Ormond museum features art from the war in France and the war at home

(Continued from Jan. 13)

I spend a lot of time at Malcolm Fraser’s “The Soul Escaping Death” painting flanked by a framed spread of many medals earned in World War 1. He served in the French Blue Devils unit and was wounded five times. He also was an officer with the Red Cross on the frontlines.

Chris wanders off. She knows that I may be awhile. 

That’s what you do at a museum, right? Wander. Or roll, depending on your mobility.

If you look up Fraser at New York City’s Salmagundi Club web site, you find that Fraser was a member. I had to search for him and the screen listed 56 items in the file. But the link does not go to the artwork but you can see some in person at the Ormond Memorial Art Museum & Gardens, 78 E. Granada, Blvd. The Salmagundi club is dedicated to representational art so it’s natural that it drew Fraser who painted portraits of the living and the dead, angels, soldiers, and John the Baptist among them.

“The Soul Escaping Death” shows a dead soldier on the ground in front of blasted battlements. He is wrapped in a U.S. flag that he apparently was carrying on the staff he grips in his dead hands. An angel has one hand on the body and another on a robe stripped from what’s supposed to be the soldier’s soul rising into the gilded heavens. The spirit looks free and happy, the vestments looking as if they are morphing into angel’s wings. The soul’s naked body looks female with long curly hair and the possibility of breasts and any genitals hidden under a triangle of pubic hair. It could be that this is Fraser’s vision of the angelic form, one that is human but intersexual, one that represents a brand-new being that we become after death. The exposed flesh of the dead soldier and the angel is rough and brown as if they were connected to the ground like old oak trees. The soul’s flesh is the pink of life, a representation of new life in the soul.

I looked at this painting a long time. I couldn’t decide if it was a work of hope in the face of death or a memoir of an artist who has witnessed slaughter on a grand scale. He was awarded both the Croix de Guerre and the Verdun Medal. “Verdun” was symbolic of the war for the French, a battle cry and also a memory of defeat. Verdun was the longest battle of the war, lasting 11 months. Casualties were enormous for the French and Germans, with 700,000 dead, missing, and wounded. The site’s towering Douaumont Ossuary contains the bones of more than 100,000 soldiers never identified, French and German dead intermingled. You can view them through little windows.

Fraser was an accomplished artist. Not sure he took many risks. The 20^th century was about to explode and the explosion was captured by poets and writers. The so-called “Lost Generation” gave us exciting and troubling masterpieces.

Charles Humes Jr. is a living artist from Miami who has much in common with this creative breed. Humes lives in the present and creates in the present. As an African-American, he has an endless array of subjects, many taken from daily newspapers. Lest we miss his messages, he uses newspaper clippings in his mixed media work.  The museum’s handout for the new year shows Humes’ “Gentrified” on the cover.

“Gentrified” is a loaded word in the black community. It often means that a black neighborhood is being turned over to developers and the mostly-white gentry who will inhabit the condos/townhouses that will replace independent businesses. Artists figure in this, too. They often are the first to occupy rundown urban neighborhoods because they can afford them. Then the city (I’m looking at you, Denver) becomes known as an arts hub and young people swarm in and then smart developers who saw this coming and bought rundown buildings kick out the artists and renovate them into condos and before long you have ranks of techies wandering the streets looking for art for their walls by artists who once lived in their building but now can only afford the prairie exurbs or some quaint rural village in the foothills that soon will swarm with newcomers seeking real estate in artsy quaint rural villages.

It's not the fault of artists. Hey, I just wanted a place to paint! It’s life in America. Not sure what it’s going to look like in Trumplandia.

Oh yes I do. I truly do.

Humes’ work will be on exhibit through Feb. 9. Next up are Colombian sculptor Felipe Lopez and collage artist Staci Swider. Accord to the handout: “Her [Swinder’s] work is a meditation on aging, memory, and the unseen forces that guide us.” Sounds intriguing and timely. Opening reception at the museum gallery is Feb. 20, 6-8 p.m.

Malcolm Fraser flies with the angels at Ormond Memorial Art Museum & Gardens

What makes a 49-year-old artist abandon his paints and go to war?

That’s the question I pondered when visiting the Ormond Memorial Art Museum & Gardens.

Malcolm Fraser was a Canada-born professional painter and illustrator who had graduated from the Sorbonne and attended Heidelberg University. In 1917, he left the U.S., steamed to Europe, and joined, after some intense training, the French “Blue Devils” unit at the Front. He was wounded five times and received France’s Croix de Guerre for his heroics. Later, he joined the A.E.F., was promoted to captain, and served with the American Red Cross on the front lines.

Fraser ended up spending most of his time in Ormond Beach. Toward the end of his life, he looked for a place to feature his artwork and one that was dedicated to veterans. A $10,000 endowment by Fraser in 1946 got the ball rolling and led to this impressive place.

Its priorities are clear when you leave handicapped parking and roll through the jungle. As Credence sang:

Better run through the jungle, 

Better run through the jungle, 

Better run through the jungle, 

Whoa, don’t look back and see.

I roll on my electric scooter and Chris walks. A beautiful space, and peaceful. I can barely hear the traffic zooming by on one of Ormond's busiest intersections. We enter the sheltered labyrinth and follow the lines on its painted multicolored surface decorated with butterflies and hummingbirds. It was designed by by Joan Baliker and the late Carol Bertrand and refreshed by Mack Sutton (artists must be named). This one is within a big gazebo and is a great play place for kids. I think about the outdoor stone labyrinth at my hometown Cheyenne Botanic Gardens, now covered with snow. 

Along the walkway is a monument by Mark Chew to veterans of the Korean War. Its streamlined silver surface reaches for the trees and beyond. It's the shape of a flame but cold as the Chosin Reservoir. Around the next turn is a bronze for Vietnam veterans by Gregory Johnson. On what looks like an old kitchen chair sits a helmet and canteen. Dog tags and a uniform shirt hang from the chair back. Its legs straddle beat-up combat boots.

I linger. This was my generation’s war, not mine physically, but it's lodged in the memories of any guy of draft age from that time (December 1968 passed Draft physical Jacksonville FL, high school deferment; December 1969 Selective Service Draft Lottery #128; Navy ROTC midshipman 1969-71; two months served on USS John F. Kennedy as midshipman, summer 1970; released from the Draft on Jan. 1, 1972). I once read this about those times: "Vietnam sucked the soul out of an entire generation."

Memories remain. 

Johnson's statue is homey, I think, the things a grunt might leave behind when he changes into civvies. Or it could be a family's reminders of a GI whose psyche never made it back home. Think of war stories: Krebs in Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” or Ron Kovic in “Born on the Fourth of July” or Billy Lynn in Ben Fountain’s “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” (whatever happened to Ang Lee’s 2016 movie based on the book?).

We emerge from the jungle and its memories. The sun shines on a colorful "Can Do" sculpture by the late Seward Johnson, part of the public art display on Grenada by the Ormond Beach Arts District. Also on the ground is the "Embracing Peace" sculpture celebrating the famous Times Square kiss on VJ Day. Inside the museum, a bronze plaque lists more than 200 residents who served in WW2 (updated in 1999 to list African-American veterans) and one dedicated to WW1 veterans. A WW1 Doughboy helmet rests in a glass case by Malcolm Fraser’s photo and bio that greet visitors. This is a decorated soldier, and we are here to see his artwork.

(To be continued)

Russia will need another Tolstoy to write about Putin's war on Ukraine

Odd in 2022 to be rooting for an underdog European country against a maniacal dictator bent on war.

Seems like 1939. Not that I experienced it first-hand -- I didn’t arrive on this planet for another 11 years. In that span, World War II began and ended and other wars erupted. One maniacal dictator was defeated and another one rose. We can’t get rid of these guys. Face it, almost all are guys. In America’s zeal to blunt Stalin, Khrushchev, etc., we waged war in Vietnam and sponsored dozens of proxy wars in Latin America. We jumped into Korea. My father, a World War II veteran who only returned to the States in 1946, faced a call-up for Korea just when he was celebrating the birth of his first child, me. He wasn’t called up but wondered in a letter: “I thought they gave us 20 years between wars?”

They do, as it turned out. His father fought in The War To End All Wars (TWTEAW) and 23 years later, Dad enlisted in the U.S. Army. In the early 1960s, the U.S. waged war in Vietnam with “advisors” and, just a few years later, draftees were being flown to Ton Son Nhut. I wasn’t one of them, thankfully, but many were, reluctantly going overseas to fight yet another war. Twenty years later, we were in Southwest Asia to fight Saddam and back again 10 years later to fight Saddam and Osama and the Taliban. We were in Afghanistan 20 years.

