Being downwind of Canadian wildfires is not fun. It’s reminding me of being downwind of Mt. St. Helens eruptions back in 1980-81.
In Memoriam
An annual reposting of some things pertaining to Memorial Day. First, a remembrance of a soldier I never knew.
Fifteen years ago I wrote the following on Memorial Day, and I wanted to revisit it. It’s about the Vietnam Veteran whose name I remember, despite the fact that I had no relation to him and clearly never knew him, because he was killed four years before I was born.
Memorial Day, for all its solemnity, has for me always been something of a distant holiday, because no one close to me has ever fallen in war, and in fact I have to look pretty far for relatives who have even served in wartime. Both of my grandfathers fought in World War I, but both had been dead for years when I was born. I know that an uncle of mine served during World War II, but I also know that he saw no action (not to belittle his service, but Memorial Day is generally set aside to remember those who paid the “last full price of devotion”). My father-in-law served in Viet Nam, but my own father did not (he had college deferments for the first half of the war, and was above draft age during the second). So there is little in my family history to personalize Memorial Day; for me, it really is a day to remember “all the men and women who have died in service to the United States”.
One personal remembrance, though, does creep up for me each Memorial Day. It has nothing at all to do with my family; in fact, I have no connection with the young man in question.
When I was in grade school, during the fall and spring, when the weather was nice, we would have gym class outdoors, at the athletic field. On good days we’d play softball or flag football or soccer; on not-so-good days we’d run around the quarter-mile track. But the walk to the athletic field involved crossing the street in front of the school and walking a tenth of a mile or so down the street, past the town cemetery. I remember that at the corner of the cemetery we passed, behind the wrought-iron fence, the grave of a man named Larry Havers was visible. His stone was decorated with a photograph of him, in military uniform. I don’t recall what branch in which he served, nor do I recall his date-of-birth as given on the stone, but I do recall the year of his death: 1967. I even think the stone specified the specific battle in which he was killed in action, but I’m not sure about that, either.
That’s what I remember each Memorial Day: the grave of a man I never knew, who died four years before I was born in a place across the world to which I doubt I’ll ever go. And in the absence of anyone from my own family, Mr. Havers’s name will probably be the one I look for if I ever visit that memorial in Washington. I hope his family wouldn’t mind.
I looked online and found these images, first of Mr. Havers’s obituary and then of Mr. Havers himself. The things you remember. I wonder what kind of man he was. He has been gone for more than half a century. His name is not forgotten.
Mr. Havers’s service information can be found on the Virtual Vietnam Wall here. He was born 14 October 1946 and died 29 October 1967, in Thua Thien.
—
Well, how do you do, young Willie McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile ‘neath the warm summer sun,
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the great fallen in 1916,
I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1916,
To that faithful heart are you forever 19?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Enshrined then, forever, behind a glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
The sun’s shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard that’s still No Man’s Land
The countless white crosses in stand mute in the sand
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man,
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
And I can’t help but wonder why, young Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did they really believe when they answered the call,
Did they really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain
The killing and dying, was all done in vain,
For young Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
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“I’m sorry, but that is just incorrect enough for you to lose!”
In the course of keeping my father company lately, I’ve been watching a bit of Jeopardy* lately. I enjoy it as much as ever, though something happened earlier this week that annoyed me.
First, let me say that I’ve noticed over the last bunch of years–maybe since Ken Jennings’s big run–that the runaway blowout game has become more and more common, and it seems like more often than not, by the time Final Jeopardy rolls around, the score is something like $28000 to $3600 and $1900, respectively. I watched one champion rack up a week of such wins, and then she lost to another guy who then went on to pile up another week of such wins. His name is Ben and apparently he teaches Philosophy at a college in Wisconsin.
Ben lost the other night. And though I found his run annoying precisely because all of his wins were boring blowouts, his loss annoyed the shit out of me. It boils down to rules, and I know, the rules are the rules, but there are times when slavish adherence to rules is complete BS, and this was one of them.
I don’t remember the numbers in play, but the game was not a runaway; Ben actually needed to be right on Final Jeopardy to win…or at least not wager so much that he’d lose on a wrong answer. The Final Jeopardy clue was this (paraphrased), in the category “Shakespeare Characters”:
“The names of these two lovers are taken from Latin words meaning ‘blessed’.”
Now, first off: I came up with the right answer, because isn’t that the most important thing about Jeopardy, anyway? For you, as a viewer, to feel as smart as, if not smarter, than the people on the teevee who know all this weird random stuff? Why yes! But still: the two challengers both answered “Romeo and Juliet”, and both of those answers were wrong, so both of them lost money. Again, the numbers aren’t important, but at least one of them still had some money left after their wager.
Ben, however, got the right characters: Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing. But wait! He spelled them Beatrice and Benedict, which was enough for the judges to rule him incorrect. His wager was big enough to drop him into second place, and off the show (until he comes back for the Tournament of Champions, so all isn’t lost for Ben).
