In Memoriam: Lieutenant-Colonel Nathan B. Bluestone, M.D.

On August 26, 1948, Nathan B. Bluestone, M.D. ended his suffering that began four years earlier on the fields of France. My father was a country doctor. His love was medicine and he tended to the ill and wounded. It was his calling. In the small upstate New York town where he practiced he delivered babies in the office house where we lived. He drove out to remote farms to give the five daughters of a farmer their vaccinations. He healed broken bones and cut foreheads. But nothing prepared him for the slaughter that he encountered after he landed with the fourth wave at Normandy in June 1944.

My experience of the war was my father's absence. He would send my mother and me funny little letters that would have sections blacked out. This was V-mail. I always thought it was strange that other people would read my father's letters to me. But the censors did read them and blocked out areas that they felt were sensitive to national security or something.

He wrote me a continuing story about a friendly amoeba. There even were illustrations. In later years, when I visited India, I found it strange that people feared amoebas as much as they did.

To my mother and aunts and grandparents he sent letters and watercolors. He was an artist as well as a physician and would, in those rare moments when he had a minute or two, paint a watercolor of where he was. We cherished those postcard size pictures painted with love, for they were not only beautiful but they represented a part of the artist that could not be expressed in words.

Then, for what seemed to be an eternity, we heard nothing. No letters came. No pictures came. Nothing came. And with each day my mother became more and more distraught.

This was the time when the Germans made a desperate attempt to counterattack the American forces. The German forces under the command of Field Marshall Gerd von Runstedt had encircled the American forces centered at Ardennes, France. This was the Battle of the Bulge. And for over a month, during the bitter winter, American and German soldiers slaughtered each other. Nineteen thousand American soldiers died. Six armies locked in battle in the coldest winter on record. Over a million men fought in what was to be recorded as the worst battle of World War II.

Torn, ripped, cut and blown apart, young men passed through the field hospital that my father headed. It was X-ray after X-ray after X-ray. It was an assembly line of death and dying. There was no time for the physicians to protect themselves from the deadly radiation. And it was this radiation that caused the skin cancer that later was to take my father's life.

When he returned from that war I was six years old. My father rarely spoke to me about that war, only once, that I remember, to joke that he had a rifle in the back of his jeep and that's where it stayed. He was a healer, not a killer. He even received a Bronze Star for bravery and never told me what he did. To this day I don't know why he got it.

My memories of Dr. Nathan Bluestone are fragmentary and impressionistic. Mostly I remember how we would sing together in the car, my father and I. "I've Got Sixpence", "Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah" and rounds and rounds.

Much later a psychic told me that my father had been deeply wounded by his inability to heal in the face of such overwhelming carnage. His soul, as much as his body, had been gravely affected. That rings true.

We moved back into the office house and my father continued the practice that he had left four years earlier. But the cancer, first on his finger, spread and slowly, he began to die. Bit by bit the doctors cut away my father. First they took his finger. Then they took his right breast. And then he died.

It has been almost fifty-nine years since my father died. I have grown far from that nine year old boy who couldn't understand why such a thing was possible. And yet, after all this time, I still cry at the loss.

On this day each year we are called upon to remember those who have died in the service of their country. Politicians give speeches, flags are unfurled and hot dogs are consumed.

What we tend to forget is what General William Tecumseh Sherman once reminded a group of young men. "War is hell." And the hell is for the living, for those who survive the deaths of their beloveds as much as it is for those who die on the fields of battle or in the hospitals.

What we tend to forget is that war leaves lots of fatherless sons and daughters. Today, for example, thousands of American and Iraqi sons and daughters will grow up without their fathers and mothers. And for what?

What we tend to forget are the children who are left behind. We forget that fifty years from now there will be adults who still grieve for the loss of a father or a mother--who still cry at the remembrance. Let us truly remember.

Two Poems:

Plague Light

Where was the light in the Dark Ages?

Did it shine in the huts of the serfs,

Those stinking, dim hovels where birthing entwined dying

And food, piss and shit

Coexisted with pigs and writhing sweating bodies?

