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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2001-2022
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
FSA/8d22000/8d224008d22491a.tif
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
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That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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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.