Lay me doon in the caul caul groon, Whaur afore monie mair huv gaun.
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Lay me doon in the caul caul groon, Whaur afore monie mair huv gaun.
Posted at 08:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Several years ago I got an email after some discussion about Joe Galloway:
My uncle died under Gen. Hal Moore's command in the Ia Drang Valley. I didn't know that until the movie came out and, realizing that the battle took place about the time of my uncle's death, I looked in the book and found his name there.
...
The guys who fought in the Ia Drang have a reunion once a year in Arlington, VA . I live nearby, so I have had the honor of attending several times. When I first found out about the reunion, I found an e-mail address for Joe and wrote him, asking if I would be allowed to attend. I put a phone no. on my e-mail. Joe wrote back that I was, indeed, welcome. A week or so later, I received a phone call from General Moore; apparently Joe had passed on the phone no. That was a fascinating conversation!
...
I have gone to the reunion for several years now...When I met Gen. Moore in person, he told me he'd carried Uncle Luther off the battlefield, and he actually wept. He said Luther was his friend.
Luther Gilreath fought and died in that valley in '65:
Edwards had gotten three brand-new second lieutenants as platoon leaders just before we shipped out of Fort Benning.
The 1st Platoon leader was Neil A. Kroger, twenty-four, a recent Officer Candidate School graduate from Oak Park, Illinois. Kroger's platoon sergeant was SFC Luther V Gilreath, thirty-three years old, a tall, slender paratrooper who hailed from Surgoinsville, Tennessee.
...
Although the enemy had withdrawn, he had left stay-behind snipers, and Diduryk's men came under sporadic fire, as did the landing zone and battalion command post. There were marksmen up in the trees and up on the termite hills. The North Vietnamese had been beaten back but hadn't quit yet.Out in the Charlie Company sector Sergeant Major Plumley and I walked through the horrible debris of battle. We found Lieutenant Jack Geoghegan's body; the two of us personally carried him from the battlefield. Then we returned, located Platoon Sergeant Luther Gilreath's body, and brought him back to the landing zone to begin the long journey home.
The ensuing email exchange compelled me to visit Luther at the Wall, which I did several times during my frequent visits to DC once-upon-a-time. Since then, Hal Moore died, as have so many other soldiers in combat, battling PTSD, or otherwise riding into the sunset.
Which brings to mind Walt Whitman, whose birthday is today:
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black,With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing,With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn,With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around the coffin,The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—where amid these you journey,With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang,Here, coffin that slowly passes,I give you my sprig of lilac.
Peace to all.
Posted at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
A couple months ago, I started a post about various objections to DC statehood, but never found the energy to complete. One point that I wanted to make, and now don't have to:
[O]pponents say, Congress can’t grant D.C. statehood without repealing the 23rd Amendment, which requires another amendment. Manchin has endorsed this view.
One of the key goals of the constitutional law experts’ letter is to challenge this argument.
First, the letter notes that the new D.C. statehood bill already deals with the problem. It repeals the congressional action that awarded D.C. those electors under the 23rd Amendment. As the letter argues, the 23rd Amendment did not require Congress to pass the law awarding those electors in the manner it did; it simply empowered Congress to do so.
Congress can thus repeal it. If it did, the seat of government would no longer get any electors. The rest of D.C. would become a state, and its 700,000 residents would get electors and congressional representation.
I even went to so far as to examine the statutory stuff about elector appointment, which Congress has plenary power over. One of the hangups for me when trying to articulate my argument was that it's a bit dangerous to leave it up to Congress, but so's letting the state legislatures be in charge of this shit, as we're seeing in the various suppression bills in Texas, et al.
Anyway, there's no reason for DC to not be a state. QED
Posted at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Back in April, when Sam was really getting into our family tree, I broke down and got one of the Ancestry DNA kits for myself (the kids want theirs done, too, but I haven't decided if I'm comfortable with the idea).
Results came back today and, while they contain a few unexpected items, are not in the least surprising.
Sweden and the Baltics? Sure, with Russian Empire cross-pollination, makes sense. France? Given our large German component and a smattering of British Isle origins, yeah, sounds reasonable, too.
I am also not shocked to find no discernible NDN ancestry, despite family lore. In fact, it makes a lot more sense to me now. The big value of this DNA stuff is it adds another data point to make building the tree even easier, and all of a sudden a lot more links have appeared.
My maternal grandfather had done quite a bit of genealogical research, which I was given at one point (sadly no longer in my possession). Regardless, I knew roughly that his family had come over from what is now Germany in the early-to-middlish 18th century, but I had little connection to my grandmother's side.