Or did it glow in the halls of the lords

Sputtering and hissing in the burning animal fat

That illumed the cold, moist

Steps and walls, always clammy?

Did its rays fall upon the plains of war

Bouncing off bright crushed skulls and glistening viscera

Swiftly covered by the diaphanous wings of flies and vultures?

Or was it in the churches

With their eternal darkness

Reeking with a black bright hell

And promise of fiery damnation.

Or, did it sparkle in the fire of righteousness

That burned under the sizzling bare feet

Of the sinful

As it slowly rose in clouds of smoke

And cooking living flesh?

No.

The light was seen in the gleaming eyes of rats,

As they streamed and stumbled off the Genoan boats

Carrying the shiny shelled fleas

With their innocent deadly bite.

It billowed high on burning pyres

Where bodies stacked like wood

Melted, their bulbous bubous black pustules

Consumed forever.

It broke through the clouds like an angel’s beam

And shone upon a landscape

Forever changed,

Forever changed

Amen

Boulevard l'Hopital: Paris--March 2006

Frozen in time

Fixed in space

A shutter speed

Stopped:

The young mother

Face turning

To face

The viewer

And her ten year old son:

Smiles

Cascading

In waves

As does her

Wild brown hair

Kept demurely tamed

But not conquered

(Never conquered)

We cannot see the boy’s face;

He is turned

To face

His mother

Head tilted

To take in her warmth

(As a dandelion faces the sun and rain)

Dancing on the far side

Of her mother

The eight year old

Daughter/ sister

Braids flying

Leaping

And laughing

At her own dance

And at some joke

That is hers

(Alone)

Frozen in time

Fixed in space

A shutter speed

Stopped.

ALBERT EINSTEIN--FAILURE

Today is the birthday of Albert Einstein. What a failure he was. Of course we know him as the creator of the Theory of Relativity and Nobel laureate. But that is unimportant. He was a failure. Many of his early teachers thought he was mentally challenged. In those days they used the German equivalent of "retarded".

Einstein didn't like to study except for those things that interested him. Albert was interested in mathematics and philosophy. He just didn't bother with the other stuff.

A high school official wanted young Einstein expelled from school. The teacher complained that Einstein never said anything. He just sat in the back of the class and smiled. At the age of sixteen Albert dropped out of school.

Albert Einstein would probably have fared even worse today in the United States than he did
in late Nineteenth Century Wurtemburg, Germany. He definitely would have been one child left behind in the era of No Child Left Behind.

The No Child Left Behind act is a dismal reflection of the low level to which pedagogical discussion has sunk in the United States today. There are innumerable things wrong with this act. For those interested in checking out some of these issues I suggest visiting www.educatorrountable.org. But let's take one aspect.

How do you quantify education. How do you measure how a student is learning. The simple (and simplistic) answer is through testing.

The work of Howard Gardner has shown that people learn in different ways. Another educator pointed out that children's learning styles are as varied as the colors of the rainbow. There are probably as many different ways of learning as there are people. but, at least, we need to recognize that someone who does well on a test might not be the most intelligent on many levels.

Testing only deals with accumulated knowledge. So a test can ascertain just how well a person has memorized required material in a course. Testing can measure how well a student can spew back what he has ingested. Digestion of this material is often not essential and can even be a distraction for the person taking the test.

Testing determines the material to be tested. And there is a time and a place for that. However, only that which can be easily tested will be included in the testing program. As Albert Einstein put it, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts"

The present obsession with testing leads to an ever increasing number of teachers who teach solely for the test. Even the importance of the material itself falls by the wayside. The test's the thing. Students focus on what the "right" answers are.

Creative teaching becomes more and more a luxury for school districts that face obliteration unless certain test scores are met. It is not surprising that the poorer school districts are in the greatest bind. These are most often the ones with the greatest problems and the greatest need for innovative approaches. But how can there be innovative approaches when the universal "fix" is testing? How can these schools encourage creativity in the face of the cyclones of "test-osterone" blowing in from Washington?

Creative teachers fall by the wayside. Either that or they buckle under to meet the new "mandates."