War never ends. Each generation gets it taste and a generation later elects warmakers that send their sons and daughters off to be killed in a foreign land.

So it goes.

After living through that history, I find it ironic that I cheer on the Ukrainians. In my head, I watch the coverage and say in my head, “Kill the Russians.” I don’t say it out loud but the sentiment is there, floating around the ether. Putin is the bad guy here and we try to stop him with economic sanctions and solidarity with NATO countries. It may work. But what happens if Putin uses chemical weapons or nukes? We have to respond. Kill the Russians! I say it although I know that it's young conscripts and civilians doing the dying while Putin plays Risk in his bunker. 

Inside of me is the part that read Chekhov and Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. I remember Tolstoy’s writing about his horrific experiences as a Russian officer in the Caucasus campaign ("Hadji Murat") and Crimean War ("Sevastopol Sketches"). In the Caucasus, Chechens waged a guerrilla war against Russian troops. They responded by torching the forests so the enemy had no place to hide and decimating villages that lent aid to the guerrillas (sound familiar?). Says one of Tolstoy's Chechen fighters returning to his burnt-out village:

“Nobody spoke about hatred towards the Russians. What they all felt, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hatred. It was not hatred, but an unwillingness even to acknowledge these Russian dogs as people.”

The Crimean War spawned Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” that I once had to memorize in detention at Catholic School. It also brought ministrations of Florence Nightingale to our attention. It was as bloody as the one in Chechnya and Tolstoy described his vanity and that of his fellow officers this way:

“A thousand human self-images managed to be offended, a thousand managed to be awfully pleased, to puff themselves up, and a thousand – to find their rest within the arms of death.”

Maybe there’s a Tolstoy among the troops assaulting Mariupol or closing in on Kyiv. Someone who goes off to war in high spirits but comes home in tatters.

Dark times demand dark humor

We live in absurd times. A Reality TV show star is president. He is a narcissist who is never wrong about anything but is wrong about everything. He enlists creepy people, straight out of a Dickens' novel, to do his dirty deeds.

You gotta laugh. How did we get into such a mess? If I was a serious columnist for a major metropolitan newspaper, I could dissect Trump's faults with a litany of facts and figures. Real journalists do that.

I'm a blogger so am not constrained by facts. I do know truth from lies and I try to adhere to them when it matters. I'd rather turn a nice phrase or get a laugh. I'm a fiction writer, too, which gives me a certain leeway to embellish, maybe even lie.

What makes us laugh at serious topics? It's in our genes, a human response to inhumane acts. How else can we deal with a monster like Trump, a ghoul like Stephen Miller? How can we tolerate war and pestilence?

It takes some talent to get us to laugh at human foibles. It takes skill and wit. Wit in the old-fashioned sense. A person with wit has "the ability to relate seemingly disparate things so as to illuminate or amuse," according to Merriam-Webster. Here's another: "a talent for banter or persiflage," persiflage meaning "light or slightly contemptuous banter or mockery."

A good stand-up comedian has wit. A bad one just tells jokes. A witty politician can turn a phrase, helps us laugh at ourselves. A bad politician heaps scorn on helpless people, afflicts the afflicted.

There's a darkness to good humor. And it takes skill to tease the humor our of war and pestilence, sex and death. The Seven Deadly Sins, a.k.a. capital vices, are as serious as the name. A good comic writer can find a lot of fun in "lust" and its sister, "envy." I've heard many a comedian describe their lustful ways -- failed relationships, oddball sexual practices, the inevitable heartbreak that comes with opening up yourself to others.

A novelist gets thousands of words to show you heartbreak. It can come in many ways. The pursuit of love. How love of country or religion can turn out badly.

We could blame war on "wrath," another deadly sin. For those who experience war, heartbreak may best describe its aftermath.

In the film version of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, a platoon of heroic U.S. soldiers back from Iraq are celebrated at an NFL playoff game. The pageantry of a big NFL bash is juxtaposed with Billy Lynn's memories of Iraq and the guilt he feels at not saving a buddy. One of the scenes involves Billy Lynn and the team owner, played straight by comedic actor Steve Martin. The fatuous owner chides Billy for his uncertainty and notes that his platoon now is bigger than Billy Lynn -- it belongs to America. So America gets to celebrate by playing a football game and shooting off fireworks. EDM beats power the costumed dancers who writhe around the stage while the soldiers stand and get appreciative applause from the crowd. The pageantry and pathos of America on stage.

Dark humor and satire are cousins. Often, dark humor is poking fun at a cataclysmic event. World War II was not a laugh riot but some amazing books came out of the struggle. Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five. Same goes for World War I. The Good Soldier Svjek is a great example, a book that set the stage for later war books and movies all the way up to the present. In the hands of a good writer, one with wit, the most serious war novel can yield some laughs. All Quiet on the Western Front is a good example.

Vietnam was my generation's heartbreak. Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato with its magical-realist elements. Meditations in Green by Stephen Wright is another darkly comic take on Vietnam and its aftermath. The movie Full Metal Jacket came out of a novel by Gustav Hasford but took a darkly comic path in Kubrick's hands. No surprise from the director of Dr. Strangelove. Michael Herr, Hasford and Kubrick collaborated on the screenplay. Herr wrote the memoir Dispatches which was part of the inspiration for Apocalypse Now, which has its own absurdist moments. Herr was a correspondent in Vietnam for Esquire Magazine. Although Herr has admitted that he invented some of the characters and did not actually witness some of the events and dialogue, he contends it is all true. In France, Dispatches was published as a novel. In Vietnam, it was all true and it was all fiction.

Fiction writers yearn to go beyond the history into a place of story, a place where the reader is compelled to move on and possibly laugh or shake their heads or both.

Where's Herbert Hoover when we need him?

In times like these, we need a guy like Herbert Hoover.

Hoover has long been a joke for his poor performance in reacting to the Great Depression during his presidency. Prosperity is "just around the corner," or so he said. Can you say Hooverville?

When World War I erupted overseas, while his country remained neutral, Hoover jumped into the fray and chaired the Committee for Relief in Belgium. He was responsible for feeding thousands of starving people in Belgium and northern France

When the U.S. joined World War I in April 1917, Hoover was the man they called upon to get shit done. He was named head of the Food Administration and came to be known as the "food czar." Most people know of Victory Gardens on the home front in World War II. But there were War Gardens in The Great War. While President Wilson called on Americans to make sacrifices for the war effort, Hoover fed the civilians at home and the doughboys in France.

After the war, he led the American Relief Administration which shipped four million tons of food to Central and Eastern Europe and post-revolutionary Russia. In 1920, the newly-elected President Harding made him head of the Department of Commerce. His competency earned him the title of "Secretary of the Department of Commerce and Under-secretary to all of the other departments." During the big Mississippi River flood of 1927, Hoover ran the relief efforts.

Hoover ran for president as a Republican in 1928 and decisively defeated Al Smith. The stick market crash came less than a year later and, in 1932, FDR took over the White house for 13 years.

Hoover was, as I said before, a guy who could GSD. So why did this go-getter from modest Midwestern roots lose the 1932 election to a rich guy from New York? He never took seriously the suffering of Americans during the Great Depression. FDR made a lot of promises and ended up keeping many of them, earning him the hatred and some envy from Republicans. Hoover had tried to get the economy moving again. But he was adamant that the government should not be directly involved in relief efforts.

Sound familiar?

It;s one of the ironies of history that Hoover could feed millions across the globe but let those in his backyard starve. He was all food food relief efforts as long as they didn't come from the gubment. He wasn't a cruel egomaniac like Trump. But his Republican small-government stance was almost America's undoing.

I'm no historian but Hoover's dilemma seems to be playing out inside the Beltway almost 90 years later. Unlike Trump, Hoover was an accomplished administrator in the private sector and in government. But their approach to an emergency seems the same. It's no big deal. Americans can't starve. We are immune to Third World viruses. The suffering was all around.

Last night, as I watched the third season of "Babylon Berlin," the stock market crashed in October 1929. In the Berlin streets, men ran madly to their banks and brokerage houses. One of protagonist Inspector Rath's colleagues goes crazy and takes hostages at a bank, threatening to kill them if they don't hand over his money. Outside an office, a businessman shoots himself in the head. As Rath walks down stairs, a man's legs hang limp above him, obviously a case of hanging. Rath is not oblivious to the suffering. He knows a little bit about it. He's a combat veteran of the war and treats his serious shell-shock symptoms with hits of morphine. He also knows that Nazi sympathizers plot to take over the police department and he is on a mission to do something about it.

