Virtuous Circle

Anti-Republican Protests

From Here

I wonder if this protestor is in favor of prayer in the schools?

Virtuous Father-1918-2004-I Miss You Already

The Virtuous Father died over the weekend just a day after his 86th birthday. He died after not feeling well for a day and the causes were unclear. He just stopped breathing. Considering his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer he was lucky his demise was swift and painless. I had tickets to visit him the day after he died and he was looking forward to the visit that never happened. I think he did looking forward to also seeing one of his grandsons who wanted to come with me. For a teenager to want to spend his last day of summer vacation visiting his grandfather speaks well for both of them.
Unfortunately our scanner is not compatible with this version of Windows and photos will have to wait for another time.
Dad was born in 1918 in Manhattan to immigrant parents and had they typical Our Gang kind of childhood. He was a brawny good-looking blond kid, nicknamed Whitey who had a street enemy known as Blackie. I don't think Blackie did well. He was a blocking back on the football team at James Monroe hospital in the Bronx and left the legendary Townsend Harris prep school (a public preparatory school) so he could play football.
Following High School graduation in 1936 he drifted, ending up in Los Angeles where his grandparents had gone. He lived on the beach with his friends and I think did odd jobs for some celebrities like Jack Benny.
In the service he went into the Army Air Corps-8th Air Force see this previous post. He was reluctant to speak about his experiences as most veterans are and I know very little about his missions fears or feelings. I know he said he didn't hate the Germans until the end of the war when he ferried VIP's from the UK to occupied territory and saw the liberated concentration camps first hand.
He returned home and married my mother who he had met on the beach during a leave from the service. He worked hard as a shoe salesman; my mom was a school secretary and was able to provide well for his children despite a working class background. He was sunshine in my earliest years-big, blond, tong and handsome and proud of me after teaching me such childhood landmarks as throwing a baseball and riding a two-wheeler. He was an extrovert who knew everyone in whatever neighborhood he was. Our relationship was periodically quite stormy usually over some incident, which was trivial, but which lingered longer than it should have.
Later after we were grown he and my mom moved to Florida where he went into the linen business owning a small store and selling in a flea market on the weekends. My mother became a real estate broker in Inverrarry.
He was an old fashioned working class-non-intellectual liberal. In favor of "free" drugs and opposed to the Iraq war. His reasoning on Iraq was that it wasn't worth one American life and that the Arabs would be killing each other like they always do if we left them alone. Not the most nuanced argument but not a very common one either.
Despite a lack of very much formal education he seemed to know everything. My mother could do the Sunday Times crossword and double-crostic in 45 minutes with a pen-and if she didn't know something he invariably did. He was terrible on proper names once sending us into gales of laughter by telling us that Danny Kaye was on in "The Secret Life of Walter Pigeon"
We spoke every day for the last 3 years-sometimes on family sometimes about the old days-rarely about politics-sometimes about baseball or old movies, which he adored. He was proud of his children and grandchildren and despite his flaws-quick anger and the ability to hold a grudge-I misses him very much.

Kubler Ross-RIP as You Helped Others

CNN.com - 'On Death' author Kubler-Ross dies - Aug 25, 2004
I had missed this obituary until I found the following link in the blog of Sheila O'Malleyand this post is an expansion of comments I made there.
I was a medical student in 1969 when "On Death and Dying" was published.Ross's work gained acceptance(no
pun intended)rather rapidly as it filled both a conceptual as well as a
therapeutic void. The adoption of her precepts which I will greatly simplify as-
Gently guiding the patient through five stages of grief -- denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance was so fast that had it occured two years later I would have assumed the work was from a previous era.-Holdouts were usually cheerfully optimistic towards dying patients holding out false hope-
In my experience most patients actually went through these stages without coaching and I have seen children as young as 3 protecting their parents by outwardly seeming to be unaware of impending death but talking about it to their physicians,nurses and clergy.
Like many truly innovative cultural concepts,in
retrospect it seems to have occurred overnight. Think about the internet or
about the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960's.
In my own field of pediatric oncology , the conceptual framework
provided by Ross allowed us to watch her sequence, ending in acceptance
unfold and it was exrtremly rare to see a patient go out kicking and
screaming.
She was a constant presence in the mid seventies giving lectures and
rounds and being generally accessable. Unfortunately at about that time
to many of us she seemed to forget that our role as physcians was to
prolong useful life as long as possible and as physician researchers we
were to attempt to manage diseases long term(eg AIDS) and to attempt to
cure them. In her later years her emphasisHer outline has been generalized to areas of loss other than death-for example alcoholics who must stop drinking go through similar stages or professioal athletes upon retirement. on acceptance seemed to work
against medical progress and in some cases discouraged patients from
seeking long term treatment or cures.
She became weird in those years-like a middle european maiden aunt
angel of death and seemed to disappear from the mainstream medical
community.
Despite the shortcomings of her later years, she will be remembered
for her truly original work and for also having the tenacity and skill
to see it actualized.

