necturus

WHRB's David Elliott included this tribute to Marion in his Saturday afternoon vocal music program yesterday (if that link doesn't work, try this one).

My very dear friend Marion, whom I have known and loved for 33 years, died suddenly about three hours ago. She had been staying with me these past several weeks, and I brought her to upstate New York to share Thanksgiving with my father, my brother, and me. And now she's gone.

The nature of conspiracies is that they are hard to keep secret forever. They tend to come to light. For instance, the scope of the 1605 conspiracy to blow up King James I in Parliament is well known. So is the conspiracy against Adolf Hitler that led to the unsccessful assassination attempt of July 20, 1944. The greater the number of individuals involved, the harder it is to keep a plot secret. We know all about the Katyn massacre of March 1940, despite the best efforts of one of the most paranoid secret police organizations in history. Yet in the fifty years that have passed since the assassination of President Kennedy, no real evidence of any conspiracy has come to light. The most likely explanation is that there was none, and Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, just as the Warren commission said he did. I cannot help thinking that had President Kennedy lived to complete his term in office, the world would be unimaginably different from the one we know today.

The premise is sound enough: let's take a day to remember those who fought, and in many cases died, to protect our homeland, our communities, and our way of life. My father, for instance, was an infantryman in General Patton's Third Army, and fought at The Bulge and the Siegfried Line. The enemy he faced was perhaps the most profoundly evil force in human history, Nazi Germany. My father survived the war and is now in his 90th year of life, but many of his comrades were not so lucky. Do they not deserve the honor and remembrance of a grateful nation? Of course they do.

But what about the other wars -- wars fought not to defend anyone's home or loved ones, but to rob other peoples of their lands, resources, or sovereignty? How are the men and women who fight in these wars much different from the German soldiers my father fought? And if we honor such veterans, what about the 100,000+ Iraqi and Afghan civilians and as many as as three million Vietnamese who died at their hands? If Americans killed more Indochinese civilians than Pol Pot, one of the most infamous mass killers of the twentieth century, how is our celebration of Veterans' Day much different from Japan's Yasukuni Shrine, which honors the soldiers and sailors who died in that country's wars of aggression?

The eleventh of November was originally Armistice Day, commemorating the armistice that ended World War I ninety-five years ago. The first World War was perhaps the most senseless war ever fought, a war no one wanted that mowed down an entire generation of Europe's youth and accomplished nothing but to abolish the old imperial regimes and unleash nationalist and irredentist movements that would give rise to fascism. The end of such a war deserves remembrance, lest anything like it ever be allowed to break out again. Yet today I head nothing about it on my radio, where the talk was all of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf.

Next year will mark 100 years since the start of the first World War and the battles of the Marne and Tannenberg. Let us hope that those anniversaries get at least as much attention as those of the American Civil War 150 years ago have got.

I hate making decisions when I am feeling intense emotion. I almost always make the wrong choice.

On October 18, 1813 the battle of Leipzig, also known as the Battle of Nations, ended with the defeat of Napoleon by his enemies, the Sixth Coalition, and the expulsion of France from Germany. France itself would fall in the spring of 1814, and Napoleon would be exiled to Elba.

Able was I ere I saw Elba.

I'm still wrestling with the third of three radio station crises this week: not one, but two crashed file servers at a station which shall not be named. I was able to recover a backup of their data, but it is from last December, when they last did a backup.

Person X doesn't like my house. She keeps telling me that it "has no intrinsic value". Well, my dear, if you were contemplating moving in with me, your opinion might matter, but snce you aren't, STFU. The house has value to me because it's where I live, and it's paid for. I don't give a rat's ass what you or anyone else thinks of it.

No, I'm not in a very good mood today.

I think the President's proposal to attack Syria is insane, and see nothing good coming from it. This attack has no legitimate military purpose that I can see, and seems to be intended to make the Obama administration look tough. That's a poor excuse to kill people, and this man's hands are already drenched in blood from his other adventures.

I was already deeply disappointed in Barack Obama; historians are going to have a field day speculating on how such a brilliant person could turn out to be so ineffective as a President.

I'm starting to think the boys need to have their toys taken away. Millions for defense, but not one cent for aggression.

My uncle John, returning home from a business trip to Europe, boarded KLM Flight 607-E bound from Shannon, Ireland to Gander, Newfoundland. He and 98 others on the Super Constellation died when the plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after take-off.

My parents brought me, then barely a year old, from Missouri, where we were then living, to my grandparents' house in Wellesley, where they got the news. I only got to know my uncle through his books and the wonderful machines my grandparents kept in his room, which they maintained as long as they lived. He was an inventor and tinkerer who ran a small plastics factory in Leominster, and the books in his room told fascinating tales of the rise of great industries, especially railroads. A great big brass scale steam locomotive stood in a glass case in his room for many years; it had been custom built by a man named George Whitney, an early steam automobile pioneer who was a good friend of my uncle's and lived to be more than a hundred years old.

For years afterward my mother would never get on a plane. The long cross-country train trips we took when I was little left me with a passionate love of trains and train travel.