WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
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
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
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
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
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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 (?)