Days of Infamy and Signs of Hope

For my parents generation, the “greatest generation”, their terrible appointment with disaster came on December 7, 1941.

 President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it  a “day of infamy,” the unforgettable day that Japanese emperor Hirohito’s air force struck our Pearl Harbor. . . the day we entered World War II.

22 years later,  the date of infamy for my baby boomer g-generation arrived:  November 22, 1963—the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

That was the day Walter Cronkite removed his glasses and told us that President Kennedy had died at 1:00 pm, central standard time.

All of us baby boomers remember where we were when we first heard the terrible news. I was in a 7th-grade classroom. Our principal interrupted the class to deliver the news. She spent a few minutes recalling how the President had "had 'em backed up against the wall," referring to the Russians and the Cuban missile crisis.

There was no other day of such a tragic infamy until 9/11/2001, when we all remember where we were and what we were doing when we saw or heard the news of the World Trade Center collapsing. I was repairing some exterior siding on a friend's house when Mike rolled out in his wheelchair with the news that a plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York. My first imaginative image was of a small plane, like a Cessna, crashing into that skyscraper. But, of course, the disaster was much larger than I had first imagined. . .

But hey. . . even as I recall these tragic dates in American history, I do want to conclude this moment of reflection with a positive indicator for our future, 200 colorful images.

 Behold the hopeful graphic artworks of 200 child residents, on display in a public playground, Vacaville, California: 

 

Glass half-Full 

Bob Woodward's Legacy

 In ages past, a fervent interest in history required stacks of those ancient paper things called “Books.”

Now books are nice, and still essential for scholarship, but I would not trade internet access for any of them, except for the Greatest Story Ever Told, the Bible. But that’s another story for another day. 

Here’s my latest story hot off the press, so to speak. 

Watching Youtube, yesterday, I come across Carl Woodward being interviewed by Ari Melber. I had to listen in.

Here’s Ari prying into the mind of the reporter who broke the Watergate story. . . with a little help, of course, from his friend and fellow Washington Post reporter, Carl Bernstein. 

For such a time as that . . . 1973, those two guys were born. 

My mind wandered back to the summer of 1973. In my near-campus mini-apartment, I took every opportunity, while not working at the shoe store or attending my last two classes at nearby LSU. . . every opportunity to watch the Senate Watergate hearings on TV.

Those hearings, chaired by North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin, were similar to the recent House January 6th hearings, and just as informative, for an historical investigation and expose' on events that were, at that time,  history-changing events. 

You see. . . back in ’73, things were different. But you didn't have to be there to learn about it.

If ye young whippersnappers are not familiar with the Watergate saga, do a search for “All the President’s Men.” 

Long story short: Two Washington Post reporters tracked down enough evidence to convince a President to take his ball and go home.

I’ll not dredge up all the drama. Just check it out and see what you think:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E18UmgEvGJk

  A few years later, the story was told in cinema: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_President%27s_Men_(film)

While recommending the movie, I’ll not get into the lengthy story of President Richard Nixon’s ultimate withdrawal from the Oval Office. 

I will, however, commend Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for opening the nation’s eyes to the inner workings. . . the “Plumbers’” view of what all the President’s men did in their attempt to cover up the Watergate Hotel break-in, a crime not unlike--though on a much smaller scale-- the recent trump insurrection attempt to overthrow our US government.

When you get to be my age, what is even more interesting is to hear, right out of the mouth of such an alert man as this . . . Bob Woodward, and discover his take on that history-changing investigation. . . how it impacted our nation and how it prompted Bob to persist in his lifelong search for journalistic truth, and then. . . and then explain it all to a highly qualified contemporary reporter, Ari Melber. 

Oh, and, as if all that were not enough, Bob did manage to, in between his many investigations and interviews, write a few more books. . . definitely worth the reading, or the watching.

King of Soul

The Tragedy of Verminizing Public Discourse

 I don’t know, but I been told (by Steve Schwartz), that a recent trump tweet referred to “Radical Left Thugs” as “vermin.”

The trump tweet, which Steve showed us in his “The Warning” blog, specifies who, in trump’s opinion, those vermin are: communists, marxists, fascists and radical left thugs who will do “anything possible” . . . to destroy “America and the American Dream.”

Apparently donald trump was not aware that he was including some of his own supporters, the “fascists”, in his vermin list.

If donald does intend to destroy fascists, then he should notify the proud boys and the the oathkeepers and the three-percenters and all those other radical thugs who were standing by awaiting his call to action on January 6 2021. He should warn them of his intent to destroy them in his campaign to extinguish “the vermin.”

Rodents, cockroaches, termites, bedbugs and lice are vermin.

