Category: History

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Whitman’s War, Our War

As I was saying — May 31 is Walt Whitman’s birthday. I’ve always been struck by his Civil War poems, their brevity and power, the immediacy of them, the empathy in them, the unflinching way he conveyed the suffering he saw and the suffering he took in. For instance, this scene from “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown“:

“We come to an open space in the woods, and halt by the dim-lighted building;

’Tis a large old church at the crossing roads—’tis now an impromptu hospital;

—Entering but for a minute, I see a sight beyond all the pictures and poems ever made:

Shadows of deepest, deepest black, just lit by moving candles and lamps,

And by one great pitchy torch, stationary, with wild red flame, and clouds of smoke;

By these, crowds, groups of forms, vaguely I see, on the floor, some in the pews laid down;

At my feet more distinctly, a soldier, a mere lad, in danger of bleeding to death, (he is shot in the abdomen;)

I staunch the blood temporarily, (the youngster’s face is white as a lily;)

Then before I depart I sweep my eyes o’er the scene, fain to absorb it all;

Faces, varieties, postures beyond description, most in obscurity, some of them dead;

Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of ether, the odor of blood;

The crowd, O the crowd of the bloody forms of soldiers—the yard outside also fill’d;

Some on the bare ground, some on planks or stretchers, some in the death-spasm sweating;

An occasional scream or cry, the doctor’s shouted orders or calls;

The glisten of the little steel instruments catching the glint of the torches. …”

Whitman was writing for an audience for whom this kind of loss was familiar. When the Civil War ended, every American knew someone who had been killed or wounded (rough arithmetic: 4 percent of the male population counted in the 1860 census died as a result of the war; that’s one in 25 men in the entire country; that ratio in today’s U.S. population would equal 6 million deaths). When Whitman wrote about the horror and tragedy of a field hospital, he was describing a scene that involved his readers in a very personal way.

The Whitman war poem — especially his picture of the field hospital — came to mind in part because, in the midst of my Memorial Day reading, I just happened across a piece from an American military doctor working in a combat hospital in Iraq. It’s immediate and moving in its own way:

“They wheeled the soldier into the ER on a NATO gurney shortly after the chopper touched down. One look at the PJs’ [pararescuemen’s] faces told me that the situation was grim. Their young faces were drawn and tight, and they moved with a sense of directed urgency. They did not even need to speak because the look in their eyes was pleading with us – hurry. And hurry we did.”

The piece isn’t Whitman. For one thing, a lot of the it’s given over to marked pro-war rhetoric and a sort of “Top Gun” meets “ER” attitude that seems a little foreign to the humanity of the situation. And the author is writing about a scene that most of us aren’t personally connected to and probably don’t want to think too much about. That in itself makes it worth the time to read and ponder.

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Il Papa

Briefly: Just happened to look at The New York Times site, and see reports there and elsewhere that the pope is near death. No surprise there — he’s been very sick for a long time. But still: The pope is dying. What’s odd is that, despite not having gone to Mass or taken any of the sacraments except on very rare occasions for nearly 40 years, I can be so quickly carried back to Catholic school days and the sense of gravity surrounding the death of a pope.

I’m thinking of Pope John XXIII (I can probably thank him for my early knowledge of Roman numerals) when I write that. He was a sort of kindly old guy who came after Pius XII, who was a cipher in my pre-school appreciation of matters ecclesiastical. I remember Mom liked J23, and thought he was doing good things in the church. I didn’t really understand what things he was doing, but there was the feeling he was a little looser and less formal than people were used to. The Wikipedia article on him has a great anecdote:

“When the First Lady of the United States, Jacqueline Kennedy, arrived in the Vatican to see him, he began nervously rehearsing the two methods of address he had been advised to use when she entered: ‘Mrs. Kennedy, Madame’ or ‘Madame, Mrs. Kennedy’. When she did arrive, however, to the amusement of the press corps, he abandoned both and rushed to her saying, ‘Jackie!’

Then he died, in 1963, in the summer between third and fourth grade for me. In Chicago, Catholic as it is — or was then, anyway — it was a big deal, and I remember a big black headline on the Daily News, which has, like all the popes except one, expired, too.