Grandma's the Scots-Irish (and Welsh) family, which made the whole notion of some Cherokee blood plausible. Those folks were often indentured servants who headed (illegally) West across the Appalachians to find land, and intermarried, so I accepted the possibility.
Let's just put that to bed right now. All the NTodd-predecessors pretty much were born, lived, and died in the same small area of Pennsylvania for generations since the 1730s or so, with no evidence any of them migrated to Cherokee territory. Lenape might make some sense in that case, but whatevs, as many European colonizer descendants are perhaps discovering, those tales of Native ancestry were bunk.
That said, I confirmed some other stuff on my paternal side. Gram and her brothers had hired a professional to gin up their family tree, which was put into a book that I got to peruse once as a lad. And yes, we are directly related to Myles Standish and John Alden (through their married kids, Alexander and Sarah). Like, they're my 11th great-grandfathers.
All those people stayed in the Plymouth/Duxbury area until some hardy souls moved to central Maine maybe a decade or two before it became a state, where they spent their entire lives until a couple generations ago. That's also where we get our connection to revolutionary Deborah Sampson.
I haven't sussed out the relationship to Abraham Lincoln yet, nor to Martin Luther (not Dr King, as I once proudly told my 1st grade teacher), but that's in the mix somewhere, too. Anyway, as the kids observed, aren't we really all related to everybody?
Sadie and Sam also found it quite funny that our family was, for most of its history, pretty much homebodies (after the move across the Atlantic, of course). Then we came along with our veritably itinerate lifestyle: they've lived in 3 different states on 2 coasts, while I've called 7 states home.
In conclusion, the Pritskys are a family of contrasts.
Posted at 06:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
My favorite Blue Hearts track.
Apropos of the awesome punk bank, The Linda Lindas, performing at the LA Public Library the other day. Their name made me wonder if they were paying homage to the Blue Hearts, who have a popular song called Linda Linda.
Now a funny little story. At the end of our college career, my buddy Phobrek was the station manager at WMHB, and he got all sorts of promo stuff from studios which he introduced to me.
We both loved the stuff from the Blue Hearts and played the shit out of their music on our shows. So much, in fact, that we made a noticeable impact on the charts, and Japanese media interviewed him trying to understand "why the Blue Hearts were so popular in central Maine."
Really, it was just two dudes, although I'm sure our dozens of listeners also enjoyed it.
Posted at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
I'm swamped until my current teaching cohort is out the door next week, so I can't really treat the latest violence against Palestine properly. Turns out, I'm not the only person who's borne witness to how Israel imprisons millions:
As we traveled from Nabi Saleh to Ramallah by bus, we engaged in a vigorous discussion about the military occupation of the West Bank and whether it resembled apartheid. Yehuda Shaul of BtS told us he had escorted Barbara Hogan, an ANC member and former South African political prisoner, around the occupied territories. Hogan had declared after her tour that apartheid was in fact not an appropriate comparison, because what Hogan saw of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank was so much more extreme than what she knew of apartheid South Africa. Whatever the correct descriptor might be, the military occupation of the West Bank is hard to understand until you see it. You might be surprised at your own intolerance of the idea of a democracy maintaining an open-air prison for 2.7 million people. Before going there myself, I had heard this phrase, open-air prison, and figured it was not literally a prison. (As someone who spends a fair amount of time in prisons, I’m sensitive to its use as a metaphor.) But everywhere I went I saw guard towers and concrete barriers and razor wire—truly an open-air prison—except where there were settlements, which featured posh, Beverly Hills–style landscaping: little blooming flowers, fragile and bright, the guard towers in the far distance.
As they say, read the whole thing...
Posted at 06:59 PM in Pax Americana | Permalink | Comments (0)
Something I wrote on June 30, 2009, not long after my return from peace and justice work with CodePink in Palestine (many broken links removed):
I was struck by this sign marking Vermont's "oldest settlement" and the celebratory flag that we now see in Burlington as well proclaiming this to be the 400th year since Samuel de Champlain's arrival to the area.
While perhaps not quite so explicit, and certainly not so recent, as "a land without a people for a people without a land," the United States certainly has its own dark history when it comes to seizing territory and shamefully treating the people who already lived there. Such a comparison between our past and what's happening in Palestine and Israel came up quite a bit in discussions with our peace activist friends.
The walls we built were mostly wooden and instead of ghettoes we created reservations. Our forebears felt justified in taking land because it wasn't being used properly. They felt justified in brutally repressing the natives because of their "terrorism". We pretend the indigenous populations are sovereign, but our government decides what their status is. This certainly makes it harder for us to judge Israelis and their policies so harshly when we don't quite occupy the moral high ground we imagine.
