Decoration Day 2025

 As usual this past Monday I spent part of the morning down among the dead men.

This time I sort of bogued on my Army brothers and instead of heading east to the big Willamette National Cemetery on Mt. Scott traveled only as far as the little burying ground at the old Vancouver Barracks, right across the river in Washington state.

It's an odd sort of place befitting the long and patchwork history of the old post along the Big River; frontier fort, trading post, white settlement and Indian agency, river port town, early aerodrome, and in the end neglected, largely forgotten, and finally abandoned.

The burials reflect this, both in style and content.

Unlike the green and shining uniformity of the flat headstones on the Willamette cemetery hill, Vancouver's green lawn is broken by many what I think of as the older "standard" above-ground stone markers you see in Arlington (so difficult to mow around!) as well as even older, non-spec markers like LT Watson's here:

 

The silent community includes not just soldiers but wives and children - so many infants and young kids from what I assume was the garrison of the 19th and early 20th Centuries! - and even a trio of former enemies; two German POWs and an Italian - though if I was SGT Dioguardi I'd have come bolting out of my grave in an undead fury:

"Wassafuck' a matta fo you!? You thinka this a flag Italiano? Tha fuck? You gotta Tedeschi flags for the fuckin' Tedeschi but notta Italiano fo' me? Betta nothing at-a all than this! You thinka Imma fuckin' Russian?!?! Fangool, tu bastardo!"

The sheer heterogeneity of the Vancouver burials kept me surprisingly entertained, so I wandered the little cemetery for a while with my dram of whisky in my pocket, bundled against the late May chill, until I ran across these two:

Army 1SG Carlisle and Marine 1SG Martin; the former possibly a First Shirt from one of the infantry companies posted here before the 1940s, the latter undoubtedly retired locally from his bootneck days.

Both seemed likely to at least tolerate an old platoon sergeant, so I shared out the fine peaty draft, hoping that they'd had a laugh or two and come home sound from their service days. I found my little cars and joined the traffic drifting back across the River of the West to my new home in my old St. Johns.

That afternoon I completed my memorial obligations by finishing the "Murph", the Memorial Day workout dedicated specifically to a Navy SOF-type officer but to the war dead of the 21st Century in general. I did this last year and wrote about it here.

This year I rucked lighter -10kg instead of the EFMB standard 35lbs - but I hit a personal record for repetitions; 100 pushups, 100 situps, 100 squats, so hooah, me.

Last year I came away from the day somewhat bitter and dissatisfied with my country and the way it has memory-holed the wars and the dead of my generation. 

I wrote:

"I will keep them in my heart, but I'm old and soon enough will join them, perhaps up on that green and shining hill, my last home festooned with tiny flags every last weekend in May, to remembrance wars and deaths my country would just as soon forget.

Still.

I promise. I will remember.

Here's to us.
Who's like us?
Damn few
And they're all dead."

 Oddly, at the end of yesterday I didn't feel quite so angry and bitter.

Yes, my country is going to Hell (or Republican Christopathic oligarchic MAGAt fascism, which is arguably worse).

Yes, I have lost the home and wife and family I worked for for twenty-five years.

Yes, I'm old, and alone, and dying slowly of Parkinson's Disease.

But I'm still here.

In George McDonald Fraser's memoirs he remembers his uncle toasting himself and his former mates of the 92nd Infantry Regiment, the Gordon Highlanders, with the pledge "Ninety-twa, no' deid yet!"

That always seemed to me an absolutely perfect soldierly sort of toast. Not a boast or a brag of great deeds done, not a promise of noble actions to come, but a simple declaration; I'm still here, still standing; I'm not dead yet.

And so I am. Sixty-seven, not dead yet. 

So here's to you, my brothers, on this Decoration Day 0f 2025.

Let the dead lie in honor and the living fight the good fight, to the end not dead. 

Yet. 

As always today: this.

Decoration Day 2023

My first since retirement, and so freighted with a very odd feeling of ordinariness; when every day is a holiday none are.

Instead of choosing to make the long drive down to Willamette National Cemetery I left the quiet house and crossed the big river into Washington, to the little graveyard outside the old Vancouver Barracks.