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Popstrology

Thanks to Kate, who actually looks at The New Yorker that arrives at our home each week, I know about popstrology. To quote the item in the magazine:

“Popstrology is a system for achieving self-awareness through the study of the pop-music charts—specifically, by determining which pop song was No. 1 on the day of your birth. If, for example, you happen to have been hatched during that brief, blissful period in October, 1976, when the airwaves were ruled by ‘Disco Duck,’ you may have inherited from its creators, the opportunistic d.j. Rick Dees and His Cast of Idiots, an ability ‘to parlay simple needs and even modest gifts into the precise degree of greatness to which you aspire.’ (As it happens, 1976 was the Year of Rod Stewart.) Popstrology is no parlor game; its methodology is elaborate and broad—the book is almost four hundred pages long. [Popstrology creator Ian] Van Tuyl identifies forty-five constellations (Lite & White, Mustache Rock, Shaking Booty), and, for each No. 1 artist (or ‘birthstar’), he provides a chart, which maps the birthstar’s signature qualities on a matrix of sexiness, soulfulness, and durability, among other variables. (Van Tuyl has no truck with coolness; popstrologically, there are no bad pop songs.) In the introduction, he writes, ‘Popstrology is a powerful and flexible science, and where its adherents take it in the years ahead is anyone’s guess.’ “

The piece goes on to give Van Tuyl’s popstrological analysis of several names in the news, including the current president of the United States, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Michael Eisner, and Robert Iger. He had to do special readings for these people since the formal borders of popstrology cover only the era from April 1956 (the First Year of Elvis Presley) through August 1989 (the Year of Paula Abdul).

About Wolfowitz, Van Tuyl says: ‘He’s a Mills Brother. “Paper Doll.” ‘ He began to recite from the song: ‘ “I’d rather have a paper doll to call my own than have a fickle-minded real live girl.” ‘ A meaningful look. ‘Reality can be complicated. Real life can be sticky. On the other hand, two-dimensional representations of reality never change. They never betray you. Commitment to beliefs, whatever those beliefs may be, is probably common among Mills Brothers.’ ”

If you’re a true child of the popstrology era, you probably need to track down the book to look up your sign (sadly, the old Popstrology.com site appears to have turned into a Vietnamese-language betting page)

If you weren’t born in the magic years, you have to look up your own Number One. Here’s a good place to do it: the Wikipedia’s “Years in Music.” In my year, Elvis had his first recording session and Bill Haley released “Rock Around the Clock.” But those were just the faintest glimmers of the rock-and-roll dawn. The Number One song when I was born, it turns out, was “Make Love to Me,” by Jo Stafford.

Hmmm. I’ll have to find that somewhere.

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Sports, Entertainment, History

In its listing of today’s important anniversaries and birthdays, the Wikipedia notes that it was on this date in 1970 that Vinko Bogotaj flew into television history. He’s the guy who was featured in the opening montage of “ABC’s Wide World of Sports.” tumbling off the end of a ski-jump ramp. You know — the agony of defeat. The surprise to me is that this happened so late; I would have sworn I’d seen it back during the Johnson (Lyndon, not Andrew) administration.

The anniversary list also reports that Charles Lindbergh received the Medal of Honor — yes, the one usually called “the Congressional Medal of Honor” — on this date in 1928. That’s a new one on me, as I thought the medal was reserved for combat heroics (or for wiping out virtually defenseless Indians, as at Wounded Knee, which produced 18 or 20 Medal of Honor recipients). In any case, Congress’s vote to award the medal demonstrates how huge Lindbergh’s accomplishment loomed at the time. The citation said:

“For displaying heroic courage and skill as a navigator, at the risk of his life, by his nonstop flight in his airplane, the ‘Spirit of St. Louis,’ from New York City to Paris, France, 20-21 May 1927, by which Capt. Lindbergh not only achieved the greatest individual triumph of any American citizen but demonstrated that travel across the ocean by aircraft was possible.”

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Anniversary

Happy anniversary, Shock and Awe. What I remember about the first day of the Iraq War — it was early the morning of the 20th in Baghdad, really — is the attempt to kill Saddam Hussein with a massive opening strike. In a way, it’s an episode that’s emblematic of the whole course of the war: The CIA reported it had good inside information about Saddam’s whereabouts, and President Bush decided to try to “decapitate” Iraq’s government and perhaps abbreviate the war. Initially, rumors flew that the strike had narrowly missed Hussein — reports circulated that a grievously injured Saddam had been pulled from the rubble of a bunker. But that, like so much that was perhaps wishfully reported about the war, turned out to be untrue. Three weeks later, a U.S. air strike flattened a Baghdad apartment block that housed a restaurant where Saddam was supposed to be. After an intensive effort to identify the remains of the score or so of people killed in the attack, the conclusion was that if Saddam had been there, he was gone by the time the bombs struck.

Maybe we’re past all the illusions we had about Iraq at the beginning, all the shaky information about the threat Saddam and his henchmen posed, the premature projections of victory, the shortsighted decisions about how to handle the occupation. Maybe we have given an elected government a precious opportunity to take root, and maybe Iraq will flourish even after U.S. troops are no longer there to maintain a semblance of order. All I can be sure of is that, after spending two years, tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, Iraq and the United States are different from what they were when we launched that first strike, and it’s far too early to tell what all the consequences will be.

