I have excerpted some of her key points and arguments, many of which are already in the process of being twisted and taken out of context by her opponents. Here’s what she actually said in what I thought was an eloquent and crucial speech. 

Hillary began by expressing what many Democrats believe:  the surge can’t be said to be working unless its purpose is being realized: political reconciliation within the Iraqi government.  Otherwise, we are simply polic[ing Iraq’s civil war."  If elected, she said:

I will start by facing the conditions on the ground in Iraq as they
are, not as we hope or wish them to be. President Bush points to the reduction in violence in Iraq last year and claims the surge is working. Now, I applaud any decrease in violence. That is always good news. But the point of the surge was to give the Iraqis the time and space for political reconciliation. Yet today, the Iraqi government has failed to provide basic services for its citizens. They have yet to pass legislation ensuring the equitable distribution of oil revenues, yet even to pass a law setting the date of provincial elections. Corruption and dysfunction is rampant….

Pointing out that neither Petraeus nor the Iraqis are satisfied with the progress toward reconciliation, Hillary argued that it is not feasible for the US to keep troops in Iraq indefinitely simply to keep down the violence.  We simply cannot afford to police Iraq’s civil war without mounting threats "to our national security, our economy, and our standing in the world."(GWU speech)

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AP says today, a new/old photo has surfaced that shows Scripps-Howard war correspondent Ernie Pyle dead at the side of the road in Japan in 1945. There is much to-do in the big newspapers today about this memorial photo of a dead war writer. But no image of the photo yet. It is being held somewhere by someone until… what? enough money, enough positioning. Whatever.

To me the iconic photo is the one of Pyle alive, as the photo below shows… and the photo of the elegant, battered tool of his trade as shown in the above photo comes in second. But, I digress.

The road Ernie and the small contingent of solders had taken that day back in the spring in 1945, had been swept of mines. Many G.I trucks had ridden over it safely. Just six days previous, President Roosevelt had suddenly died while still in office. His corn-fed Vice President, Harry S. Truman had ramped up everything in himself to try to take a wheel a million times larger than he. Germany would surrender and ‘the war’ would be declared over another 20 days hence. The end of ‘the war’ in Japan would take another three and a half months to close.

But Ernie Pyle had only heard that maybe Germany’s surrender was imminent. And he continued to write notes like these, which are from his journal, to my eye, blood poetry, bone poetry… viz:
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Just this picture for your rest and restoration before the week ahead…

If I hadn’t spent too many months in a wheelchair as a kid, I would have loved to do this: ski pure powder, like Mercurius, winged boots, ankles practically able to rotate 360 degrees , flying through the everything clean and pure at high speed, lungs filled with snow crystals, goggles caked with snow, snow pouring over the slats….

As it is, I consider hitting a femmie stride in stilettos my favored athletic, feeling lucky to have mastered that small feat, no pun intended.

But still, when a day like this comes where I live in the Rockies, when Silverton Ski mountain had SO much snow, the chair lifts wouldn’t work, and the phone lines went down so they cant even take reservations…

and yet some few intrepid souls have snow-shoed and cross country-skied in over the top of the snow heaps taller than a tall man– and then put on their ski boots and sticks and boards to side-step excruciatingly far up the no-stairs mountain, man, the lats and gluts and soleuses needed to do that alone…

all in order to be the only scrape and shsss and breathing sounds in the midst of only wind sound, cheek against God’s cheek, to ski powder, running, jumping, leaping, diving and zig-zagging like sixty. Wow. Just wow.

the intrepid souls of this world,
such feathers on the breath of God…
the intrepid souls of this world
who take so many different forms…

[This piece was cross-posted at my personal blog.]

This past week, the community to which my family and I recently moved, buried one of its most beloved citizens. Leland Conner was killed after a thirteen year old boy stole a vehicle from a rental agency and proceeded to cause a five-car crash that involved Mr. Conner’s car.

Conner’s death is one of those freakish tragedies that sometimes happen in this world, ample reason for the community’s grief. Although seventy-seven years old, he remained an active person. On top of this, everybody who knew him with whom I spoke this week described him as a good man, a nice person. His death is rightly viewed as horrible in and of itself.

But there was an added dimension to the community’s grief this past week. Simply, Leland Conner was a keeper of the past. He knew the rich history of this part of Ohio. And not just the history that has unfolded since whites first came here as settlers. He also was apparently a font of information on the area’s Native American history. He played a vital role in preserving and passing on that history, helping give tours to some of the many visitors who come to Hocking County each year and giving presentations to local students.

Fortunately, Conner committed some of his knowledge to several booklets, which are sold by the local historical society. (And for which he received no royalties.)

But his mind was a repository of more important information which, it may be, no other resident of the area possesses. His friends feel that loss keenly. “I’ve lost my main source. Now who are we going to ask?” one grief-stricken man told the Logan Daily News this past week.

Near the end of the Daily News article profile of Conner, reporter Gretchen Roberts writes:

Conner’s research into the region of Hocking Hills has helped provide a firmer foundation for the people of the region to learn about their past.

It makes me feel good to be living now in a community that values its past and that can mourn one of its local historians.

Sadly, we live in ahistorical times. By that mean, we live in an era with little regard for history. A “regard for history” has nothing to do with wanting to engage in some romantic nostalgia trip into the “good old days.” I would rather be alive today than to have lived in the frontier times or earlier about which Leland Conner spoke and wrote.

