8/21/2026

 Friday, August 21, 2026

1955 Emmett Till arrived in Money, Mississippi, to visit relatives, a week before he was murdered

1968 Democratic Convention opened in Chicago, went on to nominate Hubert Humphrey

1968 Warsaw Pact forces completed their invasion of Czechoslovakia by arresting Czech leader Alexander Dubček and forcing him to sign the Moscow Protocols

1991 Latvia declared its independence from the USSR

2014 Israeli airstrike in Rafah killed Mohammed Abu Shammala, Raed al Atar and Mohammed Barhoum - 3 of Hamas's top commanders   

2018 Michael Cohen, President Trump's personal lawyer, pleaded guilty to charges, including making illegal payments at the direction of Trump to women with whom Trump had affairs

2018 Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign chairman, was convicted on eight counts of fraud in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia

2019 Donald Trump said Danish PM Mette Frederiksen is "nasty" to him over his interest in buying Greenland and canceled his trip to Denmark

2025  An Israeli military database indicated that 83% of the deaths in Gaza have been civilians. The Israeli military initially confirmed the database to the media but later disputed it without clarifying their retraction in response to questions from The Guardian.

In bed at 9, unable to sleep, up at 10, back to bed at 11:3-, asleep around midnight, up at 7:40; 0800 203.8 124/75/63  135; 66/75/59, midday rain, wind gusts to 15 mph, 

Morning meds at 10:40 a.m.  Entresto at 8:25 a.m. and p.m.  Trulicity injection at 11 a.m.     

I finished The Secret History yesterday afternoon with mixed feelings about it.  Donna Tartt is a great storyteller; of that there should be little doubt.  She spins a great yarn.  I've seen at least two young reviewers on YouTube (where there appear to be dozens) kvetch that the second half of the story drags, moves too slowly, tends to lose readers' interest.  I thought the opposite was true.  The second half addresses what the collegiate conspirators experience after they murder their classmate and friend, Bunny Corcoran.  I thought it was the more engaging of the two parts of the novel, the part where I always wanted to keep reading, wondering 'and then what happened?'  The story didn't end in any way that I suspected it might, but it ended in at least a plausible way.  I could understand why the principal characters acted the way they did, though I thought that Henry's action at the end was a stretch.  His motivation remains unclear to me.  For me, the novel's main weakness, at least for a commercial novel intended to appeal to a wide audience, is its background setting, if that's the appropriate description, of ancient, pagan, classical Greek mythology and heroic ethics against which the story unfolds.  Julian Morrow, the characters' professor, counselor, and mentor, lauds the Greeks' apotheosis (wrong word?) of "duty, piety, loyalty, and sacrifice," and his students, led by Henry, try to see and mold their worlds in those terms.  I suspect that virtually no readers are very familiar with the ancient Greek worldview and Zeitgeist, so the frequent treatment of it within the novel just makes it harder to get through, even though it is central to understanding the story, at least from the characters' and the author's point of view.  Donna Tartt is a classicist herself, so much of the narrative appears to be her showing off her learning, like me using Latin expressions just so I find some use for the 4 years of Latin I studied in high school - pretentious, but fun, except in the case of a whole 560-page novel with so much showing off.  I'm glad I read it, though it makes me less eager to read her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Goldfinch.  Perhaps I'll try her in-between novel, The Little Friend.

Coming Apart at the Seams

Michelle Goldberg, in this morning's NYTimes:

We are mutually hostile [Red and Blue] communities yoked together in a way that thwarts each faction’s ideals about a decent society. 

For at least the last decade, a florid, aggressive contempt has been a constant in our politics.  Donald Trump, after all, doesn’t just shower liberal cities and states with insults (and, in a demented A.I. video he posted, with excrement).

Kurt Andersen, in the NYTimes, "Has America Already Undergone a Soft Breakup?',  Aug. 9, 2026:

Days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Marjorie Taylor Greene, then still a representative, reiterated her push for legally splitting up the country: “I want a peaceful national divorce. Our country is too far gone and too far divided, and it’s no longer safe for any of us.” Polls since 2021 by universities, YouGov and others have consistently found that a third or more of Americans said they expected a civil war during the next decade or so.

A national divorce — let alone a civil war — is, for now, the stuff of fiction. But while loose talk from rabble-rousers has distracted us, the nation has sunk, almost unnoticed, into an unspectacular yet profoundly strange new arrangement. It’s not yet a divorce; it’s more like a bitter, loveless marriage in which the parties stay technically but less and less enthusiastically united because splitting up is too complicated or dreadful or expensive.

 

I've started reading Andersen's book, The Break-up.  I understand that his story suggests that the U.S. might be better off broken apart somehow (without a bloody civil war) than we are now.  I probably agree with him.  I've long wondered whether we would have been better off if the South had won the Civil War.  Slavery would have died someday, just as apartheid eventually died in South Africa, and the forced abolition of slavery by federal occupation of the South only produced a renewed and partially attenuated form of it in the form of sharecropping and  Jim Crow, which persisted until the 1960s, a century after the supposed end of the Civil War.  Quaere to what extent the effects of slavery and Jim Crow persist in our society.  All we need to do is open our eyes, see our cities, and look at racial economic, educational, and crime statistics.  USA! USA! USA!

Stars and Stripes Honor Flight.  I finally made contact, and I'm confirmed on a flight out of Mitchell Field on October 10.  Text exchange with Andy.

Charles Clausen:

Hi, So .  That Honor Flight to D.C. is on October 10, a Saturday.  I haven’t received a call back on it and may be too late for this one, but if not, I need to know whether you think you’ll be able to go with me as my escort.

Andy Clausen:

I have nothing on that day on my calendar. It’s all done in one day?

Charles Clausen:

One day, out and back.

Andy Clausen:

I can go if you go.

Charles Clausen:

Thanks ❤️

Good morning, Son.  I just talked to the Stars and Stripes Honor Flight rep and confirmed our one day drip to D.C.  You’ll be getting a text from her originating from area code 815, which is where she used to live, and which I was wary that it was a scam (but it isn’t).  It is a long day, flying on one of two chartered aircraft..  One leaves at 5 a.m. and returns around 8, the other leaves at 6 and returns around 9.  They provide food all dy and treat all the vets and escorts like kings all day.  Everything I’ve heard about the trips over the years at the VA is very positive and I’m especially looking forward to spending a whole day with you, for the first time in decades and I presumably the last.  You’ll be getting a text from a Karyn in area code 815 very soon.

Andy Clausen:

I got the text and put the day on my calendar.