5/4/2025

Sunday, May 4, 2025

D+179/105

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

1977 US Catholic bishops rescinded automatic excommunications for divorced and remarried Catholics (receiving communion but still outlawed it if the previous marriages were not annulled by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

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

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

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

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

In bed at 9, awake at 4, up at 4:25.  39°, high of 56°.  Another windy day ahead.  Am I mistaken that this has been an exceptionally windy year?   

Prednisone, day 355; 2 mg., 17/21; Kevzara, 6/14; CGM, day 2/15; Trulicity.  Prednisone at 4:40 a.m.  Other meds at 5:10a.m.

Scattered thoughts.  (1)  Take me out behind the barn and shoot me.  I watched the Sunday morning talk shows this morning, including Meet The Press with Kirsten Welker's long one-on-one interview of Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.  After the ordeal, I wanted to kill myself.  I can't avoid the conviction that the nation is headed for deep, deep trouble, that we're on our way to doom, or at least a crash.  This is worse than Richard Nixon, much worse than Ronald Reagan, and even worse than Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld.  It's worse than that desperate era between the assassination of Kennedy in 1963 and the withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973 and the resignation of Nixon in 1974.   God help us (but He won't.) 

(2) Da boids. Concierge:  Who d'ya want? Nobody gets in the building unless I know who they want. I'm the "concierge". My husband used to be the "concierge", but he's dead. Now I'm the "concierge".

Max Bialystock: We are seeking Franz Liebkind.

Concierge:  Oh... the Kraut! He's on the top floor, apartment 23  :...But you won't find him there... he's up on the roof with his boids. He keeps boids. Dirty... disgusting... filthy... lice-ridden boids. You used to be able to sit out on the stoop like a person. Not anymore! No, sir! Boids!... You get my drift?

Leo Bloom:  We... uh... get your "drift". Thank you, madam.

Concierge: I'm not a "madam"! I'm a "concierge"! . . . . . . . .

I've been enjoying da boids this Spring, especially since I purchased and hung the flat feeder.  It's a big favorite with the cardinals, who have become very regular visitors, a pair of them, male and female.  I take it they are nesting, though I don't know whether she has laid her eggs yet.  I see them together on the flat feeder, so nobody is tending their nest.  I finally saw Himself pass a seed directly to Herself, beak-to-beak, as if he were feeding her.  We have white-crowned sparrows feeding on the ground, newly arrived migrants.  We also have male English or house sparrows regularly coming to our cotton nesting ball, getting a beakful of cotton, and flying away to his partner's nest somewhere in the neighborhood.  I get goldfinches at the tube feeders, but the niger seed feeder and the sunflower/safflower seed feeder, but they are not visiting the cotton ball above the niger feeder.  Last year, the goldfinches were almost daily visitors to the cotton ball.  I understand they can have 2 or 3 broods each season.  We are also being regularly visited by two big crows who like the suet cakes.  They don't fly in, they walk from across the lawn, sort of like two stately, portly flâneurs, but they don't look so stately as they mount the shepherd's crook from which the suet cakes hang.  They are too big and awkward to peck at the suet daintily, like the chickadees, or with authority, like the woodpeckers.  They look like two big 8th graders butting into the little kids' line in the school cafeteria, out of place.  The mourning doves that normally feed on the ground under the feeders are now regularly feeding on the flat feeder.  We also occasionally get a starling or a gr, grackle or a brown-headed cowbird.  I'm hoping for some of the rarer visitors, like Eastern bluebirds, Baltimore orioles, rose-breasted grosbeaks, or, please God, an indigo bunting, but no luck so far.  I need to cut up an orange and mount the halves on the shepherd's crooks.  The concierge would not be pleased with me, doing my best to attract the dirty... disgusting... filthy... lice-ridden boids. 

(2) My old notebook with notes about our revered founding fathers.  The notebook has been sitting on the floor next to my bedroom recliner.  I picked it up last night to see what I had written in it.  Answer, lots of different stuff, but notably (no pun intended) notes about the members of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1887.   There were 55 delegates.  Two from Connecticut and Maryland never showed up. Another two, both from New York, left after one month.  Twenty-nine were college-educated, 9 from Princeton.  Twenty-two were lawyers, 14 were merchants, and 10 were bankers of some sort.  Twenty-five were slave owners, maybe 26 if we include Ben Franklin, a former slave owner.  Eight had signed the Declaration of Independence.  

Slavery was legal in all the states except Massachusetts in the 1780s.  Vermont didn't pass a law abolishing slavery until 1858.  In the U.S. under the Articles of Confederation, there were about 650,000 slaves, or 1/6th of the population.  Half of all those slaves were located in Virginia.  Pennsylvania had 3.700 slaves at the time of the Constitutional Convention.  Patrick Henry, of "Give me liberty or give me death" fame, owned 30 slaves.  Of the 25 or 26 slave owners among the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, 19 relied on slave labor for agricultural work to provide their owners' livelihood.  Five owned more than 100 slaves.