I admit that I have my prejudices when it comes to the question of whether we should pay heed to history or not. As a boy, I was a nerd who loved hiding under a blanket with a flashlight and a volume of my Funk and Wagnall’s encyclopedia or one from the American Heritage illustrated history of the United States, after my parents had tucked me in for the night.

To this day, reading history and biography is among my favorite leisure-time pursuits. (I’m currently reading Michael Korda’s fine biography of Dwight Eisenhower, Ike.) I was a Social Studies major at Ohio State, focusing mostly on history. My favorite vacations involve going to historical sites.

Much of my interest in things historical can be attributed to my parents and grandparents who saw to it that we understood history to be the story of the human drama and not just dreary facts and dates.

Because I assumed history to be an essential area of knowledge — akin to knowing to fasten your seatbelt when you get into a car or avoiding puddles of water when using electric devices, I was shocked when an Ohio State Political Science professor I admired once told me, “History is worthless subject.” For me, it was one of those, “Come again?” moments. “Wait a minute,” I said to him. “Your own discipline depends on history of a sort: polls about voters’ attitudes over time, accounts of the work of what you call ‘administrative decision-makers.’ That’s all history. How can you say that history is worthless?” On this topic, this professor was as unmoved as any member of the Flat Earth Society would be by evidence that the planet is round.

But that professor was simply wrong. The past has its lessons and we ignore them at our peril.

Historical knowledge is an especially important possession for voters in a democracy like ours. We can’t make good decisions about who to support in the upcoming presidential election, for example, if we don’t have an appreciation for our constitutional system, why we do things the way we do, what has worked in the past and what hasn’t.

John Kennedy wrote a preface to that multi-volume American Heritage illustrated history of the United States that I read by flashlight as a boy. The books were given to Goodwill long ago. But one phrase from the preface which I memorized at the time has stuck with me for forty-five years:

A knowledge of the past prepares us for the crisis of the present and the challenge of the future.

History, the human story, is entertaining. But it’s also essential. Failure to learn its lessons will make us no better than cavemen. Knowing it will contribute to our wisdom and our capacity to live and thrive.

Maybe you grew up in a small town like I did; my village was population 600 souls. Maybe in your hometown, like mine, truth is sometimes definitely stranger than even NON-fiction.

Story Number One
This week in the hometown, everyone is talking about Hundred Cat Lady. This poor soul, an ‘old before her time’ 59 year old woman out in the Township, was found to have 85 cats, two dogs, and… well, 30 additional cats.

Not sure who counted the animals, but the last 30 cats were all made up into TV dinners. Ok, ok, they weren’t made into TV dinners. But they were in the food freezer. Dead.

“As for the frozen cats,” she said, “[I] decided to go that route when a cat would die because a neighbor had complained about them.”

Neighbors complained…that is, about the dead cats, one would presume. But maybe don’t ask too much further because it’s possible that before ‘freezer perpetuity’, the deceased cats might have been laid out on the hood of cars on front lawn, you know, to kind of desiccate before being burying?

…Or they could have been laid out nicely around the concrete bird bath. Or else. Trust me, this is not disrespectful. Where I come from, dead animal decor abounds.

So, the sentencing judge today said the poor woman can’t possess any cats while she’s on probation. The two dogs have been returned to her. She’ll be required to receive counseling. She must pay $600 in fees and court costs. And, she must make $10,237 restitution.

Dang. It’s hard to imagine if you haven’t the money to take adequate care of 85 cats and two dogs, and God forgive me, the monthly electric on the box freezer… that you’ll soon find over 10 Grand to pay the courts. If that isn’t evidence that in odd corners of our great nation judicial sentencing is not always realistic.

Story Number Two
Also back to home this week, people are excited about a brand new twist on an old story that used to scare the ‘A, B and C-jeezus out of us when we were little kids.

A woman by the name of Belle Gunness had lived not that far down the highway across the farm roads. She was not a good-looking woman people said. She was in the habit of advertising in the big city Norwegian papers over in other states, saying she was a rich widow looking for a husband.

When a prospective “catch’ would write to her, she’d woo them and then convince them to sell everything and bring themselves and their cash to come live with her.

Thus, the groom-to-be came out to her farm, and she’d live with him a while. Then, she’d kill him.
Then she’d run another ‘rich widow’ ad. Then another man would show up with his life savings. Same. Same. Then she’d run another ad. This went on and on. Until people became suspicious. I know, I know, sounds like people were really slow on the uptake, but back then in that part of the country, it wasn’t that people were slow.

It was that they bent over backward to try to ‘mind their own business,’ which meant looking away a lot. A good thing perhaps. But, often, in terms of inhumane cruelty to others, and worse…not good. Not good at all.

But Belle Gunness murderer is not what people are talking about back home this week. They’re talking about a group of graduate students from up to the University of Indianapolis who recently “worked into the night,” to exhume the century-old remains of Belle Gunness.

They will use DNA from the remains and DNA from envelopes of letters written by Gunness to see if they match.

Belle Gunness and three beautiful young children died in a fire in the farmhouse in 1908. But the rumor has persisted that she staged that, and was seen getting on the west-bound train that same night of the fire, that the adult corpse in the fire had no head.

It gets worse. Read the rest of this entry »