“Rules are rules!”, people will say, but in the greater scheme here, let’s be real. He got the two right people in the right play, and if that clue had come up in standard play, where answers are verbal, he likely would have been fine unless he had been very careful to enunciate the ‘T’ at the end of Benedict. And I have seen people provide misspelled answers that were ruled correct on Final Jeopardy quite frequently! Lots of times people don’t know the exact spelling of whatever it is they’re writing, so they come up with a phonetic equivalent. So the rub here would be that Benedict is not phonetically the same as Benedick, and that’s true.
But again I say, come on. The guy obviously got the two right characters from the right play, while the other two players weren’t even in the ballpark. To rule that he loses because he was ninety-eight percent right, but his two-percent of wrongness was sufficient to be equivalent to the two other folks who were one-hundred percent wrong, was just annoying.
But we’ll see Ben again. He’s a terrific player, and his loss was bullshit.
None of the games since has been a blowout and we’ve seen the championship change hands every night since Ben’s exit, so there’s that.
And by the way, Mayim Bialik’s giggle when someone gets the Daily Double is still annoying. She’s fine as host, I just dislike that one quirk of hers.
* Yes, I know that the actual title of the show includes an exclamation point, but it looks typographically wrong to me, so I’m omitting it.
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Thanks, Mom
My mother doesn’t like Mother’s Day, having established quite early on when I was a kid that she found it a cynical ploy invented by the greeting card companies. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t cite just one of many memories for which I owe her for having them at all:
And, a theme song for the ages!
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Sighing towards Gomorrah
There’s a particular type of response from Gun Enthusiasts* that you’ll run into each and every time there’s a mass shooting in this country (which means, you can see this response each and every day, if you look for it, since we now have mass shootings on a daily basis). This response is always offered in response to calls for weapons bans. Here’s a perfect example:
This is a very popular response, but I always find it odd that none of these Gun Enthusiasts* ever seem to consider that the person who committed whatever mass shooting it is that drew their response could have said or posted the exact same thing, right up until they actually started shooting.
* By “Gun Enthusiasts” I mean, “Gun Nuts”.
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Mr. Klepper speaks
Land of the “free”, home of the “brave”
Land of the free…except for reading what you want to read, teaching your kids what you want to teach, seeking the medical care you and your doctor think you need.
Home of the brave…unless you’re a cop who is “frightened for your life”, or some random person whose doorbell rang or onto whose driveway a car turned.
It may be time to change our national anthem. We’re not anywhere close to living up to it. Problem is, it’s hard to make “Land of white people with guns, home of the scared shitless of everything” fit a tune nicely.
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Mr. Sorkin
Apparently Aaron Sorkin suffered a bad stroke recently. I certainly wish him well; despite my litany of issues with his work over the years, he is still responsible for some of the best things I’ve ever seen, and I still tend to catch up with his stuff eventually. His current project is a revival of the Lerner-and-Loewe musical Camelot, for which Sorkin is providing a whole new book; this intrigues me greatly as the main knock on the original Camelot was always “Great songs, lousy book.” So we’ll see. If nothing else, I expect to learn how Camelot incorporates walk-and-talk scenes, how often characters either agree with each other or answer in the affirmative with “Yeah”, or discuss the finer points of Gilbert and Sullivan.
Sorkin has struggled with addiction for years, so to learn now that he’s been smoking a lot for years is no surprise:
“Mostly it was a loud wake-up call,” Sorkin told the publication. “I thought I was one of those people who could eat whatever he wanted, smoke as much as he wanted, and it’s not going to affect me. Boy, was I wrong.”
Sorkin added later, “There was a minute when I was concerned that I was never going to be able to write again, and I was concerned in the short-term that I wasn’t going to be able to continue writing ‘Camelot.’”
The writer originally did not plan to go public with his stroke, but he decided to talk about it with The Times because “if it’ll get one person to stop smoking, then it’ll be helpful.” Sorkin said for a long period of time he was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.
Ouch. But if he’s continuing to work against these addictions, good for him.
Here, by the way, is one of those things Sorkin wrote that I adore. This is from Season Two of The West Wing, in which Leo invites Republican commentator Ainsley Hayes to his office so he can offer her a job, after she has mopped the floor with Sam Seaborn in a televised debate-style show. This scene is just full of charm and rhythm:
This is on my list of things I wish I could write so well.
Best wishes to Mr. Sorkin on his recovery and his conquering of nicotine.
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Spring forward
It can’t be “common” if nobody has it
I was reading Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Substack the other day–I’ve been enjoying his writing a great deal–and I saw this quote:
I have to say: I agree with this whole-heartedly. I’ve hated the phrase “common sense” for years, for the exact same reason: what people who refer to “common sense” almost always mean is “My position is inherently self-evident and you are a fool for disagreeing with it.” Referring to one’s own beliefs as “common sense” is rhetorical self-promotion, nothing more.
Now, maybe some people refer to “common sense” to refer to received wisdom that should just be easily obvious: It’s just common sense to change your oil every few thousand miles! It’s just common sense to season the cast-iron pan before you use it! And so on. Here, too, is an implied insult, since “common sense” is almost never invoked to describe a given piece of information until we have encountered someone who doesn’t know it.
So let’s retire “common sense”. It’s a terrible phrase that has no place in an informed and rational civilization.
(Yes, it’s rather late on Friday and I’m on my second drink, why do you ask?)