During the American bicentennial year, MAD Magazine of beloved memory printed a special July issue, “Madde.”

Back then MAD magazine was actually funny, sometimes a little risque but never vulgar, and never partisan – they cheerfully satirized everybody.

Since “the usual gang of idiots” died or retired and it was possessed by The Devil, a.k.a. AOL/Time-Warner (and who knows who owns its rotting corpse now?) it’s become partisan, vulgar, accepts advertising , and I believe has gone from a monthly to a quarterly. Meaning it is on life support and nobody has had the decency and respect for a once-great American institution to pull the plug.

The 1776 Issue of Madde was a characteristic loving roast of our country and the ideals of its founding.

“What’s Tom Paine doing out there sitting under a tree in a thunderstorm getting soaking wet?” -”He’s writing ‘Common Sense.’”

(Jefferson reading.) “When in the course of human events,”

-”Great lead!”

“it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them,”

-”Clear and incisive!”

“and a certain king is a doody-head!”

-”Somehow Tom that just doesn’t quite…”

(Orator on the podium.) “And I wish to nominate George Washington for his humanity, his justice, his love of mankind, and… say where is George?”

-”He’s back at Mt. Vernon, one of his slaves ran away.”

“Taxation without representation is tyranny!”

-”Wait till you see taxation WITH representation!”

This to me sums up a lot of what makes this country truly exceptional. And if you think that’s my provincial Americanism talking, take it from me, I lived abroad for 14 continuous years. Whatever their opinion of us, the peoples of the world are very aware that America is a unique country.

We know we’re not perfect – just ask us! The criticism of America you hear from other parts of the world is often tame compared to the criticism we subject ourselves to.

And that’s one of the most important, maybe the most important thing about America. We can take it. We can stand to hear what’s wrong with us and do something about it.

When Thomas Jefferson penned those words of the Declaration of Independence (after that doody-head remark was struck) he knew America had flaws, the most obvious being slavery. And he knew there could be a terrible price to pay in store.

But the words are true, and will endure through the ages.

Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and just hours before john Adams, his old friend, old enemy, and at the last, friend again.

Jefferson’s last words were, “Is it the Fourth yet?”

Adams’ last words were, “Thomas Jefferson survives.”

I think he was right. Time will tell.

“All eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born ,with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them. … ” Jefferson’s last letter, written 10 days before his death.

Cross-posted on my blog at The Marshall Independent.

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The run-up to this Memorial Day has been interesting to say the least.

As readers of The Marshall Independent can see, I interviewed a Korean War veteran who has been living with the injuries of that war with the support of his wife and family, since he came home in 1955. A remarkable man who persists in the face of adversity and remains cheerful.

I also went grave-hunting for the resting place of two veterans of the war of 1812 who are buried in Lyon County. I had no idea! And it’s a little embarrassing to admit it had totally escaped my notice that this is the bicentennial year of the war that gave us our national anthem.

I also found the grave of a veteran who over a military career spanning 22 years fought in the Florida War (or Second Seminole War,) the Mexican War, the Sioux Uprising, and the “War of Rebellion.” I have no idea is his service in the army was continuous or whether he just “marched to the sound of the drums” when he heard the call.

Looking into the background of the holiday, I found that it started out after the Civil War and was first called Decoration Day. And very touchingly, the first known celebration of its kind was May 1, 1865 when newly-freed slaves gathered to honor the Union dead in Charleston, North Carolina.

I learned that memorial days were observed locally to honor the Confederate or Union dead, but as early as April 25, 1866, women in Columbus, Mississippi laid flowers at the graves of the war dead regardless of which side they’d fought for.

I also got into a heated discussion online, that degenerated into childish insults when I said the yes indeed, the Civil War was all about slavery (And how do I know? Because they said so themselves!) And caused great consternation when I suggested that nothing we do or don’t do is likely to end the scourge of war.

Saying that is taken by too many people as arguing for war, and it’s fashionable these days to be “against war.”

Smug self-righteous nonsense. Only a lunatic is “for” war.

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity,” said Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe World War II.

The sixth century Byzantine general Flavius Belisarius, considered by some military historians to be the greatest field commander in history, said, “All men with even a small store of reason know that peace is chiefest of blessings.”

Does anyone think their moral authority to condemn war is greater than these men? It takes two parties negotiating in good faith to preserve peace. War can be started by just one.

I heard personal stories of meeting disabled veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, with the implied accusation that if I could have that experience I’d be a pacifist – as if I hadn’t known anyone wounded, crippled, killed in war.