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Numbers

Not that numbers ever tell the whole story, one view of the U.S. killed and wounded in Iraq:

Killed

Year 1 (March 20, 2003-March 19, 2004): 583

Year 2: (March 20, 2004-March 19, 2005): 938

Wounded

Year 1: (March 19, 2003-April 2, 2004): 2,988

Year 2: (April 3, 2004-March 14, 2005): 8,256

(Source: Iraq Coalition Casualties)

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Al and the Ides

March 14th is Albert Einstein’s birthday. Since I’m unconversant with mathematics — though I can show off every once in a while with arithmetic — I can’t pretend to understand much about his theories of relativity except some of the changes they’ve brought. Lots of us leave a world completely changed from the one we were born into; he’s one of the very few who left a world his ideas had transformed.

And then there’s the 15th. The Ides of March, and if you want to know why it was called that — well, check here. All the historical and literary interest in the date stems from Julius Caesar getting knifed (44 B.C.) by pals. More personal interest attaches to the date because it begins a run of March and April dates that were birthdays of close friends growing up (and my sister’s birthday, too) — on the 15th, 21st, 22nd, 26th, 30th, 31st, and the 6th of April. Not dates I’ve written down — they just happened to stick in my memory, maybe because of the proximity of my own birthday. Whether I’ve been in touch with any of these people or not, I still think about each of them, if only briefly, as the days come each year.

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Trivia Smackdown: Asklepian vs. Caduceus

Caduceus

It’s too horrible to ponder what life would be without trivia, so I won’t (and besides, everyone knows that trivia isn’t really trivia at all, but precious knowledge nuggets that must be nurtured and cherished and trotted out the next time there’s a lull in conversation).

Today’s precious knowledge nugget comes by way of The New York Times Science section: "Slithery Medical Symbolism: Worm or Snake? One or Two?" It’s a discussion of the Asklepian (as the Times has it; a more common usage in English appears to be Aesculapian, checking both Merriam-Webster online and the number of Google hits that come up) versus the caduceus as the proper symbol of the medical profession. Paraphrasing Albert Brooks, you know the symbol as the stick thing with a snake (or snakes) wound around it. I haven’t been looking closely enough these past decades, because the difference had escaped me. And a difference there is:

"In Greek mythology, Asclepius was a half-mortal who had the power to heal the dead. He learned it by seeing a snake he had killed with his staff revived by another snake, which had crammed herbs into its mouth.

"Using the same herbs, Asclepius saved a man killed by one of Zeus’s thunderbolts. (Zeus frowned on that presumption, which also threatened to put his brother Hades, the god of the dead, out of business, so he zapped Asclepius too. Zeus later relented and made Asclepius the god of medicine.)

"Several historians blame the mix-up on a 19th-century British publisher and an American Army surgeon. The publisher, John Churchill of London, used the caduceus on popular medical texts he exported – but as a printer’s mark, because Hermes was the god of commerce.

"The surgeon, Capt. Frederick Reynolds, lobbied hard in 1902 to have a gold caduceus adopted as the badge of Army doctors. ‘From Captain Reynolds’s correspondence with the surgeon general’s office,’ two Australian medical historians sniffed last year in The Annals of Internal Medicine, ‘it is apparent that he was unaware of the distinction.’

"…Doctors who know the classics are particularly offended because Hermes was also the god of thieves and, even more ominously, was charged with leading the souls of the dead to the underworld.

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‘An Experiment’

Speaking of “crap journalism” and the information-consuming public, here’s the famous passage from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s dissent in Abrams v. United States (1919) in which he proposes the marketplace of ideas :

“… When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country. … Only the emergency that makes it immediately dangerous to leave the correction of evil counsels to time warrants making any exception to the sweeping command, ‘Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.’ ”

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George

What I learned:

Born this day in 1732.

Chopped down a cherry tree and confessed. Turned out he didn’t. Chop it down or confess.

Was a land surveyor. Tried to imagine what that job entailed. Lots of time in the woods, lots of time using mysterious instruments, lots of notebook work.

Fought in the French and Indian War. I can picture this, but lately I think of how bad the bugs and food and toilet realities must have been and how you never see that in the movies.

An important man of Virginia. Leader of the Continental Army. Lost battles around New York. Surprised the Hessians at Trenton. Soldiers walking bloody barefoot in the snow, dozens dying the night before the battle from exposure.

Then Valley Forge. Cold and hungry for two winters.

Yorktown. Washington won after all.

Back to Virginia. Wife: Martha. Owned slaves. Not sure he talked about them.

Then to New York to become president. Sworn in at Federal Hall, looking right down Broad Street from Wall. Thanked god at length.

Didn’t want to be king. “Call me ‘Mr. President.’ ”

Two terms. Valedictory: “Avoid foreign entanglements.”

Back home to Mount Vernon. Low doorways. Bad teeth. Caught cold and died. 1799.