marine service on Iwo Jima in 1945.  Afterwards, I sent him the chapters of the memoir dealing with those experiences.  Last year, on this date, I had the following email exchange with him:

LOA: Robert  Bly?

CDC:  If I recall correctly, you were an English major at UWM, one of those increasingly disparaged, "useless" majors (like history) that aren't specifically designed to prepare college students for a trade or profession, like accounting or computer science. If so, uou may be more accepting of one of what Geri thinks of as my "eccentricities," i.e., I like poetry.and classic literature. I don't like most of the poetry I come upon, which is simply incomprehesible to me, but I have some that move me deeply like Walt Whitman's "Come Up From the Fields, Father" about a mother's grief over the death of her soldier son, and Yeats' "Vacillation", only the 4th and 5 stanzas. Now that I am an old man, all that seems to have stayed with me from my college education is my enjoyment of literature that I picked up in my English classes in Marquette's Liberal Arts college. In any case, I came across Robert Bly's poem about the dream of a telephone call from his dead father in my paperback anthology of poems edited by Garrison Keillor, "Good Poems." It grabbed me because of its suggestion of a troubled relationship between the poet and his father and ambivalent feelings toward his father: "Why did it take us so long to get going. Perhaps he left us somewhere once, or did I simply forget that he was alone in winter in some town."

I think you know my Dad was one of the 70,000 Marines who fought on Iwo Jima 80 years ago this month. He was a radioman He came back to my mother, my little sister, and me quite thoroughly fucked up from the experience. He never talked about it until he was in his 80s and I was in my mid-60s, and then only sparingly. Growing up with him and his PTSD was a miserable experience for my sister and me.   I had a strained relationship with him most of my life. There was a period of 13 years in which we never spoke, never wrote, never communicated at all and it was only when we were both old men that we developed a healthy relationship and real friendship and even then, he held onto what seemed to be his life's motto: 'The less said the better.' In any event, it was with that personal background that I read Robert Bly's "When My Dead Father Called."

The last few years of my Dad's life, he lived with Geri and me during the warmer half of the year and with my sister Kitty in Phoenix during the colder half. My children didn't know him. All they knew of him was that my former spouse Anne told them he was "a crabby old man," which was what she knew of him. I wrote a long memoir for my children that contains a lot about my childhood with him, about Marine training, Iwo Jima, and PTSD. Quite a bit of research went into the memoir. I have the chapters on my computer in digital form and, if you're interested, I can email you the chapters on his time in the Marines and the effect it had on him. They would explain why I was so moved by the conclusion of Bly's little poem: "Perhaps he left us somewhere once, or did I simply forget that he was alone in winter in some town." 

I'm still deeply moved by Robert Bly's poem, and by Whitman's "Come Up From the Fields, Father," and by Yeats' "Vacillation," and, not surprisingly, they are all related to my experiences with my parents.  My Mom's been dead almost 53 years now, and Dad 19 years, yet they fill my old age with memories and feelings, both of gratitude and of regret.

When My Dead Father Called

Last night I dreamt my father called to us.

He was stuck somewhere. It took us

A long time to dress, I don't know why.

The night was snowy; there were long black roads.

Finally we reached the little town, Bellingham.

There he stood, by a streetlamp in cold wind,

Snow blowing along the sidewalk. I noticed

The uneven sort of shoes that men wore

In the early Forties. And overalls. He was smoking.

Why did it take us so long to get going? Perhaps

He left us somewhere once, or did I simply 

Forget he was alone in winter in some town?

 

Vacillation

My fiftieth year had come and gone,

I sat, a solitary man,

In a crowded London shop,

An open book and empty cup

On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed;

And twenty minutes more or less

It seemed, so great my happiness,

That I was blessed and could bless. 

. . . 

Although the summer Sunlight gild

Cloudy leafage of the sky,

Or wintry moonlight sink the field

In storm-scattered intricacy,

I cannot look thereon,

Responsibility so weighs me down.

Things said or done long years ago,

Or things I did not do or say

But thought that I might say or do,

Weigh me down, and not a day

But something is recalled,

My conscience or my vanity appalled.

 

Come Up from the Fields Father

Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,

And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.

Lo, ’tis autumn,

Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,

Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind,

Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines,   

(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?

Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)

Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds,   

Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well.

Down in the fields all prospers well,

But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter’s call,

And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.

Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling,

She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust her cap.

Open the envelope quickly,   

O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d,

O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul!

All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only,

Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,

At present low, but will soon be better.

Ah now the single figure to me,

Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms,

Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint,

By the jamb of a door leans.

Grieve not so, dear mother, (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs,

The little sisters huddle around speechless and dismay’d,)

See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better.

Alas poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be better, that brave and simple soul,)

While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,

The only son is dead.

But the mother needs to be better,

She with thin form presently drest in black,

By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,

In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,   

O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,

To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.

Whitman's great poem always reminds me of what my dear sister told me during one of our daily, early-morning chats in our 70s.  When she and my mother came home from work one day to the apartment building where they lived, my mother opened her mailbox and saw that I had written from Iwakuni to tell the family that my squadron had been deployed to Vietnam and that I would soon follow.  She had opened and read the letter in the vestibule where the mailbox was, not even waiting to take the letter upstairs to her apartment.  And she wept.  She wept because her son, her firstborn, her comfort and joy during the years of WWII, was going off to his war just as her husband had 21 years before.  And she must have feared that I might come back from my war, if at all, as shattered as my Dad was when he came back from his.  That was 60 years ago and I still picture her, standing next to the mailboxes, crying, my little sister holding her and comforting her, but dealing with her own fears.  It reminds me, of course, of the millions of mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, who are the uncounted casualties of all our wars, including the few I was destined to meet as a Casualty Assistance Calls Officer on the north side of Philadelphia in 1966-67.  

