Sunday, March 1, 2026
743 The Council at Estinnes decreed that Christian slaves could not be owned by Jews, fearing that the slaves might convert to Judaism
1562 Blood bath at Vassy: Francois de Guise's troops open fire on Huguenot congregation, first event in Wars of Religion
1692 Sarah Goode, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba were interrogated after accusations that they were practitioners of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts Bay Colony
1845 President John Tyler signed a resolution annexing the Republic of Texas
1872 Yellowstone became the world's first national park
1953 Joseph Stalin suffered a stroke and collapsed. He died four days later.
1954 4 Puerto Ricans opened fire in the House of Representatives, injuring 5 members
1955 An Israeli assault on Gaza killed 48
1958 Samuel Alphonsus Stritch was appointed Pro-Prefect of the Propagation of Faith and thus became the first American member of the Roman Curia
1970 The end of US commercial whale hunting
1982, The New York Times raised its price from 25 cents to 30 cents
1985 The Pentagon accepted the theory that an atomic war would cause a nuclear winter
2014 President Barack Obama warned Russian President Vladimir Putin over involvement in Ukraine
2016 Forbes Richest List was released with Bill Gates No. 1 with $75 billion and the number of the world's billionaires dropped to 1,810
2022 US President Joe Biden, in his State of the Union address, said Vladimir Putin has "badly miscalculated" by invading Ukraine
2025 Donald Trump signed an executive order designating English as the country's official language.
In bed at 9:05, up at 5:55. 19/11/28/21 isolated snow showers then sunny.
Morning meds at a.m.
I slept well last night, after spending an entertaining evening watching two YouTube sites that Sarah alerted us to. The first was by a young filmmaker who dubbed himself "The Anti-Chef" and set out to make all the recipes in Julia Child's The Art of French Cooking, The second was by a couple, he an American and his wife a Calabrese, called Pasta Grammar. Both series are very entertaining and informative. While we and most other Americans ignored it, cheered it, or tsk-tsked it, the war against Iran forged on.
Musée des Beaux Arts, W. H. Auden, December 1938
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
A day like this puts me in mind of this time of year 60 years ago, in 1966. I was serving the last of my 4 years of active duty in the Marines, with memories of Vietnam never far from my thoughts. The network news shows and daily newspapers brought fresh stories every day of battles fought, of body counts and body bags. I was living in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and serving as an Inspector-Instructor at a Marine Air Reserve Training Detachment at the Naval Air Station in Willow Grove, PA. And every sixth day, I was on call to serve as the Marine officer who informed the next-of-kin that their son, or husband, or brother had been killed or wounded in that God-forsaken land almost 9,000 miles away. I hated the duty, of course, and have never forgotten it. I wrote about it in my memoir:
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. I would stop at the hangar to pick up the paperwork and Schmidt and I would drive, usually silently, to the home. Each of us knew that if the circumstances were 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.” I couldn’t help thinking: “What an asshole.” Those memories remained with me as I watched “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 logistics of returning her husband’s body through the Philadelphia Navy Yard and of 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 afterwards 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. John Kerry was a notable exception. 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. Below is a poem that the Bloody Bushes would have perhaps entitled “The Civil War Syndrome.” It is, to me, the saddest poem ever written.
_________
Come Up From the Fields, Father
Walt Whitman
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.
I think of those days again again today. Instead of the chicken-harks Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld sending our troops into an unnecessary war, a war of choice, it is the draft-dodger Donald Trump, Captain Bonespurs, the guy who thinks he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. We got our ass kicked in Vietnam, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. What should we expect in Iran?Down in the field 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, flashed 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, 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.
___________
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