“A country like ours, possessed of immense territory and wealth, whose defense has been neglected, cannot avoid war by dilating on its horrors, or even by a pacific display of pacific qualities, or by ignoring the fate of victims of aggression elsewhere,” said Winston Churchill.

We, the civilians of this generation, while paradoxically farther removed from our contemporary wars than our grandparent’s generation, are more exposed to the horrors of war than they.

Modern media brings the war to us in real time, and has grown beyond the ability of the government to censor and sanitize what we see of it.

Modern military medicine saves more wounded than ever before. In the horrors of a Civil War surgery, the most severely maimed did not survive. Today more than ever before are coming home, with the evidence of their maiming for us to see.

“If you would have peace, prepare for war,” said Flavius Vegetius, author of the oldest surviving military manual.

But how can we ask our young people to prepare for war, how can we ask them to fight wars, after they’ve seen what happens to some who do?

The same way we always have. Set aside a day to honor those who prepared for war, those who fought the wars, and those who fell in them.

Have a good Memorial Day.

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Note: Cross-posted from my newspaper blog.

Veteran broadcast journalist Mike Wallace died yesterday at the age of 93.

Wallace was born in Brookline, Massachusetts on May 9, 1918, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents originally named Wallik, and his life only got more interesting from there on.

Wallace was one of the few remaining survivors of the beginnings of broadcast journalism, back when it was common to have a wider variety of experience than is even possible today. He was at various times a commercial pitchman, a game show host, radio narrator for shows such as the original Sky King and The Green Hornet, sportscaster, and stand-up comic (didn’t know that one did you?)

He also served as a communications officer on a U.S. Navy sub tender during World War II.

I feel safe in saying no journalist starting out these days could ever amass a resume like that.

My first memories of Mike Wallace were from the half-hour documentary Biography, which featured informative and interesting, but mostly softball pocket bios of prominent people, living and dead.

In 1959 Wallace and Louis Lomax produced The Hate That Hate Produced, a five-part documentary on The Nation of Islam, featuring one Louis X, later known as Louis Farrakhan.

Wallace began, “While city officials, state agencies, white liberals, and sober-minded Negroes stand idly by, a group of Negro dissenters is taking to street-corner step ladders, church pulpits, sports arenas, and ballroom platforms across the United States, to preach a gospel of hate that would set off a federal investigation if it were preached by Southern whites.”

With Farrakhan responding, “I charge the white man with being the greatest liar on earth! I charge the white man with being the greatest drunkard on earth…. I charge the white man with being the greatest gambler on earth. I charge the white man, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, with being the greatest murderer on earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest peace-breaker on earth…. I charge the white man with being the greatest robber on earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest deceiver on earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest trouble-maker on earth. So therefore, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I ask you, bring back a verdict of guilty as charged!”

It would not be the last time Wallace and Farrakhan clashed on air.

Contemporary critics have called the documentary a “caricature,” “one-sided,” and even “yellow journalism,” but The Nation of Islam and Farrakhan have no reason to complain. Farrkhan and Malcolm X were catapulted to fame and became frequent interview subjects, college speakers, and talk show guests (before Malcolm X’s assassination,) and the Nation of Islam’s membership doubled to 60,000 in the weeks after the broadcast.

Whether one regards that as a desirable outcome or not, it illustrates something about Wallace as an interviewer. He let his subjects have their say.

Well yes, but isn’t that what journalists are supposed to do?

Ideally yes, but in this day and age there are an awful lot of so-called journalists who constantly interrupt their subjects, cut them off, argue with them, and shamefully edit their responses.

Wallace did a great service to a lot of people when he revealed he had been treated for severe clinical depression, including a suicide attempt. He said it took him a while to acknowledge because he thought of it as a shameful weakness.

He was one of the founders of 60 Minutes, which created the genre of TV news magazine.

Wallace could be startlingly naive at times. In one interview he spoke of his long professional relationship with Yasser Arafat, and how he’d come to admire him. This from an intelligent, mostly well-informed Jewish journalist would be a little like hearing Walter Lippman profess his admiration for Adolf Hitler. It should serve as a cautionary tale, that journalists get out and about a lot, but our experience on any given subject tends towards the superficial.

Wallace’s surviving son Chris is a journalist at FOX News. Mighty big shoes to fill, I must say.

Good by Mike. Somehow it doesn’t feel like TV News without you.