The old post cemetery isn't the original burying ground set aside in the 1840s. That space was built over when the post expanded in the 1880s and as many of the bones as could be found were removed to the current location, just north of the busy street that is 4th Plain Drive.

It's a very odd little spot. There's a couple of paved loops but no parking area, giving a weird "drive-through" feel to the place. Like everyone else, I just pulled the little car off the road in as gentle a fashion as possible to spend some time with the dead.

As always in these federal plots, the identical stones testify a wide variety of shades; obviously GIs and their families, but also the legacy of the frontier post - civilians working for the Army, traders and travelers, native (probably) laborers. There's even a handful of POWs from the Second World War, German and Italian prisoners buried far from their homes.

I did the same thing I always do.

Wandered among the gravestones, nodding to the GIs as I passed, pouring out a libation in their memory. Most of those buried around me appeared to be guys who'd died between the big wars, in the 1920s ans 1930s, veterans and timeservers alike only in sharing the Army blue or khaki, or OD green. Or the tree suit I wore at the end of my time.

As so often these latter days, I felt the slow loss of the kinship I once felt with my nation and my service. That We the People had soldiers fighting overseas seemed like another age instead of just two years ago.

At the end of my stroll I found myself next to what remained of 1SG Ewart, who'd been topkick in the 1st Infantry back in the day. It seemed like an old First Shirt would be a good sort of person to entrust a cold beer, so I left mine with him and turned for home, my moment with the dead done and another lazy retired sort of day before me.

I'm no longer certain what this day means, to me and to my nation. We seem more than ever a house divided against ourselves.

Yet.

As always today;

This.

Decoration Day 2022

 I visited my Army brothers down in the Deep Southeast today, as has been my tradition this day for the past several years.

The big graveyard on the slopes of Mt. Scott hasn't changed. It was just like it always is, neat, tidy, orderly, quiet. Everything, in other words, that war and fighting are not. We like our wars to be distant and iconic, if we can make them so, and so Willamette National Cemetery plays its part.

Today was, as it always is, busy. Cars and truck-loads of families coming to visit their lost ones, "...not gone but marching far away". Older adults my age visiting parents of my parents generation, middle-aged kids of Vietnam-era parents, and young adults or actual kids who looked mostly to be grandkids or even great grandkids of the people who were there waiting silently for their living remainders.

The absence of truly young adults, the peers of the young men and women whose stone dates ended in our recent wars, was marked; at least I marked it. We've managed to make our dead disappear much as we made them disappear while they lived and fought the wars we wanted kept out of our lives.

I had to walk among the dead for a bit, not an unpleasant task on a warm spring day in a pretty garden spot, until I found one of my own generation; another platoon daddy, SFC Groome, who was only four years older than me but had done much hard service in the Gulf Wars. He'd also died a dozen years earlier, so it seemed like a good spot to stop and share a drink.

It wasn't a Bud or a Rainier pounder - when I go visit the dead I tend to drink like a grunt - but it was a fine malty draft, and after sharing I sat with him a while. I hoped he'd had a good life. I also apologized for the Iraq service his stone testified; for not being a better citizen and letting fools and knaves abuse his trust. 

I hoped that he'd had a decent tour, had time for a laugh or two, and had come home sound. And wished him a loving family to come and visit him now and then, to remember fondly his empty chair, and to keep his spirit alive in their hearts.

On the way back to the little Prius parked up the hill two lovely douce matrons asked me to take their photo; it seemed odd to want to pose over someone's grave, but they were kindly and I was obliging, so I snapped off some shots and made sure they checked their camera to ensure I'd done right. They thanked me sweetly, we exchanged courtesies amongst the orderly dead, and I resumed my climb, back to the car, then back down the hill, then back across the cloud-dappled Portland Monday to North and home.

As always on this day I felt ever more disconnected and adrift from the country that made this day a holiday for me and mine. 

Every year it seems less and less the country I'd hoped for when I was young and strong and proud in my own Army blue.

Yet.

As always today;

This.

 

From the edge of the blast zone...

 The past several weeks have put me in strong mind of the images recently coming out of the coast of the Levant.