There are those who are oblivious due to political orthodoxy. That is not Trump. Remember that he was a Democrat for much of his life, probably because he had to deal with lots of Dems in NYC. Trump is what he has always been, an unscrupulous narcissist. Yesterday, when threatened by America's governors charting their own way out of the pandemic, he said that they couldn't do that because he alone was in charge. Period. Spoken like a true autocrat. One of these days, he will read the Constitution and discover that we have three branches of government. They've all been compromised by the GOP but we know how it's supposed to work. In November, we will have the opportunity to return the country to its roots. I hope that all those nurses and doctors and CNAs and first responders will remember that it was Trump who left them unprotected against the COVID-19 scourge. When it happens again, and it will, we need an adult in charge.

When all else fails, the arts help make sense of the senseless

Every so often, I pick up a book that I can't put down. "The Winter Soldier" by Daniel Mason is one of them. I hadn't heard of it until I came across it on a table of trade paperbacks at our local Barnes & Noble. The title grabbed me as did the cover art of a city that looked like it could be the Vienna of 1914.

The back cover blurb said it was about a Viennese nobleman and doctor who goes off to serve the empire during World War I. He falls in love with a nurse.

That's pretty much all I needed to know: medical personnel in WWI. I just finished a draft of a novel set after the war with medical personnel as main characters. Research! I didn't count on being drawn into a story that wouldn't let me put it down. But that's what happened.

In "The Winter Soldier," Lucius Krzelewski is about what you'd expect from a privileged product of the decaying Austria-Hungary empire. A talented but self-absorbed med student. He works hard to establish credentials that will lead to a cushy practice. He's an understudy to a prominent but old-fashioned professor. He prefers his books over contact with ill humans.

War comes. Lucius takes his time joining the army. He does, finally, and his father wants him to serve in the Austrian cavalry and his mother wants him safely in Vienna.

He joins the medical corps and is sent to a little army hospital tucked into the Carpathian mountains. When he arrives, he finds that he is the only doctor. He has never operated on a living human. He does not know the first thing about trauma medicine, amputation, or anything else. Head nurse Margarete, a nun, has to teach him about battlefield medicine. The nun may or may not be a nun. A soldier who arrives near-death in the midst of winter plays a key role.

That's the set-up. No spoilers here! I started to read it for background on war-time medical practices. But the human drama is what captured me. It's thrilling and worth the read.

The author is a medical doctor and this is his third book. I look forward to reading the others.

I read other books too. During the last four years, I've discovered some fine World War I books. I've read "A Farewell to Arms," "All Quiet on the Western Front," "Johnny Got His Gun." I've read "The Good Soldier Svejk" by Hungarian author Jaroslav Hasek several times. A novel of the absurdity of war and a precursor to "Catch-22." and other darkly humorous novels. "The Daughters of Mars" by Thomas Keneally tells of two Australian sisters who go off to war as nurses. Their trial by fire is the ill-fated Gallipoli invasion. And then they are off to France. Great  novel.

What about women authors? Vera Brittain, another well-to-do Brit, signed up as a nurse. She witnessed lots of bloodshed and lost both her brother and her fiance. She wrote about her experiences in "Testament of Youth."

Another memoir, "Goodbye to All That,"  is by English poet and veteran Robert Graves. And speaking of poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen wrote some devastating work, antidotes to some of the more celebratory verse from the war's early years.

Monty Python's grandfathers-in-humor found a printing press and published The Wipers Times on the Ypres (Wipers) front. The brass was not fond of their efforts. You can read some of the issues online and see the blokes in action in the film, "The Wipers Times."

There's an amazing amount of war-related work out there. It's even recreated in the Oscar-winning film "1917." After immersing myself on the subject for four years, I understand the era better. However, I'm not willing to forgive humankind for embarking on such a slaughter. That may be the key element of my book. Young people return from war as changed and damaged creatures. Yet, life goes on. Why and how? Can they forgive their elders for sending them off to the killing fields? That may be the most difficult task of all. What if war-making is not a forgivable crime? "Thou shalt not kill" is 10 percent of the Ten Commandments. So is "honor thy father and mother." What if they were the ones who sent you off to kill? Are they as guilty as the politicians for sending you to war? It's the worst kind of betrayal. It seems to be coded in our DNA, this sacrifice of our children for nebulous aims. It continues from generation to generation.

When all else fails, the arts serve to make sense of it.

"That's some catch, that Catch 22"

"That's some catch, that Catch-22. 

"It's the best there is."

Those lines stuck in my head in 1969 and never left. I heard them again in the Hulu iteration of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22." It was good to hear those words said aloud on a big smart TV. It acknowledges the elegance of the term, its evil logic. Yossarian would be crazy to fly the increasing number of combat missions. To get out of them, all he has to do is ask. By asking, he shows that he is sane and thus must fly more missions.

Fifty years ago, we could easily see the parallel for our times. Yossarian would have to be crazy to go to Vietnam and fight strangers. All he has to do to get out of it is ask. By asking, he shows that he is sane enough to go. It was a bind many of us found ourselves in.

Yossarian summed it up his self-centered beliefs during a talk with Clevinger who would soon disappear into a cloud. "The enemy is anyone who's gonna get you killed, no matter which side he's on."

We knew the people trying to get us killed in 1969. Johnson/Nixon/Westmoreland/Selective Service System. Also, our family and neighbors and teachers and all the people who were solidly behind the war. Fast-forward to this generation's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and its architects -- George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld -- and you can see through recent history what Heller was getting at.

In the Hulu version, by executive producers George Clooney and Grant Heslov, Yossarian is a wide-eyed antihero and a self-centered jerk. His acts of self-preservation hurts others. He whines and complains. He retreats to the hospital. As the scenes add up, it becomes increasingly clear that he is correct in his assumption that everyone is trying to get him killed. Still, he goes on his bombing missions, eager to drop his bombs so the planes can escape the flak field and he has one less mission to fly. The horrors multiply until Yossarian reveals Snowden's secret in the back of the B-25 (one of the book's proposed titles was "Snowden's Secret").

The most telling scene thus far comes at the end of the second segment, when Yossarian reaches out of the bombardier's window in mid-air and tries to erase a spot of blood. During the previous mission, the plane next to his is hit by flak. The plane's bombardier, his body streaked with blood, slides across the glass on his way to his doom. He leaves behind a bloody trail and we see the look of horror on Yossarian's face. On the next mission, some of the blood remains and Yossarian attempts to scrub it off, as if he could banish all of the blood that he has seen and will see. The music accompaniment: is Benny Goodman's "Goodbye," which can't be meant irony-free.

I finished watching the series late one night. That seemed somehow appropriate. There were plenty of laughs, many absurdities. The final scenes are eerie as Yossarian confronts the secret they all share and the blood of the innocents causes him to ditch his bloody uniform for the duration. Catch-22 loyalists may not like the last scene. It's not as hopeful as the one Yossarian chooses in the book. He revels in Orr's survival and his escape from the war. He contends to duplicate it or die in the attempt.

The Hulu series does not give Yossarian an out. The look on his face after yet another bombing run says it all.

Clooney and Heslov made other changes to the narrative. They work, for the most part. I missed Chief White Halfoat and Dunbar. Major ____ deCoverly gets very little to do. In the beginning, I thought it seemed a bit dated, maybe because we have been through so many absurdities (and absurdist fiction) since World War II spawned the book. And now, Trump, a true Scheisskopf, claims our attention.

Maybe it's not so dated after all.

It just doesn't end. There are so many enemies, those who want to kill us for nebulous reasons. Norman Mailer, another World War II combat veteran, said that Heller takes "his reader on a more consistent voyage through Hell than any American writer before him." That may be the biggest secret of all. Life is a trip through hell. Our assignment, should we choose to accept, is to make it heaven without losing our souls. At 18, "Catch-22" gave me an inkling of the challenges ahead of me. At 68, I see the road I traveled, how many choices I had to make along the way. I suppose that's the gift and curse of aging. Sometimes we get a little gift, such as the resurrection of a beloved book, to ease the journey.

The most thoughtful article on Hulu's "Catch 22" was by Jeffrey Fleishman in the L.A. Times, "Why Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22' is a relevant antiwar satire in the age of Trump." You have to get by the firewall, but read it at https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-catch-22-novel-hulu-20190515-story.html

In finding fault with Heller's depictions of female characters, he refers to Susan Straight, the writer who teaches a fiction class on love and war at UC Riverside. She lambastes Heller's treatment of women, especially the nurses. Most serve as just sex objects, an oversight that the producers try to remedy in this adaptation.