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Note: Cross-posted from my newspaper blog.

That’s what went through my mind when I opened my email this morning. (Feb. 10)

“An gorta mor,” is Irish Gaelic and means, “The Great Hunger.” It refers of course to the Irish potato famine of 1845-46, when the potato crop was infested with a blight that turned the staple food of the Irish peasantry into an inedible fetid mush.

The famine was compounded by political stupidity and the incredibly callous attitude of the English government. The famine caused the starvation of an estimated quarter of the Irish population, and another quarter to permanently immigrate. It’s how a lot of us became Americans.

The reason I thought of this was that I am on the mailing list of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Today I got a notice of an international conference next Wednesday, Feb. 15, commemorating the great famine of 1959-61 in China.

That famine was also the result of political stupidity and an incredibly callous attitude on the part of Mao Tse Tung’s communist government. The famine came about because of their attempt to reorganize Chinese agriculture during the so-called “Great Leap Forward.” The price of their ill-advised experimentation was at least 40 million dead, and cannibalism in the countryside.

I got on the foundation’s mailing list by chance when I was living in Washington for a few months. My first week there I came across the Victims of Communism Memorial, located at at the intersection of Massachusetts and New Jersey Avenues and G Street, NW, within view of the U.S. Capitol. The memorial is a replica of the statue the demonstrators at Tien An Min Square made, itself a copy of the Statue of Liberty with a Chinese face. The face was modeled on a woman who died under torture in a secret police dungeon for the crime of asking embarrassing questions of the regime.

When I stumbled across it, there were a bunch of Bulgarians conducting a memorial service around it. They were commemorating the panahida, a word which means a funeral service in Greek and many Slavic languages, but to Bulgarians means specifically a remembrance for the victims of the communist regime.

I introduced myself and told the organizers that I’d actually lived in Bulgaria and I wanted to write a story about the ceremony. I did, and there are Bulgarians who believe God personally directed my footsteps that day.

It was in Bulgaria that I experienced real hunger for the first time, living in a country that had not yet re-privatized agriculture, getting paid in local currency that depreciated at the rate of 10 percent per day. I lost an alarming amount of weight, with effects that linger to this day.

This morning I threw away half a ready-made lasagna that’s been around too long. Tonight or tomorrow I’ll probably throw away the rest of a bean and rice dish we won’t finish soon enough.

I can’t say this is going to change my behavior any. But for a while when I do throw food away, I’ll be a little more conscious of what I’m doing.

An Gorta Mor.

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Note: My personal blog is on indefinite hiatus, however I am cross-posting from my newspaper blog at The Marshall Independent and the print-only TV Guide.

Jeszcze Polska nie zginela,
Kiedy my zyjemy.
Co nam obca przemoc wziela,
Szabla odberizemy/

Poland is not lost,
While yet we live.
What foreign force has taken,
We will reclaim with the sword.
- Dobrowksi’s Mazurka, National Anthem of Poland

Today is Veterans Day in the United States, and Independence Day in Poland, two events linked by much history.

It is also Armistice Day, or Rememberance Day in Europe and the British Commonwealth, and Independence Day in Poland.

For me the meaning of November 11, is defined by the 13 years I lived in Poland, and by my children whose grandfathers were officers in the U.S. Navy and the Polish Army.

The holidays are all linked to the date of the signing of the armistice that ended World War I. On that day in 1918, hostilities formally ceased in Europe. With the defeat of Germany and Austro-Hungary, and the fall of the Russian monarchy, the nation of Poland was reborn 122 years after being partitioned and absorbed by the three powers.

In the “Fourteen Points” speech given by President Woodrow Wilson to a joint session of congress on January 18, 1918, outlining his hopes for a just peace, point 13 was, “An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.”

That is why all over Poland there are streets and public squares named after Wilson.

The celebration of Independence Day in Poland was officially forbidden by the communist government and re-instituted by the Polish Third Republic in 1989. I remember parties where we’d celebrate with fireworks, just like in America. However, November is usually very cold in Poland, so we’d have the party inside, set off the fireworks outside, and run back inside to watch them through the window.

I used to tell my students about how much fun we have on American Independence Day, and I’d joke, “The next time your country is overrun, have your revolution in the summer.”

Of the many Polish veterans who have served in America’s wars, the first were Polish exiles who fought in the American Revolution. The best-known of these were Kazimierz Pulaski, who has been called “the father of American cavalry,” and Tadeusz Kosciusko, who designed and built the fortifications at West Point.