Because here I sit, quiet in the gray light of earliest morning, with my coffee and my hands lit by the phosphor-brightness before me untroubled by more than the usual reminders that my body has been here for sixty-two years and I have not treated it kindly.

My family are all still asleep...no, wait; I do have another early waker, the Big Cat, Drachma. He's our sniper-scout, authorized to roam the AO without specific direction, and he takes advantage of that with characteristic feline ruthlessness. His junior partner, little Nine, has too many physical issues for me to feel comfortable with that; she has to be "walked" during her much-demanded expeditions outdoors. 

Here they are together on the east deck:

You'll notice the craftily-synchronized tail-wagging. I'm informed that is likely to be proposed as a demonstration sport for the 2021 Olympics, assuming that my country is even capable by next summer of sending representatives.

Sorry. Got sidetracked by cats again. Damn critters, they're like that.

Anyway...my point is that the Fire Direction Center is a quiet place. 

My kids are poised to return to Virtual School in less than a month - Portland Public has decreed online-only until the new year - which as a former teacher and parent I find appalling but as a sixty-two-year-old highly unexcited about the possibility of one of my progeny returning from school with a massive viral load of the novel coronavirus am kinda fine with.

My Bride, likewise, is preparing to return to her job as Miss Debra, School Secretary (which, by the way, isn't nearly as fun as it might have been fifteen years ago. I'm not saying we've reached the post-roleplay stage of our sexual lives, but we have gotten to the point where "too much like work" is a genuine factor. Sorry if that's TMI, but, there you have it...) and seems to be willing to be cautious about it.

My job, while incorporating entirely too much boring grunt-level dirt-nanny bullshit work, is still here. My outfit seems to be managing to hang on to clients, and we haven't been seeing - at least, not yet - the shutdown or suspension of backlog work.

And I'm...okay. Getting out to do some of the things I enjoy, diverted by the return of Portland soccer, reading a crap-ton, exercising, trying to stay as healthy and mentally and emotionally sound as I can; this is from a recent nautical adventure on Columbia Slough, with the Bride as Pirate Queen.

The only personal drawback is my physician has ordered me to cut back to less than a single beer or dram a day and no more than four or five a week! - and that's cruel hard for someone who likes the drink taken as much as I do. 

I find I've resorted to finding bizarre beverages to sample in hopes that a single draft will be enough.

And, yeah, this one surely was. Ugh.

So from the promontory where I stand? Yeah, things are well enough.

And, yet, when I look beyond that, it's more like this:

The Senate Republicans and the White House - that is, the "governing" pieces of the GOP, if you can call governing what they do - have given up trying to keep to the inside of the fog lines and simply let the nation, the public, and the economy drive off a goddamn cliff.

There's no urgency. There's no plan. Except "it is what it is". At least the House Democratic caucus proposed something, a legitimately-WW2-level response to what is an extinction-level epidemiological event. The fucking GOP?

Nothing. Let them die, God will recognize his own. Apparently that's all we're gonna get from the Pary of Personal Responsibility.

The states and cities budgets are going to crater. The death toll is going to keep rocketing up. People - most people, I can't speak for MAGAts - aren't stupid enough to dice with Death if they don't have to; they're not going to flock into IKEA and Cracker Barrel and Spencer Gifts (are there any "Spencer Gifts" left anymore, outside zombie enclosed shopping malls..?) so restaurants and bars and little shops and businesses are going to collapse.

One of my favorite little soccer bars, the Toffee Club down on Hawthorne, tried to reopen under the "Phase 1" rules back in late June. Much as I enjoy sharing a pint and a match I had no interest in going maskless to share recycled air with random strangers in the Plague Year. I didn't go, lots of people didn't go...and so now they're closing again.

That's...very saddening.

And pointless. Utterly uneeded. For a tiny fraction of the money that went to Amazon and Yeezy and Untuckit this little bar could have kept playing until we have a vaccine or effective treatments, another year or two.

But, no.