The following paragraph wraps up the article. To me, it sums up the real byproducts of war -- the damage done to the men who fight them, and the damage they do to the people who love them.

Straight’s memoir “In the Country of Women,” which will be published later this year, reflects in part on women in her family who endured their own private battles. “I’m writing about the women who fled all the men who had been in war,” she says. “My ancestors survived the men who survived the cannons and they were terrible men.”

Of course, you don't have to go to war to be a terrible man. Draft-dodger Trump is proof of that. But in "Catch-22," we see the bullet and the damage done.

What it was like to be in England "The Summer Before the War"

The war was World War I or The Great War, as it was known before there was a second installment to worldwide slaughter. In the village of Rye in Sussex in England, the Edwardian Era was in full bloom. Men were men, women were women, and sheep grazed peacefully in verdant pastures. A young Latin teacher, Beatrice Nash, lands in the village. She still mourns the death of her father, a semi-famous poet. In Rye, she confronts the sexism of the time with great aplomb which caught this reader's attention right away. Her story is woven into those of Agatha Kent, a spunky middle-aged matron who lobbied to bring Beatrice to the local school. She also shelters her two nephews, Daniel, a foppish budding poet and Hugh, a medical student. The scene is set for this comedy of manners which eventually runs headlong into The Guns of August.

"The Summer Before the War" is Helen Simonson's second book and her first historical novel. She's done her homework, as far as I can tell. I am researching the same era in the U.S. for my novel "Zeppelins Over Denver," although a more accurate title might be "The Summer after the War." Only five years separate 1914 from 1919, but those years changed forever the very different worlds of Rye and Denver. The scope of those changes in Rye were perhaps more remarkable, given that the place had hundreds of years of history with pubs in buildings built in the 15th century. The settlement and later the city of Denver was but 60 years old in 1919, Colorado just 42 years into statehood and still possessed many of the traits of the frontier. Native Americans lived there for centuries but they were expendable during The Great Western Expansion, especially when gold was discovered in Cherry Creek. And we all remember the Sand Creek Massacre.

What happens when you deposit a crop of restless people into a restless place going through its own historic changes? A novel, I hope, a good one and publishable. Some 20 million people died in World War I and millions more in the Flu Pandemic of 1918-1919. More than a million U.S. soldiers went overseas and many returned changed in body and in mind. Nurses, too, women who had only imagined a quiet married life found themselves in bloody field hospitals while German shells exploded around them. Wars tumult sent many of them on the move to new places. Women would get the vote in 1920 and Prohibition began (Colorado got an early start in 1916). Racial strife spawned the "Red Summer" of 1919, when race riots flared in U.S. cities as black soldiers returning from war said they weren't going to take this shit any more. Working men went out on strike and were beat up and killed for their efforts. The Communists had turned Russia red. That "subversive" influence was felt in the U.S., and helped spawn the investigative unit that would eventually become J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. People traveled in automobiles and airplanes, even zeppelins. Jazz was the new sound and the Charleston the wild new dance.

What a time. I share Simonson's passion for the era. It involves digging into archives and digital records available through Google. War videos can be viewed on YouTube, and you can also listen to some great tunes such as "Come Josephine in My Flying Machine" and "How You Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm after They've seen Paree." The audio is tinny and scratchy which only adds to my listening pleasure. As I conducted research, it occurred to me that this entire generation is gone. A baby born in 1900, such as my Irish grandfather, would turn 119 this year. If you were born when the war ended, you would turn 101. There are some centenarians out there, but they are rare. Their collective memories lie within us, their descendants, and in the records they left behind. Their stories live on. However, it is through fiction that they really come to life.

Thus it is with Simonson's novel. Her leisurely writing style is reminiscent of the writers of the era, some of whom lived and worked in Sussex, such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf. But a formal tone and leisurely pace does not a boring book make. Simsonson''s characterizations are sharp and her conflicts very real. Humor, too, a real penchant for satire with writers as her favorite target. She has a lively time portraying the Henry James-like Tillingham, the poet Daniel who, a few decades on, would be wearing a black beret and mumbling his poems in a smoky coffee house, and Beatrice's almost-but-not-quite-famous father.

SPOILER ALERT! The townspeople rise to the occasion when was breaks out. They welcome refugees from Belgium. However, when one of the young women, Celeste, turns up pregnant and its discovered she was raped by German soldiers, angry residents lobby to turn her out. When her father arranges for Celeste to go to a convent, Daniel, the foppish poet, agrees to marry her. While Simonson sets her book in a bucolic setting in the midst of a beautiful summer and fall, she doesn't want us to forget that humans are fallible, even horrid, creatures..

"The Summer Before the War" is published by Random House. The trade paperback sells for $17. Listen to the 2016 Diane Rehm NPR interview with Simonson at https://dianerehm.org/shows/2016-03-22/helen-simonson-the-summer-before-the-war

This isn’t the first time that National Guard units have been sent to the border

1916 cartoon by Clifford K. Berryman, via National Archive Berryman collection. Not sure if the Uncle Sam of 2018 can jump the massive wall that soon will be built at the border. 

Guys in white pajamas shot at my grandfather. That’s the way he told it, anyway. Or maybe it’s just the way I remember his stories. For a few months in 1916-17, Grandpa and his troop of Iowa National Guardsmen faced Pancho Villa’s irregulars across the Rio Grande. He told us that the white-clad Mexican fighters couldn’t shoot straight but Iowans in their spiffy regulation uniforms weren’t much better. They didn’t know it yet, but they were practicing for the big show in France. The U.S. entered the war about a month after Grandpa and his unit returned to Iowa.

Trump isn’t the first commander-in-chief to send National Guard units to the U.S./Mexican border. It’s different this time because Trump is in a snit about not getting enough funding from Congress for his stupid border wall. During the campaign, Trump promised rabid rally crowds that he would build a wall and by gum, he will get his wall, or else your husband or cousin or daughter from the Iowa National Guard will spend the next year trying to snag the caravans of Mexicans that Trump imagines are invading the U.S.

Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa did invade the U.S. in 1916. His seasoned troops invaded Columbus, New Mexico, and killed 18. Villa lost almost 100 men due to the shiny new machine guns employed by U.S. troops. Villa fled back across the border, leaving Americans in a panic. Pershing’s troops, aided by the first airplanes used by the U.S. in combat, pursued Villa through northern Mexico. They killed a few of his lieutenants but never snagged Villa.

Trooper Raymond Arthur Shay, Iowa National Guard, Iowa City. He and his farm-boy cohorts knew how to ride and care for their horses. They spent most of that southwestern winter dismounted, swatting flies, and taking pot shots at insurgents. Prior to this border expedition, the farthest Grandpa had been from home was basic training at Camp Dodge outside Des Moines. He was a farm boy, oldest of nine kids. Now here he was, hunkered down on the banks of The Big Muddy and the big fool told him to push on – or at least to keep firing at the tiny men in pajamas he could barely see. Their horses weren’t much good either, as this guerilla war was unsuited to cavalry charges. Horses did come in handy for the U.S. Army patrols sent into enemy territory to find Villa. As far as I know, Grandpa never made it across the border.

Four years before, General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing, commander of this Mexican Punitive Expedition had wrapped up another war like this. In 1911-13, he waged what most considered a successful campaign against the Muslim Moros in the Philippines. In Pershing’s view, the Moros were pajama-clad insurgents worth fighting. But not these poor, undisciplined Mexicans. Pershing grew increasingly frustrated. His hands were tied by Congress. Politicians -- always coming to the border on their junkets. Reporters in tow asking stupid questions. There was no winning under these circumstances. This refrain would be echoed decades later by other U.S. generals in other wars. You know, Vietnam.

At the end of January 1917, Pershing abandoned the border foray. The following winter, Grandpa, now a newly minted second lieutenant, found himself in France eyeballing German trenches across a bombed-out moonscape. World War I trench warfare, with its machine guns and barbed wire, rendered obsolete any “Charge of the Light Brigade” operations. Still, the Iowans had shipped over with their horses as cavalry looked fine on parade days. One spring morning, a resurgent General Pershing staged an inspection and picked the unit’s best mount to ride. It belonged to Lieutenant Shay. That was the high point of the war for him, his favorite story, and ours.

Other stories weren’t quite as romantic. Dismounted, in the trenches, poison gas washing over doughboys as they struggled to don their gas masks. Never enough time. Enough of the gas seeped into Grandpa’s lungs to cause some harm, but not enough to get him sent home before the Armistice.