Pulaski saved the life of George Washington on one occasion, and died in the battle of Savanah. He is one of only seven people to be awarded honorary United States citizenship.

Kosciusko returned to Poland afire with the ideals of the Revolution. He supported the Constitution of May 3, 1791, the second constitution written in the world after the American, which extended more rights to the peasants and limited the power and privilege of the nobility. It was seen as a threat by the surrounding powers and in 1792 a faction of the nobility formed the Targowica Confederation and invited Catherine the Great of Russia to invade the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to secure their power.

To this day “Targowicaniec” (“person from Targowica”) means “traitor” in Polish, in the same way we’d say “a Benedict Arnold.”

In 1794 Kosciusko led an uprising against Imperial Russia and the Kingdom of Prussia.

He lost.

Kosciusko spent the rest of his life in exile working in vain for the freedom of his country. When he died he left his fortune to buy the freedom of as many American slaves as possible, with the land, tools, and education necessary for them to support themselves.

During the years I lived in Poland, I saw the medal of the Order of the Cincinnati given by George Washington to Kosciusko in the Polish Military Museum in Warsaw, and a signed military communique written by Pulaski in the Pulaski Museum in Warka, Poland. And once while touring the crypt beneath Wawel Castle in Krakow, I came across the tomb of Kosciusko with a plaque in both English and Polish commemorating this fighter, “Za nasza i wasza wolnosc,” “For our freedom and yours.”

I wish I could describe for you how I felt when I stood in the presence of these relics.

For most of the 13 years between 1991 and my return to the U.S. in 2004, I taught English, wrote for American publications about the changes I saw in Poland, and in a small way helped in the rebuilding of that country so linked to ours by history.

Though I never made much money there, the wealth I took away with me was first and foremost my children, the friendship and respect of the people I met, and the heightened sense of closeness to my own country I found while living abroad.

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I just had a look at the names and pictures of the 13 victims of Major Hasan’s attack of Sudden Jihad Syndrome, which brought back a memory from my childhood.

In Newport, Rhode Island, tucked away on a side street just off the old town square is the Newport Artillery Company museum/HQ.

By an odd bureaucratic fluke, the company was never officially deactivated after the Revolution and so can technically claim to be the oldest unit of the U.S. Army. A charming fiction of course, but it’s a really fine museum. The members still have colonial-style uniforms and I believe a canon.

Among the exhibits was a propaganda poster from WWII, and I mean good propaganda. The graphic, if memory serves, was a soldier standing (I think, it’s been a very long time) in a graveyard. Along one side of the poster is a roster of obviously ethnic names: Polish, Irish, German, Italian, whatever.

Blazoned across the top were the words, “Americans All!”

The role of the dead at Ft. Hood:

Maj. Juanita Cole, 55 (Was her maiden name Hispanic or did her folks just like “Juanita?” That happens in this country.)

Maj. Libardo Caraveo, 52

Capt Russell Seager, 51

Capt. John P. Gaffaney, 54

Staff Sgt. Justin DeCrow, 32

Sgt. Amy Krueger, 29 (During WWI anyone named “Krueger” would have come in for a lot of suspicion and harassment. She joined the Army after 9/11 and vowed to get Osama bin Ladin. Sometimes, in degenerate ages it takes a woman to do a man’s job.)

Spc. Frederick Greene, 29

Pfc. Michael Pearson, 22

Pfc. Aaron Nemelka, 19 (Jewish? Slavic? I wonder how much “harassment” he got as a kid for his name?)

Pfc. Kham Xiong, 23 (Is that Cambodian? Did his parents flee the Killing Fields? Is it Chinese, perhaps from one of the ethnic minorities of China? We owe it to him to get it right.)

(UPDATE: He was Hmong, a tribal group in Vietnam with a strong warrior tradition who sided with the U.S. during the war.)

Pvt. Francheska Velez, 21 (Hasan got a twofer with her – she was pregnant.)

Spc. Jason Hunt, 22 (A fellow-Okie. He must have gotten some ribbing down at Ft. Hood during the annual OU-Texas football games.)

Michael G. Cahill, 62 (John Q. Civilian – except the enemy has made plain enough there ain’t no civilians in this war.)

Americans all. Gunned down by a man whose family was taken in by this country. Who was given a costly education in return for service in the military – in the higher ranks with honors and dignity. Not as an enlisted man, officer’s houseboy or hash slinger in the mess.