And I won't even bother to discuss the baboon-assed jackanapes in the Oval Office. We all know that he's useless in this pandemic as a tampon in a typhoon, except to spread lies and bullshit and disinformation and propaganda for his BFF Vladimir. Oh, and golf. That may be his most egregious personal wrong; he's taken a game my father the Master Chief loved and was damn good at, a game I sort-of appreciated, and made me utterly loathe because of his ties to it.

So here I sit, watching, appalled, as roughly four of ten of my supposed-countrymen roar and bay and lust for this bloated fool, for this ridiculous abdication of responsibility and sanity, and while they do the supposed free press refuse to put their thumbs on these people - both the MAGAts and their tin gods, the Cottons and Mnuchins and McConnells and, of course, Il Douche - for that insanity and irresponsibility and stupidity.

And...so than, what? 

Vote? 

Sure as hell, yes I'm going to campaign and vote against every one of these sonsofbitches. Starting right here in Portland, where the combination of a worthless Police Bureau and the worthless Mayor who's humping them, need to go

But I live in safely Blue Portland. There's nothing I can to to stop the chucklefucks in Cornhole, Texas and SisterWife, Tennessee (with the help of Trump's people and the GRU...) from inflicting this lunatic graft and corruption and plutocracy and stupidity on me and my family and my Blue Portland for another interminable four years.

It's maddening. It helps me understand rebellions and the construction of guillotines; when the rulers and their partisans show they don't care if you live or die, well...then it becomes you or me, jack, and I'm gonna make sure it's you if I can.

But...all I have is a vote, and a voice, and a keyboard. 

(And, if it comes to that, an old bolt-action rifle, one magazine, and 120 rounds of ammunition, so let's hope it doesn't come to that.)

And that's arrayed against millions of moronic MAGAts. Fox "News". Page after page of bothsider Quisling press. The fucking GRU! The weight of the Executive Branch, the Senate, and the Supreme Court.

Even if Trump loses in November - and even if he concedes without him and his MAGAts picking an actual physical fight, which I am thoroughly unsure they won't - all those other noxious weeds will remain, determined to choke with religion and racism and oligarchy what I had thought were the growing trunks of the Trees of Liberty; secular science, equity, comity, equal justice under law.

Much of the time I feel like Smokey the Bear, clinging to my smouldering and shuddering Cascadia douglas-fir, alone at the top of the ridge, whilst all around me all the forests in the nation are burning to the ground.

...in a quiet way and at an opportune time,

One of my favorite works of fiction is Tim Farrington's The Monk Downstairs. There's nothing weighty about it, it's just a pleasant little tale of life and love, a trifle that I enjoy because Farrington writes with a sort of breathlessly effortless grace, the kind of writing that makes writing feel easy and natural, as if you could just sit down and crank out that sort of perfectly simple yet perfectly weighted prose any time you want to.

But there's also a deeply sorrowful heart to it, and I remembered why I cried the first time I read it, over a dozen years ago but not long after my daughter Bryn was stillborn. It was this, and I hope Mr. Farrington forgives me quoting him at length.

"She had never allowed herself to grieve wholly before, she realized now. Not for her father, not for her grandparents. Not even for her marriage: she'd never allowed herself to face what it meant to fail in the central relationship of her life. To really remember that shining, innocent love she'd felt and everything that had happened to it. And this was why, of course; because some pragmatic, self-protective sense had told her that grief was bottomless. Skirting this sea, she had dipped her toes in; she'd wondered what would happen if she crossed the line, but it had always seemed that it could only be a kind of defeat, a drowning, a death.

And so it was.

But maybe it was not the end, to be defeated by life. Maybe that was even part of what it meant to be a human being; to recognize the way in which life had finally defeated you, to accept the ways in which death had come, to stop looking away from the failures of love, and to grieve.

To keep your heart open in this sea of silence; to drift in it, surrendering to its currents baffled and without recourse.

And at the bottom of it, to be surprised anew by love's simplicity."

And that's really it. It's a sort of munshin, a letting-go, the simple acceptance of the endlessness of grief, the release of struggle and denial against that suffering of loss. Some things are simply too grievous to be borne, and it is the trying to bear them that crushes you beneath their weight. It is only when you simply sink beneath them to that deep, still darkness that your heart and mind can then accept that that grief is part of you and always will be.

