Taps for the greatest generation

The New Neo Posted on by

Today is the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day. I reposted something I wrote a few years ago in honor of the occasion, but I have a few more thoughts to add.

Seventy years is a long time, but not so long that there aren’t veterans of that day still alive and even kicking. But the sad truth is that each year there will be fewer and fewer to tell the tale, and one day there will be none.

The funeral I attended yesterday was for one of those veterans, not of Pearl Harbor but of World War II. He had graduated from college at the ripe old age of 18 and enlisted almost immediately, becoming one of the youngest naval officers ever.

I learned all these facts for the first time at his funeral. The coffin was flag-draped, and the stories of his service were related as part of the eulogy. At the gravesite there was another surprise (at least to me): a two-person honor guard from the Navy, who removed the flag before the coffin was lowered into the grave, folded it into the familiar triangular packet, and presented it to his widow.

Before that, the older of the two had played Taps on a bugle, standing (as the rules dictate) “at a distance 30 to 50 yards from the grave site while a ‘Final Salute’ is given.” This particular bugler was some sort of musical genius; I have never before heard Taps played with such a beautifully heartbreaking tone.

[NOTE: See the Wiki entry for more about military funerals, including who is eligible.]

70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is an updated repeat of a previous post.]

Today is the seventieth anniversary of the December 7, 1941 Pearl Harbor attack. The generation that reacted to it by mobilizing and fighting World War II is on its last legs. But they were the ones we still call “the Greatest.”

I was reminded of this while watching one of those Oliver North “War Stories” TV shows, about Pearl Harbor. It featured some of the elderly participants reminiscing about that long ago day. Before each one spoke, there was a photograph of him back in 1941: young, vibrant, handsome, full of life. Now they were ancient, and most only vaguely resembled their former selves. But they still transmitted great moral strength and a kind of Gary-Cooperesque stoicism and understated bravery as they told their stories.

A couple of facts: it’s become fashionable to believe that FDR knew about the attack in advance and let it happen anyway. But those 12/7-truthers are almost undoubtedly wrong. Roosevelt wanted to get us into the war, and he knew a Japanese attack was coming at some point, and informed his generals to that effect, but he knew none of the particulars in advance.

It’s odd how this idea of a government in cahoots with the enemy, willing to let innocent Americans die, keeps coming up again and again. A certain not insignificant segment of the population appears to favor such conspiracy theories, probably because we don’t like feeling vulnerable to sudden attack. We’d rather think Daddy in the White House could have stopped it but chose not to—that makes him powerful but amoral, rather than powerless to protect us.

Here’s a post I published last year on Pearl Harbor Day. It focuses on FDR’s famous speech afterward, and the will and resolve he amply demonstrated. Will and resolve in war remain extremely relevant these days, in Afghanistan (at least Obama hasn’t made any references yet today to “the bomb that fell on Pearl Harbor,” his gaffe from July, 2008).

Here is just a little bit of Roosevelt’s post-Pearl Harbor speech, in case we need reminding of what American resolve used to sound like:

”¦No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

Here’s the speech itself:

[NOTE: The memorable phrase that began FDR’s address, “a date which will live in infamy,” wasn’t in Roosevelt’s earlier draft. It reads “a date which will live in world history.” That sounds like a high school essay; Roosevelt crossed out “world history” and added “infamy” in his own hand. A wise choice.]

Do presidents age fast in office?

The New Neo Posted on by

Demographer S. Jay Olshansky has done a study appearing in JAMA which he claims debunks the popular idea that serving as POTUS is so stressful it shortens a person’s life:

Olshansky found that 23 of the 34 U.S. presidents who died from natural causes did not appear to have their lives cut short by the stress of leading the nation. They lived longer than men of their same age and era – and in many instances far longer.

For example, the average age of the first eight presidents at their time of death was 79.8 years – during a time when life expectancy at birth for men was less than 40.

The reason is likely the effects of advanced education and better access to healthcare, Olshansky said.

Well then, why compare them to average men of their day? Why not compare them to men of similar wealth and education and access to healthcare? Probably because that would be a great deal more difficult to find data for, especially concerning the early years of the US.

Olshansky also touches on the popular perception that presidents age visibly in office at a rate greater than normal, although his study didn’t cover that. This phenomenon of accelerated presidential aging has long been observed and remarked on, but I have a different take on it.

I’ve noticed in my own life and among my friends, as well as for public figures, that visible aging doesn’t progress in smooth linear fashion. It advances in fits and starts and discrete bumps.

One year I look around at my friends at the Christmas party and everybody looks pretty darn good. The next year I wonder who all these old folk are. In their thirties and forties the aging process seems so slow and gentle as to be almost stagnant; most people seem to go on and on looking almost like they did in their twenties.