This is three straight posts on one subject, and I’m sorry I’ll quit now. Right after this.

I want him dead. I want him executed, hanged with a hemp rope. I want his mouth stuffed with pig’s flesh, his body wrapped in the skin, and I want him buried in a pig yard.

And if anyone objects, I want us to rise up as a nation and say, “GOT A PROBLEM WITH THIS? COME AND GET YOU SOME.”

Jihadism

Note: A shorter version of this appeared as the weekend Op-ed in the Valley City Times-Record,

Thursday was the anniversary of what the Chinese government calls “the June 4 incident.” That nice bit of understatement describes the killing of somewhere between 241 and 2,600 protesters by the People’s Liberation Army.

The first is the official government figure. The second is an early estimate by the Chinese Red Cross, which they now deny they ever said. Really. You must be confusing us with somebody else.

The Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 followed the sudden death of Hu Yaobang, former Secretary General of the Communist Party of China and prominent advocate of reform, from a heart attack. Hu had been forced to resign by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and humiliate himself publicly in a “self-criticism” session.

A demand for a reversal of the verdict against Hu was the focal point for a growing demonstration in the 100-acre square in the heart of Beijing by Chinese students, workers, disillusioned Party members and masses of people who felt the longing people in communist countries had for anything resembling a normal life.

Protesting students erected a statue of the Goddess of Democracy, modeled on the Statue of Liberty with a Chinese face.

At the time I was a grad student at Oklahoma University, and helping a couple of Chinese students defect.

I’d gotten involved by helping Tang, an archeology student in our department, by proof reading his papers. I actually don’t know how he’d gotten in, his pronunciation was horrible and his written English needed a lot of editing. And to give you an idea of how naive he was, he told me his original destination in the U.S. was Harvard, but a friend had talked him into coming to OU with him.

One evening at a party I was making small talk about history and made some off-hand remark about the good fortune of our country in having such a wealth of natural resources.

Tang burst out, “No! Here you are rich because you have freedom!”

“We’ve got to talk,” I said.

In the course of conversation, it turned out Tang desperately wanted to stay in America – and was an overstay on a J1 student visa.

The J1 visa allows one year of study in the U.S., after which the student must return to his home country and must wait two years before he or she is eligible to return. At the time, we had about 40,000 Chinese students in the U.S. on J1 visas.

It also turned out that Tang had been rather free with his pro-democracy sentiments and admiration of America, and had just discovered his room mate was an informer for Chinese Security. He found out when he got the phone bill, and saw the record of a few hundred calls to the Chinese consulate in Houston.

I couldn’t help but laugh, “Tang this girl can’t have been a professional if she didn’t know all long distance calls are itemized on American phone bills. A real pro would sneak down to the pay phone on the corner.”

I introduced Tang, and his new fiancee Ying, to my housemate who was Director of Hispanic Student Services at the university, on the assumption he might know something about immigration problems.

All this time, the tension was building in Beijing at Tiananmen, the “Gate of Heavenly Peace.” We saw on TV that heroic, unnamed youth standing in front of a line of tanks, and making them back off.

Then the killing started and we all saw the face of a protester on the cover of Newsweek, lying on the pavement his face covered with blood.

The next day, the Chinese students on campus held a demonstration, and crossed their own Rubicon by signing a petition condemning the killings. I saw them on the oval carrying the American flag and singing the Star Spangled Banner.

Since the Vietnam war, the national anthem had left a bad taste in my mouth when I remembered young barbarians burning the American flag, and old scoundrels wrapping themselves in it. I hadn’t sung the anthem myself in a long time, and here were all these Chinese kids singing their hearts out.

They were, in a word, awful. It’s a difficult song at best and they were so off-key they needed a search party to find it. And in the middle of it I realized I was crying.

The rest is history. The protests were crushed, and a number of protesters tried and executed. But reportedly only workers, no students or intellectuals. The statue of the Goddess of Democracy was demolished. George Bush Sr. solved my friends’ problem by unilaterally abrogating the visa treaty, and we got 40,000 new Americans.

But I came across the goddess years later, while out walking in Washington, D.C. There she was at the intersection of Massachusetts and New Jersey Avenues and G Street, NW, within view of the U.S. Capitol. She was chosen as the appropriate symbol for the Victims of Communism Memorial. There people from many lands lay flowers and light candles at her feet in memory of their own dead.

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Note: This appeared as an op-ed in the weekend edition of the Valley City Times-Record.