That, just as for the note to be there must be silence before, and after, there must be darkness for there to be light.

Knowing that does not lighten the darkness. But it makes the darkness bearable, a part of life instead of a denial of it.

Not in anger but in sorrow

What can you say?

As years go, 2011 had its usual share of blessings and curses.For me and mine, well, I'm a father, so perforce my year was consumed by my children, and in that respect it was more blessed than not.

My Big Guy turned eight and started third grade, while Little Miss made five and started public school altogether, going to kindergarten with Peep's K-teacher from three years ago. They seem to be growing and thriving.

The Boy is smart and funny, and he even impressed me on Christmas Morning when, confronted by a ridiculously juvenile present from one of his aunties, he simply smiled and nodded graciously instead of rejecting the gift with a snarl. He has taken on a half-portion of preteen snippiness and attitude but seems to have mixed some maturity in there as well.He still seems to me to be myself at eight; determined to go at life the hard way. That's not an easy road to walk, and as a father it pains me to watch him insist on taking it. But all I can do is show him where he's going and love him as he goes there. And hope he chooses happiness instead of troubles.

As the girl gets bigger she's taking an interest in her condition as Chinese and American. She talks of her parents in China, is enthused about everything Chinese, and takes pride in the marvel that she can be Chinese AND American which, as she has told us whenever possible, is way cooler than being plain old vanilla caucasian-American.She is sweet and loving, the very avatar of the peacemaking little sister. So far she has yet to run up against anything she can't overwhelm with kindness and I dread the day she does. Until then I try and keep her in hugs, kisses, and lap chang (臘腸)

And I'm a husband. My bride Mojo continues to be the marvel that is Herself; she has continued her running program, including competing in several 5K fun-runs and getting her distances up to as far as seven miles. She looks wonderful, and from my selfish vantage feels even better - there's something about strong muscles under smooth skin that seems designed to provide delight to the male senses.Her sewing has improved to the point where she is actually making clothes (from "upgrading" existing clothing with appliques and frills). And perhaps the most exciting surprise she has brought to our lives was to learn - just this past week - that her contract with Northwest Natural has been extended six months.

I don't know how I managed to be so gifted with such a woman, but, trust me, I never forget how lucky I have been. I lost a good woman by selfish ignorance and learned from that loss; I hope I will never forget that my beloved is worth more than rubies.

And me?

Well, sadly, all I take with me from this year is the newly-won knowledge that I should have treated my body with more respect. I didn't, and it is finally punishing me for my carelessness with cruelty.In all other respects I hope I have earned another year's wisdom and another year's kindness in return for another year's journey away from the strength and fury of youth. If there is any justice in the world vieillesse should gain in savait what jeunesse can no longer pouvait.

I have my work, which I enjoy and have learned to do well; I have my beloved and my children, who with me weave the strong cloth of "family" from the warp of love and the weft of obligation. Those of you who wear that fabric know whereof I speak; it's not always a comfortable garment, not always stylish or fashionable, but it's durable and a comfort in the cold and the storm. We don't always enjoy the weaving of it. But we often do, and the crafting is both an honor and a joy when it's done well.I have my Portland home and my Cascadian homeplace.

And I AM at home here. I have been a Portlander, an Oregonian, and a Northwesterner longer than I have been anyone anywhere else. Twenty-one years this winter.

I may not have been born here but in all other senses I am a native Oregonian with all the strengths and failings that entails.

In many ways I feel more strongly rooted here, in the dark and wet soil of the Northwest, than I do in the larger nation that calls me its own. I may have spent twenty years wearing the uniform of the United States, but in many ways the flag I fight for now is the green, white, and blue of Cascadia; if 2011 has brought me any revelations it is that while I'm resigned to watching my nation foolishly struggle to return to the Gilded Age at home and fritter away its substance in feckless adventures abroad I am unwilling to let that foolish fecklessness degrade the Pacific Northwest I love. Let the United States take its own road to hell, provided that the Republic of Cascadia prospers.Does that sound callous?