There’s a group who hit the aging wall in their mid-to-late forties, going almost overnight from young to oldish. They’re the canaries in the mine. Another bunch “turn” quite suddenly in their late fifties, with the early sixties a time of particular peril for many.

These periods happens to coincide with the ages of many presidents while in office. I hereby submit that it’s not so much the stress of office—after all, the stresses come with an awful lot of perks, too—but the age of presidents during their administrations that is accountable for some of this perception of accelerated aging in presidents on the part of the public. Most of us would be perceived that way as well, if we were subject to the sort of relentless scrutiny presidents undergo.

Movie stars try to counter this through cosmetic surgery; presidents rarely do. But the way so many of those stars look after the age of 50 makes me think the presidents are wise not to follow suit.

[ADDENDUM: One president who aged a great deal in office was FDR. But he was also the president who was in office longest, over twelve years, and he had some very special health problems that made him different. Even then, most of his aging occurred in the last year or couple of years of his life when he had lost a remarkable amount of weight, not long before his death in office:

Roosevelt, by the way, was a heavy smoker, which may have contributed to his demise.]

Going to…

The New Neo Posted on by

…a funeral today, so posting will be light.

I’ve been thinking about the passage of time lately. I went to a wedding this past Saturday and there was my own childhood friend taking up her role as the mother of the bride. Although her own wedding long ago still seems vivid to me, it sure doesn’t seem recent.

A wedding is a happy occasion, and the one this past weekend was especially joyful because the bride and groom appeared starry-eyed in love, and both families ecstatically happy at the entire state of affairs. Yeah, I know the gloomy statistics, but this one made a believer out of me.

But then there’s today’s funeral. As I grow older, time seems to accelerate in alarming fashion, and funerals will become more frequent. This past July I wrote this about the man whose funeral it is:

Last week I visited two elderly relatives who’ve recently moved to an assisted living facility not too far from me. They’re in their mid-eighties, and although they’ve been married for more than 50 years they live in separate wings of the place, because his problems are physical and she has Alzheimer’s.

These are people who were long known for their lively, upbeat personalities, always fun to be around. He’s still gamely trying to be cheery, despite some pain and enormous fatigue, plus his concern about what’s going on with his wife, but it’s a challenge he doesn’t always meet. He’s the one with the full awareness, after all, which is mainly a blessing but has its drawbacks when things are bleak.

But his wife has no such problems. Her mental state hasn’t deteriorated too much yet. She’s still, as they say, “well oriented”””at least in space, if not in time. She’s aware that he lives in a different building, but she thinks it’s a temporary thing, a sort of hospital, and that they’ll soon be reunited for good. He visits her a couple of times a week, and her ordinarily cheerful personality seems intact so far.

I don’t know whether his wife will be able to understand that he has died. I don’t know what they’ll tell her, and I don’t know what information she’ll be able to retain. Such are the complications of a life so long that the mind wears out before the body—or, in her husband’s case, the body before the mind.

Strangely enough, I’ve written about this same situation before, when I attended the memorial service for a friend’s father who’d died and left behind a wife with Alzheimer’s. Here’s how it was handled then:

But one person was mysteriously missing [from the service]: his wife. They’d met at the age of thirteen and been married for sixty-six long and happy years. I looked around the room but could not find her. Then during the service, the minister explained that no, his wife would not be attending.

I’d known that she was in the middle stages of Alzheimer’s disease. But I also knew that she’d been told about her husband’s death, and since they’d still been living together in an assisted living apartment, surely she felt his absence, whether she could recall it or understand it. But the minister noted that experts in Alzheimer’s had suggested that her attendance at a service such as this would be a pointless cruelty: she would only be saddened by it and yet would not remember it. It would reopen the wound of her husband’s death freshly from moment to moment, to no purpose. And so it had been recommended she stay away, and come down only for the reception and luncheon, which would seem to her a sort of party.

And a sort of party it was, actually. When a 90-year-old dies after a rich full life, that life can mostly be celebrated, although of course there’s grieving, as well.

I ended that post with a quote from Ecclesiastes. It seemed appropriate then, and it seems appropriate now. That’s the thing about Ecclesiastes; it’s always appropriate:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.

A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance”¦

Kiss and tell with Ginger White

The New Neo Posted on by

I wasn’t going to write anymore about this. After all, Cain’s out of the race, so what’s the point?

But this Daily Beast interview with Ginger White seduced me (as it were) into reading more, and then writing more. It’s a cautionary tale of—well, of something, or perhaps many things, although I’m not entirely sure what they all are.