 My worst job, however, – the worst job I have ever had – came every 6 days when I was the Marine Corps’ Casualty Assistance Call Officer for the north side of Philadelphia and the northern suburbs.  When a Marine was killed or seriously injured while on active duty, whether combat-related or not, an officer and a senior staff NCO delivered the news personally to the next-of-kin, almost always the wife or the parents.  The information about the death or injury came into the Marine detachment at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.  If the family member to be notified lived north of Market Street, one of the teams in my rotation got the call to tell the family.  My team was myself and a staff sergeant who worked for me, a fellow named Schmidt from Antigo, Wisconsin.  The call would first go to Pete Powell, our admin officer, who would call me or the other officer on CACO duty.  I would call SSgt. Schmidt and pick him up at his home and we would drive, usually silently, to the home.  Each of us knew that if the circumstances were a bit different, it could be his wife or parents receiving the Marine at the door.  As soon as the person visited opened the door, or saw us approach, he, or usually she, knew why we were there.  If the Marine was not dead, I would have to get that information out immediately.  If I wasn’t yelling “he’s all right” or “he’s alive and being cared for” or some such statement, I didn’t have to tell the wife or mom that the Marine was dead.  She knew it from my uninvited and dreaded presence in her doorway.  If we didn’t have information already about church membership, I would stay with the family while SSgt. Schmidt went to get a priest or minister or at least a friend or neighbor who could stay with the bereaved after we had left. Such misery! Such suffering!  How awful those encounters, how awful still the memories of them.

It was the memories of the mothers and wives that were with me as I watched George H. W. Bush gushing over the Gulf War in 1991.  “The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula. . . It’s a proud day for America – and, by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”  Those memories remain with me as I watch “H. W.’s” idiot son “W” and his band of neocon chickenhawks prove Daddy wrong in the desert sands of Mesopotamia.  Bush and Cheney and Paul Wolfewitz and Richard Perle and almost all of their legion of neocon supporters never stood in a doorway in front of a shrieking, terror-stricken mother learning that her son is dead, never spoke with a young wife about the return of her husband’s body and the need for funeral arrangements.  While others were making these casualty calls in north Philadelphia and all across America, George W. Bush was getting inducted into Skull and Bones and enjoying his last year at Yale under his student deferment while Richard Bruce Cheney was on his fourth or fifth deferment, working in Madison for Governor Warren Knowles while working on a Ph.D. at the UW.  Richard Perle was working on his master’s degree at Princeton after attending the London School of Economics while Paul Wolfowitz was doing graduate work at the University of Chicago after graduating from Cornell.  These men were all privileged.  They were not the type to get their asses shot off in a messy war in Asia.  They were not the type to let military service alter the trajectory of their privileged lives.  Like the vice-chickenhawk-in-chief Cheney, they “had other priorities in the 60s than military service.”  Very few of the Marines and soldiers and airmen and sailors who did serve came from such backgrounds.  They came from backgrounds much like mine: blue collar, the so-called ‘working class.’  They did not have estates in Kennebunkport.  Their homes were apartments and modest frame houses on small lots.  Their list of educational attainments usually stopped at high school, boot camp and infantry training.  These were the men the United States sent to kill and be killed, not the likes of Bush and Cheney, Wolfewitz and Perle.  And it was the wives and children, the parents and siblings of such men who would live with the consequences of their service.  For them, it wasn’t “the specter of Vietnam” that was “buried forever,” it was their son, their husband, their father, their brother.  For them, the “Vietnam syndrome” has never ended, any more than World War II “syndrome” or the Korea “syndrome“ has ended for those who suffered the deepest losses.  

....

 

2/2/2026

 Monday, February 2, 2026

2007  My Dad died at age 86.

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In bed at ?, up at 5:18.  21/15/26/18.

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at  a.m.  

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 Sunday, February 1, 2026

1913 Joyce Kilmer wrote his poem "Trees" in Mahwah, New Jersey

1933 Hermann Goering banned Communist meetings and demonstrations in Germany

1948 President Harry Truman urged Congress to adopt a civil rights program

1954 President Eisenhower announced the detonation of the world's 1st hydrogen bomb 

1974 Pope Paul VI's encyclical "To Honor Mary"

2021 Joe Biden signed executive orders to reunite immigrant families, setting up a new task force to address around 1000 remaining separated families

2025   President Donald Trump announced 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico and 10% tariffs on China. Canadian PM Justin Trudeau announces retaliatory tariffs of 25%

In bed around 10, up at 6:10.  9/2/26/8

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 9 a.m.

Sleepwalking.  I haven't written anything worth reading for at least the last two and a half weeks, or perhaps months or years.  I copy and paste some stuff from past years' entries, or from newspaper articles, or elsewhere, but the last thing that required any thought at all (and not much) was my thoughts after watching Wild Strawberries again on January 14th.  It's looking like my journaling has come to an end, a bit short of 3 and 1/2 years.  I feel like I am sleepwalking through life, not depressed in any clinical sense, but seeing no purpose in being alive.  I've stopped doing the Connections puzzle in each morning's New York Times, after doing 500 puzzles.  I still do the morning mini-crossword, but haven't tried the regular Monday and Tuesday puzzles for quite a while.  I read hardly any of the articles in the morning papers, and this morning I didn't watch any of the Sunday morning talk shows.  I get out of bed each morning, but don't know why, looking forward to nothing, not doing anything, reading anything, or writing anything.  Quo vadis?  Quare?  The last time I wrote anything semi-extensive about what was going on was on January 9th.

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