The First Peoples aren't totally invisible here, though. Names of rivers, roads and towns use their words. We have Pow Wows and other festivities that showcase their culture. But we still have overlaid our world upon theirs.
Tel Aviv is celebrating a milestone this year as well: the city is marking its centennial with arts festivals, concerts, etc. It began as a neighborhood in Jaffa and didn't actually get its name until the following year:
Minutes of a meeting of the Ahuzat Bayit Committee, early 1910:
Dr.Hayyim Hisin: “I suggest that we call our new neighborhood Herzliya, in memory of Herzl”
Abraham Gerson Hanoh: “But there is a chance that we will incur the wrath of the (Ottoman) authorities by naming it after Herzl”
Arieh Akiva Weiss: “This is true. We have to find a name that the goverment will agree to. And let us not forget that we are only building a small neighborhood (sec:!!!), a part of the big city of Jaffa. I suggest the name New Jaffa.”
Menahem Sheinkin: “I suggest the name Tel Aviv, which is the Hebrew name of Herzl’s book ‘Altneuland’, as it was translated by Nahum Sokolow. This is the name by which Herzl wished to express the hope for our future in the Land of Israel. In addition, Tel Aviv has a local, Arab sound and so the local population will be able to get used to it quickly”On May 21, 1910 the committee accepted Menachem Sheinkin’s proposal to name the new neighborhood Tel Aviv.
The neighborhood of Spring Hill grew out of Old Jaffa and eventually through all-too-familiar tactics, took over the city:
Tel Aviv is Israel’s first and most important example of the apartheid-style colonialism which is central to Zionism. As historian Tom Segev wrote, “Segregation led to the establishment of Tel Aviv… by Jews tired of living among Arabs. Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion wrote that “The destruction of Jaffa, the city and the port, will happen and it will be for the best… When Jaffa falls into hell I will not be among the mourners.”
Driving Jaffa “into hell” was required in order to assure Tel Aviv’s dominance. As a result Jaffa, whose orange groves, factories and literary institutions made it the center of Palestinian life, had to be destroyed and its residents driven out. In 1948 Zionist military forces displaced 95% of Jaffa's Palestinians. Historian Ilan Pappe writes that the people of Jaffa were “literally pushed into the sea” to board fishing boats destined for exile as “Jewish troops shot over their heads to hasten their expulsion.” Soon after Zionist forces blew up and bulldozed three-quarters of Jaffa's Arab section.
Out of the 70,000 Palestinians who used to call Jaffa home, only 3,650 were allowed to stay. Many of Jaffa’s Palestinian residents fled to Gaza – which means the families of many of those killed and wounded in this year’s massacres by the Israeli Occupation Forces, as well as those suffering right now from Israel’s genocidal siege, came from Jaffa.
Their homes and property confiscated, the few remaining after 1948 were pushed into a ghetto surrounded by barbed wire patrolled by Israeli soldiers and guard dogs. In 1950 Jaffa was swallowed up by the Tel Aviv municipality. Some of the Palestinian workers remaining were forced to build the luxury hotels and condos that line Tel Aviv's beaches, but could be imprisoned if they were found in Tel Aviv after 6 p.m.
The ghetto into which the remaining Palestinians were pushed, while by far the poorest neighborhood in the city, is also a coastal neighborhood with some of the highest property value in the city. As a result 3,000 Palestinians face eviction right now so their homes can be torn down to provide exclusive housing for Jews so they can have easier access to the real Tel Aviv beach.
Exodus 14:1-3: And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, that they turn and encamp...by the sea. For Pharaoh will say of the children of Israel, They are entangled in the land, the wilderness hath shut them in.
The Palestinians of Jaffa were pushed into the sea, and hundreds of thousands all over the land began their forced exodus.
Truly a catastrophe of Biblical proportions and worthy of remembrance.
Today, the government of Israel still attempts to remove all vestiges of the Palestinians who used to live on those lands. They build concrete walls and restricted roads, they destroy villages, they make life so intolerable that Palestinians will leave of their own accord. They travel through an invisible country.
