10.21.25

"The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands."

— Virginia Woolf

Gloomy and dark here in the Corning home office this morning.

This is the first photo posted here from the new iPhone, after I dropped the old one on Saturday and shattered the face, leaving it alive but flashing lime green at me whenever it was running. $1,100.00 we really didn't have. The camera is reputed to be a miracle, but this looks like just another photo of a tree to me.

Four lost days to make up, and only two work days this week because we're heading to Boston on Thursday morning.

Dad's celebration of life (God how I hate that glib phrase for whatever we've done to banish funerals) went fine. Ashes in the middle of the living room coffee table, with family members, some quite inebriated, gathered to tell stories of his life and legacy. Well, one had to be careful about the whole legacy thing, eh? I barely drank a drop, knowing they all expected me to say something first. Afterward the women adjourned to the patio to chain smoke and drink and talk about sexual organs and performance, a conversation Peg found rather stunning. Welcome to my childhood.

We took our leave early, went to bed by 9, and flew home the next morning with brisk tailwinds for the entire trip.

Why has society shifted to celebrations of life and cremation? I have two theories. First, the funeral home industry has made giving grandpa a proper sendoff a $20,000.00 exercise, or more, and folks just don't have the liquidity for that when something necessary like a car is going to set you back $50,000.00 or more. Second, this is a society that denies death, eschews the rituals of passing except when they're turned into a spooky joke at Halloween, warehouses our elderly so we don't have to face our own senescence and demise. Hence placing a loved one in an urn on the mantle, and this disorienting and silly non-ritual of the "celebration of life". What bullshit.

Obviously the captain is starting the week in a foul mood.

Flying to Texas and back I read a chunk of Barbara Tuchman's Stillwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-1945. A fascinating narrative built around the life of one of our most consequential military officers you've likely never heard of. The story gives one a sense of why the Chinese have this disdain for us, and how much they overcame to get where they are today.

P and I stood on the side of the road on Saturday to participate in Plano's No Kings protest. We figured on a small crowd, lots of hecklers, and a fair chance of getting shot or run-over after the MAGA dignitaries bullhorned to their minions that we hated America and were all antifa. I guess the latter would be true about anyone calling himself a Republican--shouldn't the other side be ashamed of being profa?

In point of fact, the protest was very well attended, with a couple thousand folks waving signs at that busy intersection of one of the ugliest cities in America. Lots of folks honked horns and waved back in a show of support. Only a couple MAGA idiots blasted by with Trump flags flapping out the windows of their dented little rice burners.

After the protest, Dear Leader posted an AI video of himself dumping feces from a jet fighter on the No Kings protesters. He's made it clear he's not my president, not the president of any part of the country or its population that isn't on board with the new/old racist authoritarianism. And a third of the country is quite okay with all that.

Where is this slowly rising civil war going to lead? We've been here once before, with a third of the country prepared to fight for what we like to tell ourselves was a profoundly un-American thing: treason in defense of slavery. Then again, this country's origin story in no small part included a planter class worried about the effect on its collateral of the nascent abolitionist movement in the UK.

In 1860 the U.S. had a population of 32 million, with 8-9 million of those living in the South, and nearly half of those enslaved. Six hundred thousand deaths later the matter was resolved, at least until 1877's revanchism led to nearly a century of backsliding until the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 60s. And now here we are again.

If you figure 300,000 of the dead were Southerners (I think the number might've been a tad less, because they had far fewer soldiers in the field), that means roughly eleven percent of the male population of the South, from cradle to three score and ten, died. Carve out the pre-17 year olds and those over about 40, and you end up with nearly one in five who never came home.

Run the same numbers now, with a military-age population in the U.S. of 65 million, and you're looking at losses of north of 12 million.

I know, different war and time and most died of infectious diseases, etc., etc. Still, it's pretty sobering to think of the consequences of having a third of your country march the rest of us into an debacle based on a lot of magical thinking.

On that cheery note, I fall further behind every second I type this. Time to move along.