Sunday's postcard, and a Midsummer night's gasp...
August 18, 2024
Sunday's postcard, and a Midsummer-night's gasp...
August 18, 2024
Aug 18, 2024
∙ Paid
Blue darner dragonfly, in flight at a scabland marsh
Please make it go away
My uncle Bob’s passing a week ago hit me harder than I expected. There was something forever young about his spirit and humor that is transcendent. Yesterday I was absorbing an astrophysics conversation that involved, in some part, Einstein’s (correct) theorizing of gravitational waves rippling through the fabric of the cosmos. I think my departed uncle’s laughter has a similarly powerful ring to it, still traveling through the warps and riddles of universal space-time.
Funny how the mind works. Like countless other American kids of our age my siblings and I evolved in this weird zone between the orderliness of the 1950s and the rebelliousness of the 1960s. My dad—a soldier, science teacher, and swim coach—was often overwhelmed by the pace. He was a man of metrics and punctuality. The stereo in the living room belonged to Mitch Miller and Rodgers and Hammerstein. This, while my sister Nancy was smuggling rock & roll records and eight-track tapes into her bedroom down the hall, like contraband into a dormitory. I negotiated at length with dad, a.k.a. “The Coach,” to allow my crewcut to grow out from the bristling clear-cut he compelled.
In the midst of this cultural tug-of-war we visited uncle Bob in Norman, just outside Oklahoma City, where he worked at his alma mater, the University of Oklahoma. This was the summer of 1972. Within a minute or so I noticed an album cocked against one of his stereo speakers. It was Creedence Clearwater’s “Cosmo’s Factory”—“Travelin’ Band,” “Run Through the Jungle,” etc. Clear as a bell, I remember thinking, ‘holy cow, Uncle Bob’s on our side.’ I can easily imagine him singing along with John Fogerty.
Echoes of real heroes and their interrupted lives
In 1972 it felt like we were straddling an epochal change—but with one foot, still, on Omaha Beach and Point du Hoc, June 6, 1944, where hundreds of U.S. soldiers died and thousands more were wounded. I’m a long-time member of the Peace & Justice Action League of Spokane, and I’ve marched in anti-war demonstrations when I’ve felt moved to do so. But I don’t know of a good reason not to have fought Hitler’s Nazis in the 1940s. I’m aware of my great-uncles sacrifices. I have a clear understanding of why adults at my elementary school were in tears when they learned on March 28, 1969 that General (and later President) Dwight D. Eisenhower had died just short of his 80th birthday. I can only imagine the anguish Eisenhower felt on the eve of the D-Day invasion, visiting with the troops who would try to take Omaha and the other well-defended beaches at Normandy, knowing that hundreds or more of those he spoke to would die in the surf, or on the beaches.
I would also like to think that no matter where you come from—or whether or not your family has lost sons or daughters in military service—that respect and reverence for those sacrifices are in your cognitive registry.
Yet, somehow—and for reasons I can’t come even close to fathoming—the 45th President of the United States repeatedly deprecates men and women of the U.S. military who’ve been killed or wounded.
I’m not going to offer the entire list of his statements. The weight of it is profane and unnecessary. But if you doubt the profane parts be my guest to read Gen. John Kelly’s (Donald Trump’s former chief of staff) account in The Atlantic in 2020, which was corroborated last year by CNN.
“He’s not a war hero.”
The pattern is unmistakably clear. It started 2015 when Trump mocked Arizona Senator John McCain, who was badly injured and narrowly escaped death when he was shot down over North Vietnam in October 1967. McCain spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in the “Hanoi Hilton” where he was repeatedly tortured.
Trump’s assessment? “He’s not a war hero,” he told a gathering in Iowa. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
Trump received several deferments during the Vietnam era, at least one of which was a medical deferment for a bone spur in one of his feet. Two daughters of the podiatrist (who died in 2007) said the diagnosis was treated in “family lore” as a gift—extended as a favor to Trump’s father, the podiatrist’s landlord, so that Donald could avoid military service.
For any other politician—even an unusually duplicitous one (e.g. Ted Cruz)—there would be no margin for error when it comes to respecting the sacrifices of U.S. armed service members. You would simply put a hand on your heart, commend them, and thank them for their service. Yet Trump regularly disparages military service with impunity—unfailingly adored by his followers as a great patriot who will “Make America Great Again.” It is a part of the Trump phenomenon I may never understand. I’ve accepted that, and put it in the box of mysteries with quantum entanglement and the supernatural resilience of tardigrades.
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—tjc