Grandpa’s gas mask and helmet rest in a box in my basement. Photos, too, of him and his troopers in France. Photos of Grandma – his wife -- and her nursing school graduating class. I think about them and their war when I drive down Cheyenne’s Pershing Avenue, as I do almost every day. Cheyenne, a military town, became the adopted home for the globetrotting General Pershing. He married Helen Frances Warren, the daughter of Wyoming’s first U.S. Senator, and served at Fort D.A. Russell, now F.E. Warren AFB. Their home is now a living museum, preserved for future generations. The base itself is a national historic site, home to war trophies from the Philippines and the old airfield where World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker cracked up his biplane and almost died. It also was the training site for Spaatz’s Flying Circus and the U.S. Army’s airmail service -- Charles Lindbergh was one of its first pilots.

The Pershing family experienced its share of tragedy. If you take a stroll through Cheyenne’s historic Lakeview Cemetery, you will come across a large grave marker for Frances E. Warren and her three daughters, ages 3, 7 and 8. In 1914, Gen. Pershing left his wife and four children at the Presidio in San Francisco to take over command of a brigade at Fort Bliss, Texas. Things were heating up at the border and the general was there to plan for the inevitable. In August of 1915, Pershing received a telegram that his wife and daughters died of smoke inhalation at a Presidio fire. Only his 6-year-old son survived.

Pershing Avenue starts at F.E. Warren AFB and runs straight through town past the Veteran’s Administration Medical Center where the aging Lieutenant Raymond Shay spent some of his last days. The road ends on the east side of town. If you know where to look, you can see Minuteman III missile sites out on the prairie.

     

Combat casualties were minimal in my grandfather’s World War I unit. They were surpassed by deaths from infection and disease, especially from the Spanish flu. Grandpa’s lungs deteriorated from gas attacks. After he returned to the States, he recuperated for months in an Iowa Army hospital. When he took a turn for the worse, the Army transferred him to Army Hospital Number 21 – soon to be renamed Fitzsimons Army Medical Hospital after a hero of the Great War. The dry Denver climate, famous for its healing properties, may have helped his recovery. He really took a turn for the better when he met my grandmother, an Army nurse. He and Florence Green married in 1921, stayed in Denver, raised a family, and lived a good long time.

Now Grandpa and Grandma share a plot at Fort Logan National Cemetery in Denver.

Wonder what they would make of our boy Trump.

Artist Al Farrow repurposes the world's armaments to produce "Divine Ammunition"

From "Divine Ammunition" at the UW Art Museum: Al Farrow, Trigger Finger of Santo Guerro, guns, gun parts, bullets, shell casings, steel, glass, bone, crucifix, 19 x 16 x 16 inches, 2007. Photo: Michael Shay

Here's the opening salvo of my Dec. 19 post on Wyofile's Studio Wyoming Review:

If I was a gun guy instead of an arts guy, I might have been at the gun show at the Laramie Fairgrounds. It’s Christmas, right, and all of us deserve a Glock in our stocking. 

But I was a few miles away at the University of Wyoming Art Museum viewing “Divine Ammunition,” an exhibit of the work of California artist Al Farrow. The work was selected from private and public collections. There were guns galore in the Friends and Colorado galleries. Matching handguns serve as a cathedral’s flying buttresses. Rifles frame the door of a synagogue splashed in blood-red. The very real skull of an imaginary saint sits in a reliquary fashioned from guns and shell casings. 

Happy holidays, ya’ll.

Read the rest here. 

On the look and smell of old-fashioned print books

The New York Times reports that sales of "old-fashioned print books" are up for the third year in a row, based on figures from the Association of American Publishers. And indie bookstores are doing well, reversing a decline sparked by big box bookstores, Amazon and e-books.

Good news for book lovers. Are the books being read and understood? No, if the American electorate is any indication.

But I am a book lover. At this point in my life, I am trying to shed books with little success. I occasionally clean up the shelves and take a few boxes of books to the library store. But I find a need to read a certain book that I can't get at the library and I end up buying it. My latest purchase was "Sons and Lovers," the 1913 novel by D.H. Lawrence. When a friend and one-time indie bookstore owner saw the book in my car, he picked it up and said, "This is how I learned about sex." I replied that I hadn't reached that part yet. Paul Morel and his potential sweetheart Miriam are still in the platonic stage.

I had a selfish motive for reading "Sons and Lovers." I discovered it was filled with wonderful details about a British coal-mining village of Eastwood before World War I. My grandfather lived and worked in a British coal-mining village before and during the early years of the war. I portray a character like that in the novel I am working on. Also, I never read a Lawrence novel. How I could be an English major and not read Lawrence is a surprise to me. I knew more about his life in Taos than I did about his books.

"Sons and Lovers" is a good read. The prose is dense at times but it was 1913, the same era as Edith Wharton, William James and Upton Sinclair. I read "The Jungle" earlier in the year and it was slow going at times.  Lawrence's prose is better that some of his contemporaries. He had an eye for detail.

This edition of "Sons and Lovers" is a trade paperback published in 2003 by Barnes & Noble Classics. It carries a scent but doesn't have that old-book smell.

But my 1921 copy of John Dos Passos' "Three Soldiers" does. It got it at an estate sale for $4 with the tag "library condition." Well used but not battered. From the Merced County Free Library. It still has the sleeve for the borrower's card and date stamps on the outside front cover. It smells like old paper. The pages are yellowing. But it's still readable, so that's what I'm doing. The novel concerns the journey made by three young men as they volunteer for service in World War I. Written after the war by veteran Dos Passos, the slang and expressions and description are of that time and are quite something. I can read about old times and smell them all at the same time. Not possible with an e-book.

Not sure what I will do with my books (old and new) after I'm finished with them and my research. I would say leave them to my adult children but they look upon their parents' accumulated goods as if it were radioactive waste. They're both big readers but my literary passions are not theirs.

It's good news to see that print books are back. Is it a trend or a passing fancy? Who knows. My habits are not likely to change. I will still get suckered into used book sales and garage sales and will just have to have that 1930 edition of "Death Comes for the Archbishop." I found that book at the annual Delta Kappa Gamma used book sale in Cheyenne. Only 50 cents. Who could pass that up?

It's "Heart of Darkness" all over again as U.S. war in Africa heats up

From CNN Online on Oct. 23:

Americans should anticipate more military operations in Africa as the war on terrorism continues to morph, Sen. Lindsey Graham warned Friday.

"This war is getting hot in places that it's been cool, and we've got to go where the enemy takes us," Graham told reporters on Capitol Hill.

We are embarked on another military spree. It's best to bone up on the literature of Africa, lest we make the same ignorant mistakes we made in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Saharan Africa, Southwest Asia, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Dakota Territory, and so on.

My first thought was "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad. While a tad racist, it’s a magnificent cautionary tale for overseas adventurers with a terminal case of hubris. You know, Marlow and Kurtz, Willard and Kurtz. Francis Ford Coppola used the 1899 novel (and Michael Herr’s nonfiction “Dispatches”) as a blueprint for “Apocalypse Now.”

Four American Special Forces troops were killed in an ambush in Niger two weeks ago. Most of us didn’t know that the U.S. had troops in Niger. We had to look up the country on a map and practice our spelling and pronunciation of the country so as not to sound as stupid as Trump. It’s not Nigeria. Nijz-AIR, is as close as I can get. It’s near Chad and is poorer than that country, which is saying something. According to the Africa Guide, two-thirds of the country is desert and the northeastern part of the country is "mostly uninhabitable." Most Nigeriens live in the southern third of the country described as "savannah." That is where the U.S. has a base and where our troops were killed. 

We've got to go where the enemy takes us. 

Any Vietnam War novel should be instructive as Africa’s cold war gets hot. “The Quiet American” by Graham Greene is a good primer as it was written way back in 1955, long before our misadventure in French Indochina heated up in the 1960s. While Ken Burns PBS Vietnam War series has its flaws, special screenings should be held for Sen. Graham, President “My heel hurts and I can’t go to Vietnam” Trump, Mr. Tillerson, Gen, Mattis, and any other member of this passel of fools who hasn’t seen it. The PBS does an excellent job of following our descent into madness or, if you prefer, our own very special heart of darkness. Stanley Karnow’s “Vietnam: A History” is also an excellent historical account of the war.

Novels and poetry may be the best route into understanding how quagmires happen, and what the effects are on countries.