Mostly it’s the fact that a person can spout off to the press these days (the Daily Beast is operated by Tina Brown and owned by Newsweek) and say virtually anything without proof, and it will all be printed as long as it’s about a person the MSM wishes to eliminate. One would think that Cain had been destroyed enough already, but apparently the Beast desires to humiliate him still further by publishing White’s criticism of his wife’s self-denial, White’s speculation that he had many mistresses besides her, and, in perhaps the unkindest cut of all, White’s lack of sexual interest in Cain (she alleges she thought about grocery lists during sex).

White, of course, offers no more proof of their affair than she did in the first place, nor is she asked to. And once again—as so many MSM outlets have done—the Beast trots out the old “dozens of communications between her and Cain, including pre-dawn text messages” routine. Somehow no one’s ever managed to find out how many of them were from Cain, and no one ever seems to care.

I’m not naive about the press. I’ve spent a great deal of time on this blog criticizing the MSM and its purposely shoddy and deceptive reporting. So I should not be surprised by all of this, or by the tendency of many in the public to swallow it whole. But somehow these facts never lose their ability to surprise me, at least somewhat.

I don’t see how people can read passages like the following and trust White’s story. Does she not indict herself here far more than she does Cain?:

I remember a time when I was looking for a job, and I became separated from my first husband, John, and somebody said, ”˜All you have to do is get in front of the owner of this company, and he will give you a job, because you’re pretty. And he did. The owner offered me a job, and by the end of the day, he asked me out and said, ”˜I can help you with some extra money.’ So that’s what happened, for probably six months or so. I wasn’t the only one he was ”˜helping.’ And then I started getting promoted on my own, and shortly after that, I said, I want a change. When I first started seeing Herman Cain, I lived in Louisville, but within a year I got a job offer here in Atlanta. I told Herman and said, ”˜I may need help getting there””will you help me?’ And he said yes.”

For White, getting men to supplement her income that way “started becoming a game,” she said. “It was easy for me to get help like that. It makes you a bit cold. You have to be just as clever as they are, just as cold as they are, just as calculating as they are””and sometimes beat them at their own game. But I don’t want to be depicted as a woman who sleeps with men for money. I am not that woman. There have been a lot of men who sensed vulnerability and dangled a carrot, but I am not a bad person. I am a loving mother who has always wanted to make her own way and give her kids the best. I never wanted to take a handout, and I’ve said no more times than I said yes. I’ve said no more times than you can write down.”

Wow. Just wow. Again, I’m not so naive as to think this sort of thing doesn’t happen; I know it does. But I guess it still surprises me that White would say this freely about herself and not realize how terrible she sounds, and that at the same time her testimony (and her personal history) doesn’t seem to impeach her in the eyes of much of the public.

There’s more, much much more. But I’ll stop now. Suffice to say that the portrait White’s own words paints of her is so untrustworthy, so sordid, so deeply despicable that whether or not Cain had an affair with her, he showed terrible judgment in merely being friends with her.

Cain drops out

The New Neo Posted on by

In an announcement that can come as no surprise, Herman Cain drops out of the presidential race.

Does this mean the charges against him are true? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s certainly no admission of guilt on his part.

I certainly hope they’re true at this point, because if not, this sets a terrible precedent for forcing someone out of the running.

Forgiving Newt

The New Neo Posted on by

Why is it that so many people seem to care less about Newt Gingrich’s serial infidelities than those (alleged or real) of other politicians?

Is it because it’s old news?

Is it because no one can imagine having sex with Newt, so it’s hard to believe he cheated on his wives even though we know it’s true?

Or is it because—in an archaic phrase—he made honest women of his paramours by marrying them (at least, the ones of which we are aware)?

Stop me if I’ve told you this one before

The New Neo Posted on by

Today’s a slow news day so far. Herman Cain promises to say something later about whether he’s going to drop out of the race. Newt Gingrich is still Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney is still Mitt Romney. Fancy that.

So I went to my drafts file to come up with an idea for a post to expand on and publish, and found one that interested me. It was about famous the Anne Frank quote “I still believe people are good at heart,” and how the truncated version with which most people are familiar is far more optimistic than the full quote.

I began to research the subject and was halfway through writing the post when I came to a source that was number six on the Google list. Hmmm, I thought; that certainly looks vaguely familiar. Yes indeed, folks, I had already written and published a post on that very subject almost exactly two years ago and had no recollection of doing so.

That’s blogging for you. The output required is so relentless that at this point—although it’s hard for even me to believe—I’ve got 5,224 published posts and over 200 unpublished drafts or ideas for posts. Although it’s disconcerting, I suppose it’s not all that surprising that I might forget quite a few of them.