Yuri Olesha, one of my favorite Soviet authors, wrote in The Cherry Seed:
The sun is setting. I'm heading east. I am traveling a double path. One path is accessible to the observation of everyone. A passerby sees a man walking along an empty, overgrown area. But what's going on with this peacefully walking man? He sees his shadow in front of himself. The shadow moves along the ground, extending into the distance. It has long, colorless legs. I traverse the vacant lot. The shadow rises along a brick wall and suddenly loses its head. The passerby doesn't see this. Only I see it. I step into a corridor between two buildings. The corridor is endlessly high, filled with shade. Here the soil is claylike, pliable, like in a garden. Toward me, along the wall, moving to the side, runs a stray dog. We pass. I look behind. The threshold behind is shining. There on the threshold, a solar flare momentarily covers over the dog. Then it runs off into the emptiness, and only now can I see its color--reddish.
All this happens in the invisible country, because in the country accessible to normal vision, something else is going on: a traveler meets a dog, the sun sets, the vacant lot turns green.
The invisible land is a land of attention and imagination. The traveler is not alone! Two sisters walk at his sides and lead the traveler by the hand. One sister is called Attention, the other, Imagination.
So what does this mean? Does it mean that, in defiance of everyone, in defiance of order and society, I create a world which submits to no laws save the shadowy laws of my own feelings? What does this mean? There are two worlds, the old and the new. And what world is this? A third world? There are two paths; but what is this third path?
...
[C]lear and bright is the day. The wind is blowning, making the light of day burn more brightly. The wind is rocking my tree, and it creaks with its lacquered limbs. Each of its blossoms rises and lies down again, rendering it now pink, now white. This is a kaleidoscope of spring...Five years ago you treated me to some olives, remember? Unrequited love makes the memory poorer and more clear. To this day I remember...I planted a tree in memory of the fact that you didn't love me.
...
In five years, on this spot--where there is now a vacant lot, ditches, usless walls--a concrete giant will rise up. My sister Imagination is an impulsive person. In the spring, they'll start laying the foundation...Yet, there in the invisible country, someday, the tree dedicated to you will bloom.
Tourists will come to the concrete giant.
They will not see your tree. Is it really impossible to make the invisible country visible?
This letter is imaginary. I didn't write it. I could have written it if Abel hadn't said what he said.
"The building will be laid out in a semicircle," said Abel. "The exterior of the semicircle will be filled in with a garden. Do you have imagination?"
"I have imagination," I said. "I see it, Abel. I see it clearly. There will be a garden here. And on that spot where we are standing will grow an olive tree."
Yes, I edited it a bit. Take out 'cherry' and replace with 'olive' and it represents the same thing in a different context: if you will it (the transfer of the Palestinians), it is no dream. They will be invisible, not even a memory, and we can imagine the land of milk and honey with no messy reality of another people living here, no cognitive dissonance, no myths to struggle to maintain. Nevermind that we had to uproot their trees, shatter their lives, kill their children.
Surah 5 (The Feast): We decreed for the Children of Israel that whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind.
That sounds uncannily like something in the Talmud. I think Sisters Attention and Imagination would agree that the two sides have more in common than they admit and should they recognize that shared humanity, olive trees may yet bloom in the Holy Land. If you will it, it is no dream...
Also, too: it's weird hearing my voice from 12 years ago, and realizing the only thing that's changed over there is Palestinians have even fewer olive trees and less justice...
Posted at 12:24 PM in Pax Americana | Permalink | Comments (0)
Usually when the kids are being recalcitrant, I'll go all Walter Sobchak, to humorous effect. But the other day when I was particularly frustrated, I thoughtlessly muttered, "you're driving me to drink."
Sadie heard me and responded, "No Dad, you've worked too hard to be Sober AF."
And thus my dissonance was interrupted. The kids are my Higher Power.
Posted at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
She is a procession no one can follow after.
- George Barker, Sonnet to my Mother
Been thinking about this a lot leading up to this weekend, and this morning's AA meeting kinda gelled things. Truth be told, this is a really shitty Mother's Day in our neck of the woods.
My mom (Gretchen, to the right, whose middle name Sadie shares) died 15 years ago this June. I have always missed her, of course, but I feel it more acutely this year than ever.
On top of that, my mother-in-law died just before Easter. That's kind of complicated for my part, yet I bear significant grief. More importantly, Sam and Sadie still haven't gotten over the loss of their beloved grandmother.
To complete the trifecta, my kids' mother is quite literally nowhere to found, and has been for quite a long time now. Their feelings of abandonment are tempered by some other factors, but nothing changes the reality that their mom isn't here for them.
The only other thing I'll say about that is - given it's Mental Health Awareness Month - I hope she's finally getting the help she needs, where ever she may be. Anyway, the children and I are just gonna family together like any other weekend.
Sorry to rain on everybody's brunch. I hope you can enjoy tomorrow with your loved ones, and wish you peace if you cannot.
Posted at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Posted at 06:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)