“On, sons of Greece! Set free / Your fatherland, your children, wives, / Homes of your ancestors and temples of your gods! / Save all, or all is lost!” Aeschylus, The Persians

Those lines were written by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus. For his part in creating the art of tragic drama, he won immortal glory. Winner of the highest honors his own and other Greek cities had to offer, he wrote this epitaph inscribed on his tomb.

“Under this monument lies Aeschylus the Athenian, Euphorion’s son, who died in the wheatlands of Gela. The grove of Marathon, with it’s glories, can speak of his valor in battle. The long-haired Persian remembers and can speak of it too.”

There is not a word about his fame as an artist, only about his service as a common foot soldier in the battle that saved his city and his civilization.

This Monday we celebrate Memorial Day, a day set aside to remember our countrymen and women killed in our country’s wars.

Memorial Day is not a day for the glorification of war, celebration of past victories, or lamentation for heroic defeat. It is a day to remember that for each and every American who died in a war, whether that war was inevitable or avoidable, the world ended for someone and was forever damaged for others.

It is fashionable in some circles these days to be “against war,” and to decry the horrors of war.

Congratulations. Only a lunatic is “for” war.

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity,” said Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe World War II.

The sixth century Byzantine general Flavius Belisarius, considered by some military historians to be the greatest field commander in history, said, “All men with even a small store of reason know that peace is chiefest of blessings.”

Gen. Robert E. Lee, who Winston Churchill called, “one of the noblest Americans who ever lived,” said, “It is good that war is so terrible, lest we should learn to love it.”

Does anyone think their moral authority to condemn war is greater than these men’s?

Our oldest living veterans went to war in a time when men like Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Hideki Tojo commanded armies and fleets that laid waste to nations.

Our fellow-citizens in today’s military serve at a time when weapons of terrifying power are in danger of falling into the hands of rogue nations, failed states and international terrorists.

Some day there may come a time when men “shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they study war any more.”*

Some day perhaps, Memorial Day will be “a dim remembering of a cursed time, when man was a wolf to man.”**

But that day is not yet.

And until that day comes, men and women in uniform, our countrymen, must continue to put themselves between their homes and those who would destroy them. And we must continue to honor those who did not fail in their duty, lest the day come when there is no one left willing to stand between our homes and war’s desolation.***

* Isaiah II

** Bartolomeo Vanzetti to the judge who condemned him to death, “Your laws, your courts, your false god, will be a dim remembering of a cursed time when man was a wolf to man.” Very eloquent, especially for a man for whom English was a second language. Too bad the sumbitch was guilty. Unfair trials sometimes convict guilty people too.

***O, thus be it ever when freemen shall stand,
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation;
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land
Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserv’d us as a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause, it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Fourth verse, it’s really a better poem than it is a song IMHO.

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A friend of liberty died April 10. We received the news when her grandson answered her email the following Sunday.

Judith (Baklanova) Hatton was our son’s godmother and our daughter’s namesake. She was English and the widow of a KGB agent from the department known as SMERSH who defected to the UK after WWII.

And that’s not even the most interesting thing about her.

I met Judith some years ago at a conference of the International Society for Individual Liberty (ISIL) in a village called Swit (near Poprad which was the official venue) in then-Czechoslovakia.

I recall sitting and talking with this elderly, but very lively English lady and talking. I think I quoted a line of Kipling, she quoted one back, we got to reciting whole poems alternately and after a while we noticed we had an audience.

The first interesting thing I found out about her was that she remembered Kipling coming to visit her father when she was a girl. He was sometimes accompanied by his wife, who Judith would invariably refer to as “that dreadful American woman.”

We met again at another conference in Tallinn, Estonia two years later. That’s when my friend Linda asked, “How did you get involved in the Free Russia movement Judith?”

“Well you see, my late husband was a Russian. He worked for SMERSH.”

I think my jaw dropped. “James Bond’s old enemies?” I blurted out.

“Oh yes, those dreadful Bond books” she said.

We corresponded pretty regularly after that and in a letter, I mentioned that I was going to the ISIL conference in Rome on my way back to the States.

She wrote, “Oh yes, Rome. A perfectly dreadful city inhabited by utterly vile people. I have friends who live there. They’re not vile, but their daughter is.”

I replied, “Come on Judith, don’t hold it inside. Come out and say what you think!”

I think the next time we met was after I returned from Saudi Arabia, bought an apartment in Warsaw, and met the woman who was to become my wife.