Persons whose bodies typically host vermin are also sometimes derogatorily called vermin: beggars, vagrants, homeless people, poor people, even. . . immigrants! May it never be! The pilgrims were immigrants!

But Democrats, liberals, socialists, communists, BLM activists, LGBTQ people, marxists, leftists and Jewish people are not vermin. 

The former president’s derogatory name-calling does not establish their identities. In this free nation, each person establishes their own identity. Furthermore, each group establishes their own identity.

The former president’s use of that word to defile his political opponents places him in the same leadership category as adolf hitler.

George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Dwight D. Eisenhower would not/did not use that word to describe their fellow-citizens, or even their enemies. As dignified American leaders, they would not stoop so low as to insult their opponents by calling them “vermin.”

Even Richard Nixon did not use that word in referring to his political opponents. Nixon certainly never called Hubert Humphrey or George McGovern or Sam Ervin or Woodward, Bernstein or Ben Bradlee . . . “vermin.”

Only adolf hitler stooped so law as to calling his opponents “vermin.”

Now donald trump calls his opponents vermin. If he keeps insulting and deriding them at this rate, the magamaniacs will begin stretching out their arms in the maga salute: “Heil Trump.”

Or, as the witch hailed  Macbeth in Shakespeare’s tragedy play, “Hail MacTrump who shall be King hereafter!”

That royal destiny could only be accomplished by the dastardly shedding of blood that Lady Macbeth later regretted when she cried “Out damned spot!” 

And Burn’em Constitution Rule of Law doth move against Washington and Lincoln’s name!

May it never be! . . . although, methinks. . . dark, foreboding clouds of American tragedy do loom on our horizon, not unlike those that Romeo feared when he declared:

“For my mind misgives some consequence yet hanging in the stars shall bitterly begin. . ”

with these trump’s rebels!

Glass half-Full

Louisiana

I left Louisiana in broad daylight; back in ’73 it was. 

I was a clueless English major LSU grad, still wet behind the years with an untamed urge to experience the good life.

California, where everything was hap’nin, was too far away. I had hitchhiked there one time and found it to be a cool place.

But some family connections steered me to the South’s version of California, Florida.

So I did the Florida thing for about a year and half, selling life insurance and then newspaper advertising. But then a few days of jail time on a traffic violation—driving on a revoked license to get to work one morning, but then getting caught— I opted for leaving Florida in the broad daylight.  

Finally settled in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina. Been there ever since. Destiny, I guess. At least I like to think so. 

Better yet. . . Providence, like Abraham.

Who’da thunk it that a Miss'ippi River boy, me, kinda like Sam Cooke, "born by the River" would end up living life as a mountain man?

But this is America, where a man can carve his own destiny out of whatever wood, stone, mountain, river or  storm gets in his way. 

When Katrina hit Louisiana in '05, I accompanied Pat and a bus full of nurses on a trip from our home in Boone NC down to Baton Rouge. I was quite impressed with the work that Red Cross was doing for hurricane victims who had been flooded or blown out of their owns. During that time, I remember hearing Randy Newman's song, Louisiana, about the great flood of 1927.

Listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGs2iLoDUYE

Long about 2005 or so, the ole Writerly urge—and the lame LSU English degree— finally kicked in and paid off, so to speak, haha!. I wrote and published my first novel, Glass half-Full. After that,  as a few more years rolled by the second and third novels somehow tumbled out of the laptop: Glass Chimera, Smoke.

And then the long-awaited novel, the fourth, a story that involved going home again (in my authorial memory and imagination) appeared, having been summoned  out of a million keystrokes, onto 258 KDP pages: King of Soul.

It's a story about what happened to our nation back in the days of the Vietnam War, while I was a student with a college deferment at LSU, until the lottery when my number came up 349.

Most of the story is centered on events at LSU,  although the last scene is in Kent, Ohio.

Go figure. In my mind,  it’s the great American novel, haha!. Thank God and my wife, RN Nurse Pat, for making that grand writing project possible while she was keeping patients alive in the ICU. 

What’s so fortuitous is that the creative urge had started to bloom in Asheville while Pat and I were meeting and falling in love.

Thomas Wolfe's famous 1929 novel was “Look Homeward Angel” which mostly happened in a guest house in Asheville that was just a stone’s throw from the printing company where I worked for a few years.

Thomas Wolfe also wrote another novel:   You Can't Go Home Again

Nevertheless, come Tuesday, I’ll be  "going home again," getting back to my roots,

flying out of Carolina in the broad daylight to Go "Home" Again, in that bayou state where I was born in '51. We’ll see what the ole home place has become since I left Louisiana many and many a year ago with a guitar on my knee, passin' through Alabama. . .  my true love, Pat,  for to see.

King of Soul