Sunday, March 15,20206
The ides of March
44 B.C. Julius Caesar was stabed to death b Brutus, Cassius, and several other Roman senators on the Ides of March in Rome
1966 Riots erupted in the Watts section of Los Angeles, California
1989 Department of Veterans Affairs was officially established as a Cabinet position
2025 UNICEF reported that 1 in 3 children in North Gaza were malnourished due to the Israeli blockade stopping all humanitarian aid, describing the situation as "catastrophic."
2025 Donald Trump said Tren de Aragua is "conducting irregular warfare" against the US and ordered its members to be deported under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Following a legal challenge from the ACLU, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg temporarily blocksed this order. The Trump administration nonetheless deported more than 200 alleged members of Tren de Aragua and MS-13 to El Salvador where they are transferred to the Terrorism Confinement Center
In bed at 9, move to LZB at 2 with right flank pain, up at 3 for weigh in, BP check, read some Springsteen bio, then out to TV room. WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY. 35/16/41/30 121/62/6 112 206.6 Back to bed at 6 and slept till up at 9.
Morning meds at 10:40 a.m.
From Born to Run, excerpts:
When you walked through barroom doors in my hometown, you entered the mysterious realm of men. . . Schlitz and Pabst Blue Ribbon ruled, with the blue ribbon stamped on the bartender's pouring spout as the golden eliir was slid expertly into tilted glasses that were then set with a hard knock on the wooden bar. There I stood, a small spirit reminder of what a lot of these men were spending a few moments trying to forget - work, responsibility, the family, the blessings and burdens of adult life.
. . .
I was not my father's favorite citizen. As a boy, I figured it was just the way men were, distant, uncommunicative, busy within the currents of the grown-up world. As a child, you don't question your parents' choices. You accept them. They are justified by the godlike status of parenthood. If you aren't spoken to, you're not worth the time. If you're not greeted with love and affection, you haven't earned it. If you're ignored, you don't exist. Control over your own behavior is the one card you have to play in the hope of modifying theirs. Maybe you have to be tougher, stronger, more athletic, smarter, in some way better . . . who knows? . . . I was a stranger, a competitor in our home and a fearful disappointment. . .
Unfortunately, my dad's desire to engage with me almost always came after the nightly religious ritual of the "sacred six-pack." One beer after another in the pitch dark of our kitchen. It was always then that he wanted to see me, and it was always the same.. . . It was a shame, he loved me, but he couldn't stand me. He felt we competed for my mother's affection. We did. . . [B]ack in the days when our relationship was at its most tempestuous, these things remained mysteries and created a legacy of pain and misunderstanding.
Excerpts from my own memoir, from the section I titled "Homecoming":
The Battle of Iwo Jima horribly wounded my father and, through my father, it injured his wife and his children. To the extent that I developed bad coping behaviors in dealing with him and his condition after the war, it impacted me and, through me, my family. Thus, in a very real sense, wounds from that battle 60 years ago are still felt in our family.
. . . .
[My father] was one of Mowat’s “most unfortunate ones,” of Remarque’s “restless, aimless, . . . essentially unhappy” men who, “though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.” I am confident that had it not been for the support of my mother and of my grandparents and Aunt Monica, he would have been one of the army of lost souls in the “beer halls and gutters.” He would not have survived on his own. In the same conversation in which he told me that it took him 25 years to ‘get over’ Iwo Jima, he also told me that the Marines did not want to ‘let him out’ or discharge him after the war because of his ‘condition’ and how hard it was for my mother to live with him. I don’t know whether he has any idea how hard those years were for Kitty and me. He has never acknowledged it to either of us. Kitty and I rarely talk of it and never at length, but in a serious conversation about 25 years ago she remarked that we had been ‘emotionally crippled from growing up with Dad.’ She was pretty accurate
My father had all the characteristics of the combat-induced PTSD veteran:
isolation from family and others with a ‘leave me alone’ attitude
inability to handle frustrations or even to identify them
inability to express or share his feelings
inability to handle it when things are going well, from a standpoint of not feeling worthy, survivor’s guilt
lack of self-esteem, great insecurity, and feelings of worthlessness and helplessness
jealousy of his wife’s relationships and activities, and, making everything worse, and, very significantly,
abuse of alcohol, ‘self-medication.’