Judith was bitterly commenting on “Blair’s bloody Britain” so I invited her to visit me in Warsaw.

She replied, “Oh I do hope you were serious about that, because I shall come anyway.”

My then-girlfriend was apprehensive because of the age difference between us, “She’s going to think I’m your bimbo,” she said.

They got along like a house on fire. I remember when Judith said something typically Judith-like, Monika shaking with laughter and saying, “Come on Judith, don’t hold it inside, just say what you think!”

After her return to England, Judith sent out an email circular announcing that Monika was her “official favorite young lady” and that anyone dissing Monika would have to deal with her.

After which she sent me an email saying, “Don’t worry about the age thing. When I was eighteen the finest and best man I knew was my 80-year-old godfather and if I could have arranged a marriage, or at least an affair, I’m sure I’d have been a much better and happier woman.”

When I founded the Liberty English Camps in Lithuania with my friend Virgis Daukas (http://www.languageofliberty.org/index.htm) she was a regular fixture at every camp and the most popular teacher among the young Eastern Europeans. If you could see the conditions of the former Young Pioneers camps you’d know what a good sport she was about it!

She used to show up prepared with a kind of hobo bundle she could carry in one hand as her only luggage. She’d learned to travel light when she was young, and had participated in disaster preparedness groups.

One of my favorite memories is of when a young Belarussian girl who fancied herself an Objectivist asked her, “Do you like Ayn Rand?”

“Oh heavens no, I think she’s a cow,” Judith replied.

I think Elena choked on something. She definitely had trouble breathing for a minute.

At one of the last camps she was able to attend, she told Virgis, “These have been the happiest days of my life. All my friends seem to want to do is get together and talk about their doctors’ visits, and here I am meeting and talking to young active people.”

And speaking of doctors, when she broke her wrist in a fall, she came under the tender care of Britain’s National Health Service – something I actually would wish on my worst enemy.

At on point I advised her that she might want to consult my father, a retired orthopedic surgeon. She took me up on this and sent him X-rays, records etc.

For the next few years she delighted in telling how she presented my father’s letter to an officious medical bureaucrat at the NHS. Apparently father wrote things like “Miss Hatton is NOT a pain-prone person” and referred to her wrist brace as “that rag.”

So, she said this bureaucrat asked, “Do you know Dr. Browne well?”

She replied, “Well, I am godmother to his grandson, so we’re practically related,” and took an unholy delight in watching how white he turned.

I could go on and on. Judith was a member of a smokers rights group and co-authored a book called, ‘Murder a Cigarette’ and fondly recalled the days when “Got a light mate?” established a friendly camaraderie that reached across class boundaries in England.

I think I’m just going to give up trying to make this a coherent narrative and tell some of my favorite Judith stories.

- Judith mentioned having seen Neville Chamberlain around the time of his infamous “Peace in our time” proclamation. She said he was actually quite cynical about it, because England was in no way prepared for war.

- Once around a campfire in Lithuania we were trying to come up with provocative questions to spark discussion among the students. I suggested, “Does God have a sense of humor?” Judith sort of put an end to any further discussion, though sparking great laughter, when she said, “Of course. How else do you explain sex?”

- One of her favorite experiences in Warsaw was a Museum of Socialism exhibit in an art gallery near our apartment, where they had set up an old communist-era cafe with surly waitresses who served awful tea. Judith used to delight in trying to make them smile, the way tourists try to get a reaction from the Guards at Buckingham Palace. She said, “Oh how I long for the day when we’ll have one of these in England.”

- The best advice about diet I ever heard came to me from Judith, who learned to cook from a woman who cooked for a British battallion in WWI (yes, that’s One.) The pearl she passed on was, “Pay no attention to what doctors are saying about diet, because in ten years they’ll be saying something else.”

- Judith and Boris had one son. They delayed having children until she was 40 because they didn’t know who might be coming to call some day. Her advice about parenting was, “Pay no attention to the schedules (of child development) doctors give you. Babies do things in their own time.”

She used to delight in telling us what a fine, handsome, gutsy boy we had. And how we’d never know a moments peace from now on.

Judith’s was a life well-lived. We miss her and regret that our children won’t get to know her as we did.