I think it does, and, yet, I cannot retract it. The end of 2011 finds me less enamored of my nation, and many of its people, than ever before. Don't mistake me; I understand that the United States has never been what has pretended to be, that the American people have never been as wise, as just, or as peaceful as we like to say we are. And I also believe that in both its promise and its practice the United States has been on the whole a good place to live and a force for human benifice both to its own and to many other peoples.

But this year, as it has for decades preceding it, my country seems to have grown a little meaner, a little poorer, a little more selfish and self-absorbed, a little less gentle abroad and a little more greedy at home. Sorry, America, you could have been a truly great nation. Shame you didn't really try to live up to your promises.

So.

Goodbye, 2011. You weren't much of a year; just another journey around the sun.Let's do better next time, eh?

Year's End

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

~ Richard Wilbur

Dead Time

There's something about watching a soil sample rebound from consolidation that encourages reflection.

Boredom, perhaps?

This week between Christmas and the New Year has always seemed like an odd sort of interval of no-time to me ever since my Army Days. Back in the Eighties, at any rate, this week was usually a period of massive "ghosting"; we'd fall in for a ridiculously abbreviated morning PT - often distinguished by pure fun-PT like basketball, dodgeball, or the usual exercises but led by the junior privates for the entertainment and mirth of all involved - and then go hang around the aid station for the morning, clean already-clean weapons, dick off doing small PM chores in the motor hole, or find reasons to go "inventory our TA-50" which always seemed to entail fiddling with the field gear in our racks with our boots off while watching He-Man cartoons.

After midday chow even this pretense of military activity ceased, and we would spend the rest of the afternoon just goofing off; hanging out in the chow hall, or at the gym, visit our married pals at their quarters, watch bowl games in the dayroom or just chill in the barracks with our friends.

I remember one particular mid-week afternoon that turned into a "Faces of Death" marathon from noon until well into the following morning.

Remember those videos?

In the pre-cable era I recall that the "Faces of Death" videos were considered shocking evidence of the decline of Western Civilization; amateur (or professional outtake) films of people getting waxed in various either horrible, or comical (or both) ways. Hangings, electrocutions, falls, plus all the usual gawdawful atrocities humans have always managed to figure out how to perpetrate on each other...packaged in a tidy ninety-minute VHS tape perfect for bored-GI entertainment. But the usual finger-waggers and professional morals nannies considered them the nadir of human morality and signs that Western civilization was headed for the depravity of Rome and Babylon.

How innocent were we..?

Anyway, this week was also the time when young troops would get involved in all sorts of insane horseplay; it was this time in 1986 when Private Black pioneered "drainsurfing" during an unexpectedly-intense dry season downpour and ended up in the swamps behind Venado Beach. Given Blackie's penchant for bizarre nonsense I'd have to say that this was fairly subdued for him; nothing was set afire, nobody but him ended up naked, and there were no arrests. This week was for "Jackass"-grade stunts before there was a "Jackass".

Today I'm a sedate middle-aged, middle-class father and husband and the notion of jumping in a raging drainage ditch with a foam sleeping pad wouldn't occur to me any more than running for mayor of Portland. But this week, this dead-week between the two holidays, still retains an odd sort of surreality for me.

It has always seemed to me that the old year really dies with the solstice and the Jesus-come-lately graft of religio-commercial holiday glitter we've pasted to it. The silly alcohol-fueled celebration of the New Year a week later marks the beginning of another year's journey around the sun.

But for now we wait, idly diverting ourselves with desultory work and the bright nonsense of our new toys, through the short, dark week as the earth spins through the no-time that spans the end of the old year and the beginning of the new.

And, perhaps, take some time to reflect on where we've been. And wonder where we're going.

All the Troubles in the World

...are listed here - the source of the graphic below:I find it interesting to note that some of what we think as truly appalling human conditions - chattel slavery, for example - last for years, decades, even centuries...and yet take a relatively small toll in human lives compared to, say, World War 2, which many of us still consider a Good War and one of the United States' "great adventures".

Which, I think, points up the caution needed in placing a price on horror in death alone. Slavery has always been considered one of the truly heinous human acts because of the wealth of misery it contains. There are, indeed, "fates worse than death" and few of them are remitted the slave.