I have 12 or more handwritten pages on US history, with a big focus on slavery, the slave trade, international and intranational, economics of slave labor and capitalism, the internal political importance of the slave and anti-slave interests within the country, and the inevitability of the war between the states.  Where did I get all this information?  I can't remember.😕😓😢

area,

Regret to Inform is a 1998 American documentary film directed by Barbara Sonneborn, whose first husband, Jeff, was killed in Vietnam in 1968.  He had been killed in a mortar attack while trying to rescue his radio operator.  She received the government's official "regret to inform" notification on her 24th birthday.  Twenty years later, with yet unresolved feelings about his death and the war, she decided to go to Vietnam and make a film.  I watched it this afternoon, while Geri was sitting shiva with her walking partner, Barbara Perlson.  This is a very hard film to watch.  It is only about 70 minutes long.  It consists of the words and faces of widows, American and Vietnamese women whose husbands died in the Vietnam, War, or the American War,  or because of the war in the case of one  American veteran who killed himself 8 years after the war. He shot himself in his garage, leaving a note for his wife saying, "I love you, but I just can't take the flashbacks anymore."  It made me think of my Dad and his dreams after Iwo Jima.   His memories of his war and my memories of him with those memories.  I look through the window next to my recliner and realize that the squirrel baffles on my shepherd's crooks holding the bird feeder are cones, very much like the straw hats that were everywhere in Vietnam.  All those people, all those straw hats.  All those bombing missions that checked in with us at the TACC on their way their 250 pound, 500 poundospoo bombs, high explosives, napalm, white phosphorous,  Or to strafe.   I think of how insoucient we were, safe in our "bubble," istening on our radio frequencies, watching the crew members writing backwards on the backlighted plexiglass status boards.  It makes me sick to think about it, emotionally, spirtually.  I think of my duty as a CACO for the northern Philadelphia area, every 6 days on call, every 6 days hoping I wouldn't get a call, anxiety rising each day leading up to the 6th day.  I think of the outtake from Hearts and Minds, George Ball, Undersecretary of State, describing the decision-making on going to war in Vietnam, in his proper business suit and proper tie kand shined shoes, like all the 'suits' in Washington.  I think of my dear sister Kitty telling me that when my mother opened their mailbox in the entry vestribule of their Rockwwell Avenue tripplex, saw the letter from me , she opened and red it right there in the hallway, me telling the family that I on my way to Vietnam, and she cried.  She, who had gone through so much with her husband after World War II, and now her son on his way to another war..  So many thoughts, about myself, my parents, my sister, my governent, my war.  I think of Bill Mullen and Jay Trembley, and of their wives and children.  

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

 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.        

 In 1986, St. Martin’s Press published Every Effort, a book written by Bill’s wife, Barbara Mullen Keenan, about her ordeal trying to obtain information about Bill and about living without knowing whether he was dead or alive. Bill and Barbara had two sons, Sean and Terry, who were four and two years old, respectively, when Bill was shipped to Vietnam. Barbara was a leader in the POW/MIA movement for years. In April 1976, after the 1973 Paris ‘peace with honor’ agreement worked out by Nixon and Kissinger, and a year after Saigon fell in 1975, Barbara had Bill declared dead. It had been 10 years since he was shot down. She eventually remarried. The story she told in Every Effort was hard to read, not because it wasn’t well written, but because it brought home to me, again, and vividly, how dreadful the Vietnam experience was for so many people, especially the families of the dead, the wounded, the imprisoned and the missing. The story of what she went through also reminded me how very bitter was the divide between the pro-war Americans and the anti-war Americans, including the wives and families of POWs and MIAs.

Here’s the telegram Barbara received (after the personal visit and notification by a Marine officer): 

MRS. WILLIAM F. MULLEN.  DELIVER.  DON’T PHONE.

452 SILVER CREEK ROAD, MARQUETTE, MICH.

I DEEPLY REGRET TO CONFIRM THAT YOUR HUSBAND CAPTAIN WILLIAM F. MULLEN USMC ON 29 APRIL 1966 BECAME MISSING WHILE ON A FLIGHT MISSION IN THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM.  EXTENSIVE SEARCH OPERATIONS ARE IN PROGRESS AND EVERY EFFORT IS BEING MADE TO LOCATE HIM.  IT IS SUGGESTED THAT YOU REFRAIN FROM FURNISHING ANY PERSONS OUSIDE OF YOUR IMMEDIATE FAMILY WITH ANY BACKGROUND DATA REGARDING YOUR HUSBAND’S PERSONAL HISTORY AND MILITARY SERVICE.  RELEASE OF SUCH DATA COULD ADVERSELY AFFECT HIS WELFARE SINCE IT MAY BE USED BY HOSTILE FORCES FOR COERCION AND PROGAGANDA PURPOSES.  YOU ARE ASSURED THAT ANY SIGNIFICANT INFORMATION DEVELOPED CONCERNING YOUR HUSBAND WILL BE SENT YOU PROMPTLY.  I EXTEND TO YOU ON BEHALF OF THE UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS OUR SINCERE SYMPATHY DURING THIS PERIOD OF GREAT ANXIETY.

WALLACE M. GREENE, JR.

GENERAL, USMC, COMMANDANT OF THE MARINE CORPS.

Barbara was told that Moon went down “in the Republic of Vietnam,” a knowing falsehood.  At the end of the war, there were still 2,338 men listed as ‘missing.’