Vacation Pictures

Jumprock Top- Youngest in Second Middle Son On Right in Right Picture and Third Picture Jumprock in Hendersonville-others DuPont State Forest North Carolina Near BrevardFar Right Natural Bridge Virginia

The Turnng Point:Campaign 2004

In the following link Michelle Malkin describes her experience on the Chris Mattews show.
Michelle Malkin: AMBUSH JOURNALISM...OR MY EVENING WITH CAVEMAN CHRIS MATTHEWS
Many campaings have turning points which while not always obvious at the time they occur, in retrospect cause or at least refect an irreversible change in momentum and which can be described in a simple high-concept way. In the New York senate race of 2000 it occurred when Rick Lazio invaded the personal space of Hilary Clinton. In the 1988 presidential race it was the Wille Horton ad. For Barry Goldwater it was Johnson's daisy ad and for Clinton in '92 it was his appearence on the Imus radio show in which he was able to deflect the Gennifer Flowers isssue.
While for conservatives and Republicans it has been obvious for some time that the mainstream left is unhinged it is now obvious to the population as a whole. Matthew for some reason replayed his foaming rabid attack and I saw it while flipping channels during the Olympics as I'm sure others have. Malkin as a multiple minority in the opinion of democrats must be considered a traitor and may have triggered the apoplectic response just by her presence.
While the Swift Boat Veterens attack may have altered the terms of the debate, I believe the Malkin interview will be remembered as the actual turning point of this campaign.

Tom:The Unknown Tennessee Williams by Lyle Leverich

Sorry about the light blogging-just back from vacation and getting boys ready for school-trying to arrange a visit to Virtuous Father and taking on some new work projects-also trying to spend as much time outdoors as possible and see at least a bit of Olympics-thank God basketball and tennis coverage does not predominate-enjoying sailing,shooting, whitewater,judo and other minor sports which I never see otherwise as well as swimming,track and field and surprisingly men's gymnastics-contestants seem older and more fully formed as people than in most recent Olympics-
I was looking for some non-political books to read while on vacation and found the following biography of Tennesse Williams at the library. I've never thought of myself as a particular fan of "Streetcar" but always liked "Glass Menagerie" after seeing a revival starring Piper Laurie on Broadway in the mid sixties. It didn't hurt that at about this time my widowed grandfather had recently married a woman my uncle referred to as "either a low grade moron or perhaps a high grade imbecile"those terms still had some technical meaning in those politically incorrect times and that my new step grandmother referred without irony to the many "gentlemen callers" she had known made us all crazy with laughter.

I also have a very tenuous real life connection to Tennesee Williams as my fathers best friend also my late godfather was the manager-and the son in law of the owner-of New York's Hotel Elysee where Tennesee Williams lived intermittently and where he died. My father met him at the hotel several times and said he seemed like a gracious southern gentlemen but that obviously he didn't know him.
The book is the first volume of a projected two volume biography of Williams that includes the years up until he becomes famous and at the time of this post I have only read the years prior to his college graduation.
He was the product of the south and more specifically the semi-patriciam Episcopalian south which is the culture I have married into and in which we spent our vacation (Kanuga). It was a culture in which appearences were paramount and the multiple onuses of alcoholism,mental illness and homosexuality are exccruciatingly painful to watch unfold in the life of this sensitive young man. The effect of physical illness-diphteria and then Bright's disease-which left him short statured and then frail completed his psychological underpinings. The stultifying atmosphere, the constant parental battles, the paternal disapproval and the marginal economic circumstances made me want to scream enough.
His salvations-if you can call them that were first his Episcopal minister grandfather and his wife as well as his owm love of writing and capacity for hard work.
The descriptions using gobs of primary source material makes the totures of his later life seem tragically inevitable.
The good old days-I wonder how this family would have done with our more enlightened and humane atitudes towards mental illness,alcoholism and homosexuality. Are artists less tortured today-probably not but I hope there are at least fewer who have to suffer so badly.