What I do find interesting to note is the apparent increase in horror over the past hundred years or so. But then you stop for a moment and think of the centuries of human atrocity that have simply disappeared into the memory hole. Rome alone fought nearly constantly during her Republican and Imperial periods - Plutarch says

"[Janus] also has a temple at Rome with double doors, which they call the gates of war; for the temple always stands open in time of war, but is closed when peace has come. The latter was a difficult matter, and it rarely happened, since the realm was always engaged in some war, as its increasing size brought it into collision with the barbarous nations which encompassed it round about. But in the time of Augustus it was closed, after he had overthrown Mark Antony; and before that, when Marcus Atilius and Titus Manlius were consuls, it was closed a short time..."

I wonder; what will some future Plutarch write about our own country in our own time?

μὴ μου τοὺς κύκλους τάραττε: The Outer Circle

I've been silent here for a long time, or so it seems to me.

Here it is almost the end of April and I've posted, what, five times?

I realized just this week that I have lost...something...some critical passion or fire that kept bringing me here.

One thing, I think, is the realization that this place is now so empty, that so many friends and readers have gone.

I enjoy writing for its own sake, but one of the main reasons I write here is to try and get my ideas heard and hear back from those who read my writing. And while I love talking to Lisa, mike, Ael, Pluto, the folks who come for the "battles" posts like Leon and Don Francisco, well...it seems like such a small circle. Much as I enjoy our little community, blogging means time, thought, and work, and I had once hoped that work would enable me to reach out much further.

Realizing that it's just the few of us in this little room, frankly, makes me think that the Facebook contingent might have something. At least all they have to work on is 520 characters. (He snorts...)

And MilPub, too, absorbs a lot of energy; my military and political writing that once came here ends up there being discussed in ways that make the sad idleness of the cross-posts here all the more frustrating.

But I think it's broader, and deeper than that.

Way back in probably 2007ish or so I wrote a post here called "Don't Disturb My Circles".

In it I talked about the Grand Illusion of parenting; that we, we parents, could somehow, through will, or effort, or just hope, divert the the terror by night and the arrow that flieth by day.

That we could

"...manage our little piece of the world while the Heavens fall around us. We teach, we warn, we clutch, hold and pull away. We hide the scissors and cap the poisons and pad the corners and close our eyes at the daredeviltry and hope that the fates are kind and the ground soft. We compare car seats for impact performance, choose bike helmets for impact resistance, make healthy lunches, watch uplifting programs, read good books and teach good manners and confide good choices until it seems that we’re ready to fall over exhausted from so much care."

And that somehow, by all these good choices, all this care, that we could control our world.

And when I say "control", I mean only that we could protect our children from physical harm.

Mojo and I know, in a way I hope few parents know, and will ever know, that the harm is always there. We can never forget that. And if we ever do, the fine gray skiff of ash inside the wooden matryoshka doll on the shelf in our bedroom is there to remind us that though

"...we may tell ourselves that anything that wants to hurt or kill our children will have to tear us apart before it does, as we do we realize that all our love and all our strength are helpless against a kinked umbilical cord, a flu germ, a moment’s inattention on the part of another driver."

We live with that pain, and the fear of that pain, every day.

And to that pain the only options are to surrender, or endure it and continue. We chose to risk the dark seas of Fortune and have there continued our journey as parents.

But I didn't really want to talk about parenting again.

I wanted to talk about my country.

Because in the earlier post, I talked about how part of parenting is a deliberate decision to ignore the statistical facts that a certain number of children will die or be maimed by auto accidents, falls, poisons, disease, violent acts...and that in the most incisive parsing of persons and circumstances there is no way of ensuring that your - our - own children are protected from harm. Instead we live our lives as if those awful fates were not possible, as if we could spend the remainder of our lives tracing our children's hopes and dreams in the dust and that the shadow was just the plane tree from across the garden and not a Roman soldier with his sword red in his hand.

Right now I think more and more about that because of what I see in my country.

First, let me just say that making a democracy work seems to require some fairly simple things.

