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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Untold heroics by unnamed men, now buried and forgotten by all except the ghosts they share the battlefields with; friend and enemy alike now bound by the contest that killed them. None of them knew what the next instant would bring, but all of them knew the desperate struggle and the fear and the sweat and the stink and the blood in the dark sand and the flames in the caves. Thousands of men thrown up against a big rock where thousands of other men had prepared well for exactly that. The few men in the film and in the photos became known but only because of their accidental fame and to them we owe a debt: They were the cast that made the battle famous and gave at least some of the dead an animated memorial of sorts.
Heroics by men from all over the free world have kept this planet from the death of all forms of socialism but I’m pretty damned sure that the current crop of tattooed, drugged, tranny minded, LBGTQ embracing, free ranging and by-God useless and pussified, cell phone addicted men who comprise the vast majority of service aged men in this country wouldn’t get through the first week of Boot Camp at a Mediterranean spa and they certainly wouldn’t last 5 seconds with a DI crawling up their butts. They’re so pitiful that I wouldn’t even want to watch them endure Boot in any branch of the service.
Our military is filled with great men and women but the only thing that keeps the country safe is its proliferation of weapons that guarantee pure hell on earth, for everyone, in a conflict. Internally, we’re fucked.
one of those men was a navy medical corpsman/pharmacist’s mate. his son, unaware of the particulars of his father’s wartime experience, as he never talked of it, investigated it after his death, his interest driven by finding his father’s awarded navy cross among his effects.
wrote a book about it, and his father, maybe 35 years ago (?)