The problems experienced by combat-stressed veterans’ spouses are now well known and well documented. I’m sure my mother, only 23 years old when my father returned from the war, experienced many of those problems:
being overwhelmed by pressures
having to assume total responsibility, including the tremendous strain of financial insecurity because of her husband’s job instability
feeling guilty that somehow she is responsible for my father’s rage or anger reactions.
experiencing self-doubts generated by emotional and job instability of her husband; caught up in frequent crisis-responding, losing sight of her own needs or overall pattern.
being afraid to say anything to him and not knowing how to respond, frustrated in her ability to help.
being confused as to whether his problems were combat-related or not and whether there would ever by any resolution of his conflict.
feeling responsible for ‘making it better.’ having to ‘mother’ or ‘nurture’ him and hence creating greater resentment and irresponsibility on his part.
seeing him separated not only from her, but also from my sister and me with little sense of family and poor father-child relationships.
feeling that support is not welcomed by him.
experiencing emotional and verbal abuse.
feeling dragged down by his negative attitudes.
reduced self-esteem, anxiety, and a sense of hopelessness.
My father was never physically abusive to me or to Kitty. He wasn’t a physically violent man, except for one incident with my mother when I was a teenager.. Growing up with him in those close quarters was so very difficult, mostly because he was so profoundly unhappy, and it was impossible not to be infected by his unhappiness. He was one of those whose ‘spiritual feet had been knocked out from under him. . . spiritually depleted, burned out.’ He had seen what we cannot (thank God) imagine. What he had seen accompanied him to 73rd and Emerald after the war and stayed with him, especially in the nightmares. His drinking made a terrible situation worse. I’ll say more about that later.
. . .
As I look back on my life in the process of writing these letters, I realize what little contact I had with my father after I left home at 18. He wrote me two letters, one during my freshman year at college and another when I wrote home after my sophomore year that I had decided to take my commission in the Marine Corps rather than the Navy. He was taciturn at home and even more so on the telephone (“Well, let’s not run up this phone bill” marked the quick end of every long distance call.) He fled to Florida after my mother’s death in 1972 and for a period of 13 years, from 1982 till 1995, we never spoke or wrote to each other, a long silence that wasn’t broken until my grandmother’s death, when I wrote him. I mention all this simply as a preface to the (obvious) statement that I don’t know my father well. Other than the years from our reconciliation in 1995 till his death in 2007, most of my memories are from the end of World War II until 1959 when I left home, a period spanning his life from age 25 to age 39. Those were, I believe, his worst years, years that, but for the war and the Iwo Jima trauma, should have been his best years, years of establishing himself in some work, growing into maturity, enjoying his family, and building a future. Instead, they were in large measure lost and wasted years. The frequent bouts of anxiety and depression, the relentless terrorizing dreams and the out-of-control alcoholism drained him of vitality. I cannot remember him having any hobbies or recreational interests. If he had any educational or vocational interests, it didn’t show. As far as I know, he had no enthusiasm for anything. I have no memory of him ever building anything, or fixing anything, or caring very much for anything other than perhaps his car. It was my Uncle Jim who took us cousins to Comiskey Park to watch the White Sox games, who took us to the Brookfield Zoo, who took us to Riverview Amusement Park, who started to teach me how to drive, who played ‘catch’ with me. I don’t remember my father taking part in any of these activities or indeed in much of anything that could properly be characterized as an “activity.” By the time I left home in 1959, he reminded me of the farm worker in Robert Frost’s The Death of the Hired Hand:
Poor Silas, . . .
. . . nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope,
So now and never any different.
He was pretty much a lost soul, trapped with his own thoughts and memories and debilitating dreams, cut off from the rest of the world, including his children.
I have read only the first 100 pages or so of Springsteen's bio, but I am struck by the similar experiences that he and I (and our siblings) shared with our cold, distant, rejecting, unloving fathers. Each of us grew up to be self-sufficient, functional, thriving adult males, he an international rock star, and I a Marine officer, law professor, and lawyer. But each of us, when it came to rendering our own life stories to our own children inevitably started our stories, and in a sense end our stories, focusing on our very loving mothers and our very unloving fathers. It was this commonality, that I noticed in the movie Deliver Me From Nowhere, that got me interested in Springsteen's life, and in his music, to reading his Born to Run, and to writing these notes.
"My Father's House"
Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska album
Out where the pines grow wild and tall
I was trying to make it home through the forest
Before the darkness falls
I heard the wind rustling through the trees
And ghostly voices rose from the fields
I ran with my heart pounding down that broken path
With the devil snappin' at my heels
I broke through the trees and there in the night
My father's house stood shining hard
And bright the branches and brambles tore
My clothes and scratched my arms
But I ran 'till I fell shaking in his arms
I awoke and I imagined the hard things that pulled us apart
Will never again Sir tear us from each other's hearts
I got dressed and to that house
I did ride from out on the road I could see
Its windows shining in light
I walked up the steps and stood on the porch a woman
I didn't recognize came and spoke to me
Through a chained door
I told her my story and who I'd come for
She said "I'm sorry son but no one by that name
Lives here anymore"
My father's house shines hard and bright
It stands like a beacon calling me in the nightCalling and calling so cold and alone
Shining 'cross this dark highway
Where our sins lie unatoned
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