Yes, I know that there many, many difficult things within those "simple things" - a googleplexmillion, as my son would say, of complicated individual choices and decisions. The devil is, as always, in the details.

But it seems to me that the overarching principles seem pretty commonsensical:

Involve everyone in the life of the nation to the extent possible.

Try to keep the citizens "citizens", and not rulers and ruled. That means that extreme wealth and extreme poverty, extreme partisanship and extreme homogeneity, extreme power and extreme weakness are all inimical to making a country work. The critical mass in the middle exists not as a lump unable to choose a pole but as an active force of median values; practicality, sense, compassion, bravery, honesty, fidelity.

Make the place as equitable and fair as possible; let those who can exceed do so, but not by letting those who can't fall below the level of "citizen".

Help for the sick, the weak, the old; callousness makes a nation vicious, not strong.

Be strong, but not swaggering, powerful, but not rapacious. Don't go looking for fights; enough trouble will come your way without seeking it.

Spend within one's means, but recognize that polities have common goods with spending on. Accept that taxes are the price we pay for civilization, and that those who reap the most benefits pay the highest price, and should do so gladly and graciously.

Aim for self-sufficiency. It's one thing to trade, another to be dependent on things like minerals and petroleum that we as a nation can't produce for ourselves. It presents the ugly choice between a hostage to, or a thief of, the things - such as petroleum - that the nation lacks.

...

I know that my country never really lived up to those ideals. But I look around now and it seems that I can barely recognize the nation I grew up in, I can't ignore the ignorance, greed, short-sightedness and general fucktardry.

My country seems determined to tear apart the structures that helped form it as I knew it for no better fucking reason that because our wealthy seem to object to paying taxes and our "leaders" seem addicted to foreign war.

Instead of possibilities like a Manhattan Project to solve our dependence on the petroleum we must buy or take from others, our energy seems to be invested in arguing about aborting pregnancies and similar nonsense.

Instead of asking why we seem to insist on giving up our liberties for some illusion of safety from scary Terrorists, and our broad base of economic power for a narrowing and precarious - but taller - pyramid of lucre, we worry about idols and silly street crime.

I would never, never in my life have imagined "Busted" magazine as little as two years ago. But there seems to depth to the folly we delight in, and not simple, harmless foolery that we hairless monkeys have always delighted in but the sort of bone-deep stupid that begins to warp and twist the very structure of our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

And I feel powerless to stop any of this.

I have tried conventional politics, and helped replace our senior Oregon senator with a man who seems to believe in the ideas I mentioned above. I voted - not gleefully and with a dull resignation - for the current president and his party. In hopes that they would fight for the nation I grew up in.

And, instead, watched them and their entire organization cower from, and truckle to, the people who seem to think it would be good if my country returned to the time when power, and wealth, were reserved for a small elite - assuming, I suspect, they they will be in that elite. I have watched the people I thought would fight for the sort of America I grew up in; the America of the living wage, of the GI Bill, where old people and sick people could, at least, have some hope of evading a Dickensian casting off...I have watched them squirm to evade being called "liberal" and flinch under the invective of liars, buffoons, idiots, and lunatics.

And I look around and just don't see a hope of changing this. The alternatives appear to be either the new Oligarchs...or those who run before the oligarchs.

My country is being commodified, privatized, outsourced, downsized, monetized, saturated with advertisements, war porn, greed, and foolishness. It is getting "leaders" like...Donald Trump.

While I recognize that much of the history of humanity has always been thus, it is painful for me to watch it happen again, to my own land, and know that anything I can do is less than a grain of sand in this vasty deep of clusterfuckery.

...

So, as with parenting, I can't keep the Romans outside the walls. I can't prevent the terrors, avert the bad choices, make decisions for the governing of my Syracuse in hopes that it will avoid the siege and sack. All I can do is try and keep them from disturbing MY circles. The circles I have some hope of control over and feeling for.

It hurts my heart to admit that I no longer feel that I can make any real positive change for my country, but my country seems to me to have mortgaged itself to its wealthiest citizens and industries, and I haven't the power or the riches to compete with them.

All I can do is look to my family, my home, my neighborhood, my city. My little circles in the dust.

And in the next post, I want to talk about that.