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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
Gerard Van der Leun
When all Earth’s seas shall Levitate,
Dark shawled within the skies,
Upon our eyes will Starfish dance
Their waltz of Blind surprise.
The sun will Rise within wine Dark
As Argonauts imbibed,
Whose drunken arms embrace that sleep
Where Phaeton’s horses Stride.
Upon all of Earth’s wind-sanded shores,
As dolphins Learn to soar,
All we once were on the land
Shall be sealed behind the door
Of Ivory and Chastened Gold,
That the Mystery solved complete
Shall never til the seas’ Long fall
Wake mariners from their sleep.
— Van der Leun
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
— The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot
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Some will find it incredible, but when you watch an old John Ford movie, he makes a point to raise the flag in a lot of his films.
It’s a flag that my immigrant grandparents earned the right to revere through sacrifice, and one that my father fought under in Europe.
I find it incredible that some idiot in a football uniform feels he can use it as a prop for his grievances. What he wants is to make me angry; instead he pushes his cause further away and essentially belittles himself and his organization.
Bravo, Casey, and thank you, Gerard.
After poverty, polio, homelessness, and an endless list of discoveries and disappointments, after art and beauty and pain and fifty years of “feminism,” I’m still coming. All I have left of the father I never met is a few photographs and the 48-star flag that graced his grave in France.
God Bless America.
Thank you Rob for the inspirational paragraph.
God Bless America
Happy 243rd Birthday, U.S. Army. And Happy 72nd Birthday, Mr. President.
And may God continue to bless America.
Yes, what PA CAT said above. The video brought a tear to this old Marine’s eyes.
My favorite rendition of my favorite song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ETrr-XHBjE
My second favorite:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8C7i9kdEf8
From Marc Leepson’s splendid book “Flag: An American Biography.”
The American flag proved to be an unequivocally positive symbol during the Vietnam War to the men held as prisoners of war in Hanoi. The U.S. Navy pilot Michael Christian, who was shot down in North Vietnam and taken prisoner on April 24, 1967, was perhaps the most devoted to the flag. When he was held in the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp, Christian fashioned an American flag out a few ragged bits of red and white cloth that he sewed into the inside of his prison-issue blue pajamas with a bamboo needle.
“Every afternoon we would hang Mike’s shirt on the wall of our cell and say the Pledge of Allegiance,” said U.S. Sen. John McCain, a former navy pilot who was held with Christian. “For those men in that stark prison cell, it was indeed the most important and meaningful event of our day.” When the prison guards discovered the flag in 1971, they beat Christian mercilessly, battering his face and breaking his ribs. While recovering from his wounds, Christian secretly made a replacement flag.
A few days after the beating, “Mike approached me, He said ‘Major, they got the flag, but they didn’t get the needle I made it with. If you agree, I’m making another flag,’ ” said Air Force colonel George “Bud” Day, a Medal of Honor recipient held at the Hanoi Hilton from 1967 to 1973. “My answer was, ‘Do it.’ ”
It took Christian “several weeks” to make that second flag, Day said. After he finished it, “there was never a day from that day forward that the Stars and Stripes did not fly in my room, with forty American pilots proudly saluting.”
Al Kroboth, a U.S. Marine Corps A-6 navigator, was shot down July 7, 1972, over South Vietnam. Severely wounded, he was forced to march to the Hanoi Hilton where he was held until March 27, 1973, when the North Vietnamese released him and the other American POWs. When he saw the U.S. Air Force transport plane land in Hanoi to pick up the POWs that day, Kroboth said, he did not feel emotional until he noticed the large American flag painted on the airplane’s tail.
“That flag,” he told the novelist Pat Conroy, a college classmate. “It had the biggest American flag on it I ever saw. To this day, I cry when I think of it. Seeing that flag, I started crying. I couldn’t see the plane; I just saw the flag. All the guys started cheering. But that flag … that flag.”
Oh, that Old Glory made with Stars and Bars and Field of Blue, yes, with blood and tears and fears and with Courage too.
Long may you wave gracing the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, and may we be worthy of You.
The music:
Fanfare for the Common Man by Aaron Copland
Played by the “The Presidents Own®” U.S. Marine Band®
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=32&v=0KxMc_tyQBo
I traded a Marine for a very large American flag some years ago. 9×17. Used to fly on a Navy ship. Wonder if the HOA will let me put up a flag pole large enough to fly it.
1950 my father placed a 12×12 American flag on the wall in front of my crib.
1968 I took that flag to Vietnam as a machine gun team member with the 2nd bn. 9th marine regiment.
June 1969 my unit secured and held a small hill located near the Ho-chi Minh trail rt. 922.
The flag was tied to a broken tree over my teams fighting hole with some com wire. We had a visit by the division commander and his Sgt major with the usual flunky reporters and they took pictures of the piled up bloting NVA dead and got in our way as we policed the battle field.
The Sgt major told us to take down the flag because we didn’t have a South Vietnamese flag to fly along side old glory. We did as we were told being the good snuffies trained to not ask why. Along with the entourage there was a full bird ARVN you readers connect the dots.
09/11/01 I again placed the same flag on my office door resting in a plastic sleeve. I was asked to take it down by a liberal physician who ran the clinic I worked at.
I look at the fading color of this old flag I see blood stains spattered on its stripes. From Sgt Gonzalez’s bleeding all over me and Floyd Fuller as we placed him on a medivac.
I want this flag folded correctly placed inside my suit coat over my heart when they intern me at the national cemetery in Arizona.
FINALLY there will be no voices to say take that flag down.