But Vietnam isn’t the only useful example. I have been researching World War I as background for a novel I am writing about the post-war years of 1919-1920 in my home state of Colorado. In the summer of 1914, the entire world lost its mind. Except for the U.S. – we waited until spring of 1917 to do so. A few nights ago, I watched most of the 1971 Brit film “Nicholas and Alexandra.” Nicky thought that dashing off vaguely friendly letters to his wife’s German relatives would keep Russia out of the war. Not only did Russia suffer millions of casualties, but the czar’s repressive policies fed right into the hands of the Bolsheviks. Decades of terror followed. And then the Soviets suffered their own Vietnam in Afghanistan. I have yet a read a novel about this war – I’m sure there are some good ones. We have our own novels coming out of the Afghan misadventures. It doesn’t end.

The best novel I’ve read to come out of the American Wars of the New Millennium is “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” by Ben Fountain. The juxtaposition of Billy Lynn’s shattered soul with the spectacle of the NFL Super Bowl took my breath away. It seems especially relevant now as we watch African-American players take a knee to bring attention to injustices wrought on the streets of the USA. And the critics say “Don’t mix politics with football.” Too late. America is all about these things: war and football and prejudice and spectacle and greed and cheerleaders in skimpy outfits.

I am woefully lacking in reading books by the writers of Africa. This is not a surprise, as English majors are woefully lacking in books outside those written in native English. I have read novels set in Africa by U.S. and British writers. Time to read a novel by an African author. A dedicated Ghanaian/American reader/blogger Darkowaa hosts a blog called African Book Addict! Go to her reading list at https://africanbookaddict.com/to-read-list/ It would help if you also read French, German, or a selection of African dialects. 

We've been in Africa before. "Black Hawk Down" by Mark Bowden shows what happens when a country's military ventures into a place such as Mogadishu that it doesn't understand. The Horn of Africa can be a dangerous place. The U.S., once had military and naval bases in Ethiopia. Until it didn't. The Soviets moved in and Haile Salassie was a dead man. 

Maybe that’s the lesson of all of these works of art about wars past. It never ends. Humankind keeps making the same mistakes. We never learn.

We can keep reading. We will always have that. I hope we will.

A Baby Boomer boyhood was designed to prepare us for the USA's next war

In a July 26 post, I responded to President Trump's disturbing speech to the Boy Scout Jamboree in West Virginia.

There was a riotous Facebook debate about Trump's speech. Comments flew fast and furious. Someone brought up the fact that the Boy Scouts of America was a military style organization. Others objected, saying that the Boy Scouts have nothing to do with the military. It was pointed out that Eagle Scouts recruited into the military get a boost of two rating levels over non-Eagle Scouts. That means a lot, especially when you first join up and need all the bucks you can get.

As for official military connections, the BSA swears there are none.

I beg to differ. It's not a conspiracy by the MIC to recruit the flower of our youth into their plan for world domination. It's fun to think so. Who knows, an Oliver Stone film could be in the works to blow the lid off of this plot. We eagerly await it. We thrive on conspiracies.

A Baby Boomer boyhood prepared me for the military. The Scouts were an integral part of that.

My only military experience was an eighteen-month stint in Navy ROTC. I do have years of Boy Scout experience to draw on. I was a Cub Scout from the late-50s until I joined the Boy Scouts at 11. I served until 1965 when I got to high school. Because we lived in beachside Florida, I have all of the water-oriented merit badges offered at that time. I also have a few others. I learned flag etiquette and often served as an honor guard at Scout functions. I took my uniform seriously. I obeyed the Scout Law.

I look at the Scouts as a military training program. We wear uniforms. We salute. We respect our Scout leaders even when they don't deserve it. We go on survival hikes. We drilled on flag etiquette. And so on.

The Boy Scouts of the 1950s and 1960s were training grounds for Vietnam. We knew how to build shelters, start fires, survive in the outback, dress wounds, deal with snakebites, swim, paddle a boat. If you lived in Florida, as I did, you reconnoitered swamps and rivers. When you canoed Central Florida creeks, you watched out for snakes and gators in the red-brown waters stained by tannin from cypress trees.

Most of all, Boy Scouting taught us obeisance to other men in uniform, those with rank and seniority. Be prepared! Mostly, we were prepared to take orders.

Maybe that's why the chaos of the 1960s was such a shock. It upended all of those norms. Once we learned that our leaders, men in uniforms and men in dark suits, were trying to kill us, all bets were off. Nothing had prepared us for betrayal by the very institutions that trained us: the family, the church, the Scouts, the U.S.A.

We could have grokked this, if we were really paying attention.  Some of our elders tried to warn us. Writers and artists. Martin Luther King Jr. Folk singers. Clergy such as the Berrigan brothers. Veteran writers such as Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. One of the recurring themes of "Catch 22" is that Yossarian considers his own people as much a threat as the Nazi's Herman Goering Division. They are trying to get him killed.

Quote from Catch-22:

As always occurred when he quarreled over principles in which he believed passionately, he would end up gasping furiously for air and blinking back bitter tears of conviction. There were many principles in which Clevinger believed passionately. He was crazy.
"Who's they?" he wanted to know. "Who, specifically, do you think is trying to murder you?"
"Every one of them," Yossarian told him.
"Every one of whom?"
"Every one of whom do you think?"
"I haven't any idea."
"Then how do you know they aren't?"
"Because …" Clevinger sputtered, and turned speechless with frustration.

And this one:

"The enemy," retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, "is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart. And don't you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live."

Who was trying to kill you during the Vietnam era? You get three guesses and the first two don't count.

This betrayal continues. Maybe that's what led to the Dawning of the Trump Era. This long betrayal. If you were a "good Scout" in America's golden age, you didn't question the authority of the church or the family or the government. Our most trusted elders led us into the shitstorm and lied about about it. Democrats and Republicans. Nobody was exempt and nobody was spared.

I hope Ken Burns addresses this in his new PBS documentary on the Vietnam War that starts tonight. It was never just a battle between anti-war hippies and Viet vets. It was a generation coming to grips with betrayal. We never did. Now we have a man at the helm that represented all that was venal about the Baby Boomer generation, my generation. A know-it-all who knows nothing. A draft dodger who wants to blow up the world. But first, he wants to rake in more dough to be the richest bastard in creation. He lies. He cheats. He steals. Trump is the Vietnam War come home to roost.

What makes is especially sad is that serving military and veterans are among Trump's biggest supporters. Did they learn nothing? And why do they remain this way?

We (sort of) survived the Vietnam betrayal. We won't survive this one.

This 1960s Boy Scout wonders if Trump knows anything about the Scout Oath

Did U.S. Army General and Supreme Allied Commander of Operation Overlord (and later president) Dwight D. Eisenhower ever go ever go to a Boy Scouts of America Jamboree and invite the crowd to jeer his predecessor, Army artillery officer and WWI combat veteran (and later president, the guy who okayed the big nuke drop on Japan) Harry S. Truman?

Hard to imagine, isn't it? But Trump has submerged us so far into his own sewer that on Monday, he invited the crowd to jeer his predecessor, Barack Obama, and cheer The Donald, himself, our celeb president. Obama, by the way, was in Boy Scouting as an international Cub Scout. Trump, of course, was not. Both men have served as honorary Scout leaders, one excelled at the task and the other, our current president, brought shame upon the Scouts forever.

Ike and Harry both addressed the Scouts at jamborees. When he addressed the Scouts, Truman (according to The Washington Post),

extolled fellowship: “When you work and live together, and exchange ideas around the campfire, you get to know what the other fellow is like,” he said. 

And this:

President Dwight D. Eisenhower invoked the “bonds of common purpose and common ideals.” 

They were both officers and, presumably, gentlemen. They wouldn't stoop to criticizing fellow officers in public. In private and after a few drinks, well, that's another matter. The presidency has rules and protocol. Trump is intent on transgressing them all.

Trump has said he knows more about the military than his generals because he went to military school. That's like saying I know everything there is to know about women because I married one.

My knowledge of the military is mainly through a stint in ROTC, reading, and the stories told by veteran friends.

But I was in the Boy Scouts. I was a Cub Scout in Denver and Moses Lake, Wash. My mother was a den leader. I was a Boy Scout in four states -- Washington, Colorado, Kansas, and Florida. I attained the heady rank of Star Scout, just two ranks short of the vaunted Eagle. I then discovered girls. Merit badges didn't seem so important anymore.

The Scout Oath did. So did the law, motto, and.code.

The Scout Oath (from memory):

On my honor I will do my duty to God and to country, to keep myself physically fit, mentally awake and morally straight.

Here is the actual oath:

On my honor, I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.

I forgot a few of the details. I did remember honor and duty, God and Country, and that all-important fourth line.

The oath was reinforced daily at home and at Catholic School. I've never forgotten those lessons.

