8/30/2026

 Sunday, August 30, 2026

1956 Lake Pontchartrain Causeway opened in Louisiana, the longest continuous bridge in the world

2021 America ended its 20-year war in Afghanistan as the last military evacuation plane flew out of Kabul

2022 In Jackson, Mississippi, the city's largest water treatment plant failed, leaving 150,000 people without safe running water and closing schools and businesses

2025 The Colombian commerce ministry officialized a complete export ban of coal to Israel to prevent further atrocities in the Gaza Strip.

In bed at 9:05, up at 3:50; 0410 203.4 118/71/64 110 - back to bed and up at 7: 20: 0735 203.0 130/85/61 102.  The 0.4# weight loss was from another urine loss, but why the increase in BP an little decrease in heart rate is a mystery to me.  Today is the beginning of a hot spell after some terrific weather, 70/83/67, cloudy, thunderstorm last night, rain expected this afternoon.

Morning meds at 10 a.m.  Eliquis at 8:05 a.m. and p.m.

Every Effort. I wondered whether my initial excitement about Barbara's writing in the Prologue might have been premature.  In the first two chapters of the book, I noticed two things.  First, that she reports verbatim conversations that occurred almost two decades before the book was published.  I realize that this sort of making up stuff is sometimes done for literary effect and may be at least tolerable or acceptable, but I was surprised nothing was said in an Introduction or the Prologue itself about the use of this device.  

Second, her description of the CACO visit telling her that Bill was missing didn't ring true:

"It's nearly midnight. . . "  We were laughing at [an] old joke when there was a knock on the door.  There were two Marine officers standing in the dim hall light.  They looked like a photograph: unmoving, in dress blues, high-necked, white belts, red stripes down the sides of the pants, white gloves.

I raised an eyebrow at this, because it didn't comport with my experience as a CACO for north Philly and the northern suburbs in 1966-1967.  We didn't make calls late at night; our calls were made by one officer and a staff NCO (in my case, with GySgt Schmidt from Antigo, WI), and we wore our normal work uniform, Service Alpha, not Dress Blues.  Plus, officers didn't wear white belts, only enlisted men.  And the white gloves for a CACO call seems like a stretch.

I had a long exchange (I started to write 'conversation') with ChatGPT about this, and have concluded that I oughtn't to be completely sceptical about this.  The Marine Corps Personnel Manual in force from 1961-1967 didn't specify the composition of the team that made casualty calls, nor the hours when they could or could not be made, only that one member was to be an officer (unless none was available) and the calls should be made promptly and within 12 hours of the assigning unit being notified of the casualty.  Nor did it specify the uniform to be worn for the notification.  Furthermore, Bill was missing and not known to be dead or wounded.  Marines wouldn't want Barbara to learn of this from any source other than a Marine officer in person.  Also, Barbara wasn't at home in Marquette, MI, but rather at a hotel in Green Bay.  Some Marines had to track her down and locate her before the notification could be made.  Then some officer(s) from the Green Bay Marine Reserve Center would have to be dispatched to make the notification.  They could have opted to don their dress blues for the duty because of its significance.  The reference to "white belts" suggests to me either that she was confused that the Marines were officers, whereas they were senior NCOs, not likely, or that one of the team was an NCO and the other an officer, more likely.  In other words, what Barbara reported in the memoir is not implausible.

As has often happened, I was flabbergasted, gobsmacked by the process that ChatGPT went through to assist me on this quest.  I've read that it's possible, at least for some people, to distinguish AI output from human output; I can't do it.  Communicating with ChatGPT is like speaking to an incredibly well-informed human correspondent with total recall, indeed almost omniscience, almost God-like.  It does make some mistakes and sometimes needs to be corrected, but once it is informed of its mistake, it acknowledges it, corrects itself, and makes whatever adjustments are required to comport with the newly discovered information.  Literally astounding.

The Breakup.  A passage that made me pause and think, Natalie speaking:

A few years later, the American dream I'd come to love best was my new Mark Twain notion of a nation of everyday adventurers and vagboands and seeker and scoundrels and heroes and wiseacres and charlatans, all and each committ to individualism and granting leeway for all kinds of people, weirdos welcome.  She's a character!  Live and liet live! Everyone's entitled to their own opinion!  Takes all kinds! Keep [your city here] Weird!  A free mongrel nation getting freer for everybody over the long haul, created and continuously revised by its teeming mongrel population, where epeople might consider individuals unlike them strange or unattractive or mistaken or pitiful or stupid but not deem half of one's felllow Americans loathsome, dangerous, disgusting, or demonic because of their beliefs and feelings..  And just a few more years after that, when I found out how many Americans were losing faith in that and the other American dreams, my love redoubled.  As the country started cracking up, I felt caught in a tragic love triangle: the two Americas hating each other, me still loving them both.

Pages 276 and 277.  The above passage is simply a reflection on where we were (perhaps), where we are, and where we are headed (perhaps) and not particularly reflective of what I'm about to write, but I'm impressed with the prodigious amount of learning and work that went into the writing of this novel.  Kurt Andersen is a very impressive guy.   I suspect that he may have written this work not so much for the income it might produce (though that probably was a not-insignificant motivation), but more to sort out his own thinking about what a 21st century separation or breakup of the United States would look like, how it could be worked out, especially with the urban/non-urban divide in our country.    We see it in Wisconsin with Madison and Milwaukee being so Democratic in orientation, and most of the rest of the state being so Republican.  We see it vividly in Milwaukee with the Democratic city and county being surrounded by the staunchly Republican WOW counties: Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington.  In the novel, Natalie's Tennessee sees Nashville/Davidson County stay with the U.S., while the rural counties all become part of the Free American Republic.  I don't know yet what happens with Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga, but Nashville becomes like West Berlin before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany.  Nonetheless, the book is a clear reminder of where we are now, how deeply divided we are between the Reds and the Blues, not in all jurisdictions, but in most.    Republicans take delight in color maps that show the vast, widespread regions of the nation that are Red, and the dinky Blue areas.  Those dinky blue areas, however, represent most of the nation's cities, where vast amounts of wealth and human capital are centered.

I read several reviews of the book, and I'm glad I did.  I found considerable agreement with my judgment that the first half of the book is a bit of a long, hard, slog and that the book would have been a better and easier read if it weren't so long, at well over 500 pages - like East of Eden and Lonesome Dove, but not as engaging (at least in the first half) as either of those magna opera. (Thank you, Brother Birmingham, for my 4 years of high school Latin.😊).  Kurt Andersen is a good storyteller, but he's no John Steinbeck or Larry McMurtry.