“The secret to happiness is freedom, and the secret to freedom is courage.”
Thucydides

Judith is on the web here.

http://www.forces.org/writers/hatton/hattonco.htm

http://www.forces.org/writers/hatton/files/lies.htm

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In a few days 300 will open, and my wife and I are trying to work out the logistics of how we’re going to arrange for her to see it while I take care of the seven-month-old. Our apartment in Warsaw is directly above the entrance to a movie theater, so when we were there she could feed our firstborn, put him to bed, and run down to see a movie with a pager in her pocket just in case. Here it’s not so easy, but she doesn’t want to wait for it to come out on DVD.

300, is of course the new movie about the battle at the “Hot Gates” – Thermopylae. It is based on the Frank Miller graphic novel, which was itself said to be inspired by the old B movie, The Three Hundred Spartans.

Classical scholar Victor Davis Hanson says it’s pretty good, which augers well in my book. He loved Gladiator, as we did, and loathed Alexander – ’nuff said.

I’ll be reviewing the movie, and the original 300 Spartans, and Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield – a threefer. The Spartans at Thermopylae and their legacy raise a lot of interesting, and disturbing questions about the origin of the West and the nature of free societies, which should make for some interesting discussion.

If I asked what comes to mind when I said “Thermopylae”, you’d likely quote the epitaph of the Spartans by Simonides, a contemporary poet.

Ὦ ξεῖν’, ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε
κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι.

There are several ways to render this in English. Translating poetry is often a trade-off between strict accuracy and capturing the effect of the original, but the best in my opinion goes:

Go tell the Spartans, oh stranger passing by
That here, obedient to their laws we lie.

I cannot read or recite that without my eyes watering.

This epigram was engraved on a stone and placed on the hill where the Spartans and the allies that stood with them made their last stand. The original has been lost, but a new stone was placed there in modern times. Near it is another, engraved with the words of King Leonidas to the envoy of the Great King when he demanded that they surrender their arms:

Μολών λαβέ (Molon labe) “Come and take them!”

Simonides epigram has inspired some pretty good knock-offs. The Battle of Kohima in WWII, credited with saving India from a Japanese invasion, has this memorial:

When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say,
For Their Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today

This is attributed to one John Etty-Leal and said to be “inspired” by a WWI epigram by John Maxwell Edmonds. (Inspired my ass. It’s a direct rip off, different only in minor details in the second line “For your to-morrows these gave their to-day.”)

The master of epitaph writing in modern English was undoubtedly Rudyard Kipling. I highly recommend Epitaphs of the War, which is a whole series of them on different themes. Some examples:

Two Canadian Memorials

We giving all, gained all
Neither lament us nor praise.
But only in all things recall
It is fear, not death that slays.

From little towns in a far land we came
To save out honor, and a world aflame.
By little towns in a far land we sleep
And trust that world we won for you to keep.

A Manservant

We were together since the war began.
He was my servant – and the better man.

Hindu Sepoy, Died in France

This man in his own country prayed, we know not to what Powers
We pray them to reward him for his bravery in ours.

And this one, dear to the hearts of all libertarians. A Politician:

I could not dig, I dared not rob
Wherefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

Any man would be happy to be remembered for a great epitaph. Trouble is, you can’t be around to enjoy them – unless you write your own ahead of time.

Jonathan Swift wrote his own epitaph, in Latin no less. His epitaph goes:

Hic depositum est corpus
JONATHAN SWIFT S.T.D.
Huyus Ecclesiae Cathedralis
Decani
Ubi saeva indignatio
Ulterius
Cor lacerare nequit
Abi Viator
Et imitare, si poteris
Strenuum pro virili
Libertatis Vindicatorem

William Butler Yeats translated it and cast it into English verse, thusly:

SWIFT has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.

It rhymes, but I prefer the prose translation:

He is gone, where savage indignation can no longer lacerate his heart. Go traveller, imitate him if you can. He served Liberty.

Thomas Jefferson boasted of his proudest achievements in his epitaph:

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson
Author of the Declaration of American Independence
Of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom
And Father of the University of Virginia

Notice, not one word about having been president twice!

Westminster Abbey is no doubt a great place to look for fine epitaphs among the kings and notables buried there. But in the abbey is also the British Unknown Soldier:

They buried him among the kings Because he Had done good toward God and Toward His house

Lawrence Binyon wrote For the Fallen, for the dead of WWI, from which is often taken this part to be read at remembrance services:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Shelley reminds us of the futility of vanity, (a lesson he might have taken more to heart). An enscription found on a statue of Rameses II contained a line that was translated something like: “If you would know who I am and where I am buried, surpass me in some of my deeds.”

Shelley rendered it:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings!
Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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