I am an imperfect human being. But this Scout would never behave as Trump did on Monday.

Trump is a disgrace to the uniform he never wore. .

"Wonder Woman" not just another fanboy film

I'm too old and jaded to be a fanboy.

Maybe that's why I dislike standard comic book hero movies. They're like fireworks displays. Lots of pop and sizzle, but what are you left with? I like movies that have substance or are just downright weird. "Logan" had substance. "Deadpool" was weird and profane. 

The new "Wonder Woman" has substance and weirdness. I really liked it.

Who would have thought that World War I could be so topical? A century after the U.S. blundered into The Great War, many of its themes have come back to haunt us. How does a country blunder into war? Can you say Vietnam and Iraq? Who uses poison gas? Can you say Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad? What country bombs civilians? Bet you can't name just one.  

Here's another question: If Wonder Woman finds and kills Ares, the ancient God of War, will war cease to exist?

You will get no spoilers from me. But "Wonder Woman" is traditional in that it places a quest as its central theme. Diana (a.k.a. Wonder Woman, played by Gal Gadot)), the only child on the mysterious island of the Amazons, trains to be a warrior. No surprise, then, that she gets the call to save the world. The call comes in the form of an American spy (Capt. Steve Trevor, played by Chris Pine) who crashes a stolen German plane into the sea off the island. WW rescues him. Trevor has stolen the poison gas recipe book from the German mad scientist (Doctor Poison) who is managed by German General Ludendorff, one of the few historical figures portrayed in the movie. Ludendorff wants to keep Germany in the war during its waning days of November 1918, when an armistice is threatening to break out. The general commands his troops to find the spy and the stolen book. They follow the spy to the island and a battle ensues where WW discovers a hint of her superpowers.

That's a lot so far, but the action has barely begun. It's charming to think that the German mad scientist would have a poison gas recipe book. She wears a facial prosthetic due to a war wound, possibly damage from a gas attack. On the Allied side of the war, French artists made facial prosthetics for soldiers disfigured in battle. One can only assume that artists in other countries were doing the same. While the war's casualties were horrendous, modernized battlefield medicine saved many who would have died in previous wars. So we called on our artists for a solution.  

I'm not going to tell you whether WW stops Ares' mad reign with her God Killer Sword, that World War I truly was the "war to end all wars." As we all know, the world is a wicked and warlike place. Ares himself tells us that it's not his fault that humans are so warlike. He just helps them along a little and they do the rest. 

Taking a page from the book of Sisyphus, humankind replays its fate over and over again. If only we had one person to blame it all on.

Alas, war is hell, as WW sees. It also is forever. Zeus created humans and within us lies the seeds of our own destruction. If that's not a timely lesson, well, you haven't been paying attention. 

P.S.: After I wrote this, I read other reviews of the movie, including one on Roger Ebert's web site, Vulture and in conservative National Review. The best was by Mark Hughes in the May 30 Forbes. It's a blend of industry forecast -- he predicts that "a $90 million domestic opening with a 3.2x multiplier would get it to a stateside cume about $288 million" -- and insight. And he shows some real insight. 

Reading a novel of letters -- The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

It takes skill to pull off an epistolary novel. That's one of the reasons I was so impressed by "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society," co-written by American aunt/niece duo Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrows. The authors reveal the story through letters from the main characters. The voices ring out through the letters, a lost art, unfortunately. You can find out so much about a person through letters, material you won't get through Twitter and Facebook.

One of the fascinating things about "Guernsey" is how much we learn about communication in the England of 1946. Letters to Guernsey on the Channel islands arrive by boat and airplane. Characters send cables and telegrams. On the island, note are slipped under doors. There are phone calls that are recalled via letter. When they aren't writing, people talk to one another, hang out together and take walks. They later write letters about it.

On the surface, the book is about the main character's effort to find a suitable topic for her next book. Juliet Ashton's claim to fame is her biography of one of the benighted Bronte sisters, Anne. She followed this up with a collection of newspaper columns she wrote during the war, "Izzy Bickerstaff Goes to War." Ashton's plucky alter-ego recounts, with humor, her spirited efforts to make it through the home front during the Battle of Britain.

Did you know that the Channel Islands were occupied by the Nazis during World War Two? I guess I did, in an offhand sort of way. The occupation went from 1940-45, which is longer than some of Europe's German-occupied countries. The Channel Islands were isolated, closer to France than England. The British War Office realized bombing or invasion would kill more civilians than have any lasting effect on the war. A Resistance existed, with citizens sabotaging the Germans in subtle and unusual ways. Some hid escaped Todt (imprisoned) workers. That spells doom for one of the islanders, Elizabeth McKenna. She is sent to a Nazi concentration camp and, for most of the book, we await news on her fate. We also await the future path of Elizabeth's daughter Kit, conceived in an illicit affair with a German officer who was more human being than Nazi automaton.

The novel is a bit of a potboiler. Will Juliet find love with the American millionaire or the rugged islander? Will she adopt Kit? Will he ever write the book about Guernsey occupation during the war? Alas, dear reader, you have to read the book made up of many letters. Or you can watch the cable series (Showtime, I think) in the works for 2018.

As you know, the book is best.

What would Kurt Vonnegut say about the April 22 March for Science?

If he were still alive, Kurt Vonnegut might have attended the science march near him this weekend. New York City will probably have a big one. He would probably attend more to protest numbskull Trump than to applaud science.

Some of Vonnegut's big books, especially Cat's Cradle, carry warnings about runaway scientific research. In Galapagos, Vonnegut posits a future where humankind has evolved into sea-lion-like creatures with flippers and beaks and smaller brains in heads streamlined for swimming. One of that book's recurring themes is that contemporary human brains are too big and possess all sorts of ways to screw things up. In Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Vonnegut has fun with time travel and memory. He also has the fire-bombing of Dresden, brought to us by masterminds in science and war-making. They go hand in hand. So it goes.

Vonnegut studied biochemistry as an undergrad and has a master's degree in anthropology. He worked as a PR guy for General Electric while he wrote his novels and raised his family. He and his fictional alter-ago, Kilgore Trout, are noted sci-fi writers. But Vonnegut stands out for his scientific background and his social commentary. Baby Boomers discovered his novels just as we headed off to college or Vietnam or the assembly line or wherever. It spoke to the absurdity of war, as did Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Ken  Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest completes the big three books of the 1960s that changed my life and many others. Just think about their backgrounds for a minute. Heller was a World War II veteran and NYC ad man in the Mad Men era. Kesey was a rural Oregon boy who made his way to Stanford and sixties legend as part of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He wrapped up his life on a farm in Oregon, back where he started. Vonnegut came from an educated Indianapolis family but the war changed everything, as it did for many of our fathers. My father was able to attend college on the G.I. Bill, begin a career as an accountant, marry a nurse and fathered nine children, of which I am the oldest.

Dedicated sci-fi readers know the thrill and the danger of science. We know that science leads to Hiroshima and to the Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator or ICD. I wear one of those in my chest. It was invented by Morton Mower, a Denver resident, now a millionaire art collector. Part of his world-renowned collection of Impressionists (Degas, Renoir, Monet, etc.) is now on display at the Fulginiti Pavilion for Bioethics and Humanities at the Anschutz Medical Center, 13080 E. 19th Ave. in Aurora. A med center with a gallery that exhibits artwork collected by a scientist/inventor? You can attend for free as you get an ICD check-up at the cardiac telemetry unit. A nifty blend of science and art, invention and patronage.

Saturday's Science March is not an effort to promote science above religion or instead of religion. It is a move to celebrate scientific innovation against those who would hide inconvenient facts and cut funding for research. Consider the Know Nothings of the 19th century U.S. They professed to "know nothing" other than that written in their bibles. They valued The Word over words and imagination and science. Today's conservative Republicans are descendants of the Know Nothings.  They are threatened by humankind;'s march into the future. And it is scary. Technology brings drastic changes. The arts expose our children to other voices and other cultures. People who don't look like us force us to consider our deeply held beliefs about race and gender.

It's really fear that drives conservatives. Fear of galloping change. Science and the arts and education represent the most threatening fields. That's why Congressional conservatives' budget cuts target them. If only we could stop the clock, everything would be all right with the world!

But you can't stop change. So we write and we march and we challenge the people who want to deny climate change and evolution and higher ed.