Summer Reading I.Stalin -Court of the Red Tsar

Ihis post will be somewhat rambling as I have the misfortune to view this book (Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore).both as an opportunity to learn something about the world ,but also something about myself. This is often unhealthyt and I hope it is not overly self indulgant or adolescent.
I have never had the emotional fortitude to study the gruesome details of totalitarian society, whether that of ancient Rome, feudal Europe or the triumvirate of twentieth century horrors; Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany or China under the stewardship of chairmans Mao. When I succumbed to the temptation, Fox Butterfield's "Alive in the Bitter Sea"(about Communist China), or in the case of required school reading (The Diary of Anne Frank)-I felt greatly saddened but on some basic level exempt from the threat that we could ever experience similar horrors. Since these issues did not relate to my primary activities, medicine and business and not being compulsively introspective I haven't thought about these issues much. However I was much younger when readings such works and have periodically wondered whether my own inability to relate to these events was based on:
a) Emotional Immaturity
b) Developmental Immaturity
c) An unacknowledged squeamishness
d) The inability of a post war American raised in physical and emotional security to ever fathom the circumstances giving rise to these horrors.
Earlier this summer on seeing the author on television, I decided to put the book at the top of my summer reading list and at least think about some of these issues.

Montefiore's book is able to depict the often mundane human qualities that coexist in some kind of demented equilibrium in the lives of
A cast ot thugs that include Molotov, Beria, Kruschev, Kagonavich, Yagoda, Mikoyan, Yeshov, the butcher Khrushchev et al. Partly the depiction of ordinary events, tennis matches, picnics, all night stag parties, children's birthday parties as well as personal reminisces of elderly participants or children put some of these events into an almost empathetic vision. It is gut wrenching to see a man continue to work with Stalin on a daily basis after his wife has been liquidated, but maddening to think I am actually feeling this for a mass murderer and sadist himself. Some of the activities of daily life were: all night drunken stag parties, Stalin's cruel humor, his insomnia, incredible patience as well as the superhuman physical endurance and the overwhelming fear that were key aspects of these underlords or "magnates" as Montefiore calls them. The work succeeds using primary source material, the occasional minor anecdote and the minimal amount of editorializing. In this context the mention of say another 100,000 people to be sacrificed in the terror of the late thirties becomes even more chilling. However my personal inability to understand the evolution of these horrors remain and I must believe that in any system devoid of fundamental liberties,the scum, the sadists and the troublemakers will always rise to the top.
I had in started to read the book in tandem with Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" to keep the erosion of liberty as the primary focus. That failed, as the narrative was too compelling although I suspect the underlying idea had some rigor and value.
Was there a point at which the horrors of Stalin's reign would have been avoidable? Was the terror, which persisted until the very end the product of one man, or was it inevitable in any case? What are our lessons for today? Do current incursions and potential incursions on some of our liberties possibly portend a police state?

One of my favorite American quotes is Jefferson's "The Price of Freedom is"Eternal Vigilance " It is even the title of one of the categories of this blog.I had always thought this meant that any diminution of liberty threatens the whole edifice and must be fought. This led to somewhat schizophrenic view regarding historic events such as Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The book somehow led me to conceive of "Eternal Vigilance" as an even more onerous task-one in which the citizens of our republic must periodically relinquish certain fundamental liberties in the face of an external threat but then recognize when the threat is over and demand these liberties back. Our record of accomplishment is very good on this matter and the minimal and in my opinion insufficient incursions on our liberties so far demanded in the War on Terror are not reasons for alarm.

Word Count

This is fun-check out the ranks for God,Man, Law
I don't know the primary inputs but have fun anyway-via Opinion Journal

DuPont State Forest-Triple Falls

This Mornings Hike

Vacation Hendersonville,NC

Sites of Hendersonville-

I'll be gone for the next 10 days or so-don't know if I'll be able to post-anyone in the Asheville/Hendersonville area-drop me an e-mail