On Saturday, April 22, we meet at 10:30 a.m. in the service station parking lot at Little America in Cheyenne. We then caravan over to Laramie, where we will join others at noon for the Wyoming March for Science from the UW Classroom Building at 9th and Ivinson to downtown. An Earth Day Rally follows, with music by Laramie's Wynona. If you are interested in making an appropriately clever sign, one that honors wit and science, gather at the UU Church in Cheyenne from 6-10 p.m. on Friday, April 21. I missed the Wyoming Art Party's sign-making session last night in Laramie. You may remember WAP's performance art at the Women's March in Cheyenne in January. Their uterine-based signage ("Wild Wombs of the West") was a big hit for many, although some follow-up letters in the local paper called them crude and insulting to women. It's always a good thing when a protest incites letters to the editor.

See you on Science Day on Saturday. It's also Earth Day. Naturally.

Vonnegut won't be there. He's on Tralfamadore, most likely. But he will be there in spirit, both as an encouragement -- and as a warning.

During spring cleaning, the bell tolls for booklovers

What do I keep? What do I recycle? What do I throw away?

The questions of spring cleaning.

Over the weekend, I vowed to clean up my writing room. Spring cleaning fever hit us on Saturday as we helped our daughter move to a new place in Fort Collins. We tackled her room first, which she hadn't lived in for 18 months. Because it was vacant, I used it as a storage room for the stuff overflowing from my office. The jig was up. She's at home, searching for stuff for the move. So I had to comb through the boxes of receipts and old checkbooks and manuscripts and books.

I tackled the books first. The difficulty is that I want to read parts of a book to decide if it's a keeper. Got stuck on a Brad Leithauser poem, "The Odd Last Thing She Did" by his collection of the same title. It's about a suicidal young woman who disappears after leaving her car running on a cliff overlooking the ocean. "The car/Is Empty. A Friday, the first week/Of June. Nineteen fifty-three." A mystery is at the heart of this poem. Could be the setting for a 250-page hard-boiled mystery novel, a case for Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. But it's a four-page poem, long for a poem, short for a novel. The summer night is lovely with "the stars easing through the blue,/Engine and ocean breathing together." She could have been abducted, but that's not what the poem implies. She threw herself off the cliff. A suicide. A pretty, 23-year-old, and one with a car. But she didn't want to live.

"What are you doing?" Chris asks

I look up. "Reading," I say.

"That's not spring cleaning."

"Yes, but..." I want to say that this poem is wonderful and filled with mystery. It's why we read. But realize that I have been caught in the act.

Now my daughter is looking at me. She writes poetry. "C'mon, Dad," she says, hauling another box of rejected books out to the car trunk. She will take three boxes of books to the library today.

Caught in the act. I close Brad's book and put it into a box labeled "Mike books." Our rooms and basement have many such boxes as the bookshelves are full. In some circles, I would be labeled a hoarder. But among booklovers? Also in the box is "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy, which I keep pledging to finally read; "The Voice of America," stories by Rick DeMarinis, which doesn't have my fave DeMarinis story ("Under the Wheat") but does have "The Voice of America" and "Aliens;" and a 1968 Fawcett Crest Book edition of Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" or, if you prefer the German, "Im Westen Nichts Neues." I have been tempted lately to reread the latter book as I am working on a novel set in the years after The Great War. But I have other research to do and may never get to it.

Therein lies the bookie's dilemma. What to keep, what to send to the library? I cannot bear to throw away a book as it seems too much like burning a book. Someone, somewhere wants to read the book that I don't want. Just as I want to read a book that someone else doesn't want, which is why I stop at garage sales.

I am 66 with grown children who are both readers. What will I make of all of this when I am gone? My accountant father painstakingly put the division of his library in his will. He read history and presidential biographies and autobiographies. I got everything from Lincoln to Kennedy, including a beat-up 1885 edition of the "Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, Volume 1." Not sure which of my four brothers got the other volumes, if there were any. But I also got a trade paperback of the Grant memoirs which is comprehensive but not nearly as compelling as the original.

Technology is changing reading and collecting habits. Old books fall apart. Indie bookstores die along with their proprietors and aging customers. Good news, though -- it appears that this trend may be reversing. Our kids read books but spend a lot of time on Kindle and online reading.

I am tempted to bring up all these issues with my family. But I am in a losing battle against time. Nobody will care for these books as I do. Some will be claimed by my heirs but most will end up in library second-hand sales or in paperback bookstores or on the curb in garage sales. I will get rid of those that I can now and let time take its toll on the rest. John Donne said it well, and I don't have a single Donne book, not even holdovers from my undergrad and grad school English courses.

Here's the quote, which you may recognize:

"... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Before those bells start tolling, I need to tackle these books. Wish me luck.

Reading "In Country" in the aftermath of another set of wars

It only took me 31 years to get around to reading "In Country" by Bobbie Ann Mason.

Published in 1985, the book explores post-Vietnam War America, specifically the South of rural Kentucky. The struggles of local veterans are seen through the eyes of 18-year-old  Sam (Samantha) Hughes, whose father Dwayne was killed in the war before she was born. Sam lives with her Viet vet uncle, Emmett, and might go to school at the University of Kentucky or she might get a job and marry her boyfriend, Lonnie. She's rooted in a specific place but rootless, too, as are most 18-year-olds. She keeps asking questions about the war but nobody, especially the vets who meet with Emmett every morning for coffee, want to give her any answers.

In one passage, Sam ponders a photo of her "soldier boy" daddy who was about her age when he died:

She stared at the picture, squinting her eyes, as if she expected it to come to life. But Dwayne had died with his secrets. Emmett was walking around with his. Anyone who survived Vietnam seemed to regard it as something personal and embarrassing. Granddad had said they were embarrassed that they were still alive. "I guess  you're not embarrassed," she said to the picture.

In the mid-1980s, the war years were fresh memories. Mason's epigraph is from Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A.," possibly one of the most misunderstood rock songs in American history.

I'm ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to run

Springsteen's lyrics are sprinkled throughout the book, as are songs by the Beatles, Stones, Creedence -- all the oldies from the era. The soundtrack of the Vietnam War, as one author recently called those tunes. Pop culture references abound, as do mentions of Americana: Wal-Mart, strip malls, muscle cars, Budweiser, and so on. Writing teachers sometimes tell their charges to be sparing with contemporary references, as it might date their work. Bobbie Ann Mason uses these references in order to date her work from the mid-80s, when veterans and non-veterans alike were trying to make sense of a lost crusade that nearly ripped this country apart.   This style was sometimes referred to as K-Mart Realism. This style was at its zenith when I attended grad school 1988-1991. It was shorthand for all of those white folks who once populated rural Kentucky and wide-open-spaces Wyoming. Whether draftees or volunteers, these men went to "a foreign land to kill the yellow man." They returned hoping to marry their high school sweethearts and get a job in the mines or in the factories that powered the 1970s economy. Many disappointments awaited them. Their girlfriends and high school pals had moved on. They didn't want to hear about Vietnam. Neither did older vets, the Greatest Generation, fathers of the whiners and complainers who came back from Vietnam. "Get over it," So they only talked about it with other veterans oif they just dropped out, as did Emmett, who doesn't work and spends his time watching M*A*S*H and recycling cast-off goods, much as the VC used to re-purpose all of the material the GIs threw away.

By 1985, this economy had begun to disappear,  Mines and textile mills and factories were shuttered or moved overseas for cheaper labor. To Mexico, Indonesia and, ironically, a newly energized Vietnam. Reaganomics worked to destroy unions, the foundation of blue-collar America. Vietnam veterans tended to blame liberal elites for this reversal of fortune. They were the spoiled hippie college kids who caused us to lose the war. Their love for the spotted owl and pristine wilderness killed the logging and mining industries. Their political correctness have us everything from women's lib to gay rights to Barack Obama in 2008 to -- yes -- The Donald in 2016.

Mason's characters are wonderful. The book begins with Sam, Mamaw and Emmett driving from Kentucky to Washington, D.C., in a beat-up VW bug Sam just bought from Vietnam vet Tom. We then are transported back to Hopewell in the months leading up to the trip. The book ends at The Wall, no surprise since its presence looms large throughout the book, even though it's off-stage most of the time. This a a fitting remembrance to the Vietnam War. Remember that the memorial was referred to by one opponent as a "black gash of shame." It now is almost a sacred site for Vietnam vets, home to motorcycle rallies for wounded vets and pilgrimages by vets and their families, such as the Hughes clan of Kentucky.

I'm not spoiling "In Country" to tell my readers than it ends at The Wall. The reflective surface of The Wall often leads to eerie juxtapositions, as when Sam looks at her father's name and realizes that it's her name too and she can see his face in hers. Or in veteran writer Yusef Komunyakaa's 1988 poem "Facing It:"

I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.