The Advanced Placement courses have long been infested with the test virus. As an historian I was shocked to see that the Advanced Placement course in American history at a local high school was simply a prolonged preparation for the test. The vital, complex and fascinating issues of American history were reduced to multiple choices or "correct" interpretative essays.

It seems to me that one of the basic goals of education is to encourage people to think for themselves. It seems to me that one of the goals of education is to encourage people to find and develop their talents and potentials. Testing and the teaching associated with it do little if any of this.

It's bizarre. They are testing kids in kindergarten. A whole new generation is growing up thinking that education is simply a succession of tests. Not only that. There isn't any break.

Homework is the handmaiden of the testing model. Kids have to do schoolwork on weekends--even during the summer. It seems like robots have taken over the American school system. Or maybe it's just a repackaging of that old Puritan axiom: "Idle hands are the devil's workshop." Busy work substitutes for education. If Albert Einstein were a kid today he would probably drop out of school by third grade instead of eleventh.

Of course testing is profitable--for the testing companies and all the peripheral industries. But there are a few things that can't be tested.

You can't test creativity. You can't have a box that tests the ability of people to think outside the box. So Thomas Edison, Galileo, and e.e. cummings would simply not pass.

You can't test art. You can't test music. Oh, yes, you can test knowledge of the scale. You can test musical theory. But how about the art itself?

You can't test imagination. You can test knowledge. Once again some words from Albert Einstein. "Imagination is more important than knowledge," he said. "Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the globe."

Since you can't test creativity, the arts and imagination, they have little use as part of a school's curriculum. In fact, the arts are disappearing from schools across the country. The money is all in the tests.

Where would we be without creativity and imagination? We would not exist as a species. For these are what take us beyond our limited known world. It is imagination and creativity that gave us fire and the wheel. And Albert Einstein.

Which gets me back to the beginning. Happy Birthday Albert. Maybe you were right when you said, "The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." It's becoming more and more true for millions of kids.

Today is Water

Today there is water

Rippling across the ice

Glistening on the black road.

Today the sun slips

Behind the clouds,

Then slips back and floods the path.

Shadows dance on the snow

A shadow tree limb bends and

Touches a thick black shadow tree trunk.

The wind whistles

Across

The blank smooth white field;

Then poof!

A white phantom rises

And dances in the snow.

Today, the stream rushes

Under translucent layers of ice.

Today, there is the wind’s whisper

In the woods

That reaches out and touches my face.

Today there is water.

Yesterday was a gray day;

Gray wisps of wood smoke

Dissolved into a grayer sky.

A car shushed behind

Then shushed away.

The field of snow was mushy;

Even the woods looked soggy.

(A black phantom moved among the trees

And sent a chill of excitement

Up my spine).

Yesterday winter retreated slightly

In the sloppy face of Spring.

Yesterday water was neither frozen

Nor flowing

But in that mush time

Between,

That soggy limbo

Of neither/nor;

And so was I

Who felt as out of sorts

As that softening snow bank

Covered with road filth;

But today there is water.

Enough is Enough is Enough

Enough is Enough is Enough

What a time we live in. Sometimes I think I am in the middle of a large insane asylum. And, after a while, I begin to wonder if I am the one that is crazy. What to do in a world turned upside down? Where to begin?

Iraq. Let’s take Iraq. That’s as good a place as any to begin.

Hillary Clinton said that she was duped by the administration. Hillary Clinton said she didn’t know better. The government misrepresented the facts. She’s not original of course. Lots of folks have said that they were misled. Enough of that.

Now I don’t care about or for Hilary Clinton. I don’t even really know who she is. Does anybody? She’s a caricature of the opportunistic politician without any visible principles or integrity—just a sense of what will get votes. Take her recent co-sponsorship of a constitutional amendment prohibiting flag burning. You can almost see the bean crunchers in the Clinton campaign counting how many right wing votes Hillary would harvest with that one. But this claim of ignorance about Iraq is the last straw.

Back in 2003 the facts were there for all who took the time to see them. Take Scott Ritter. He had been the United States weapons inspector in Iraq. No friend of Saddam Hussein, Ritter was among those forced to leave. It was clear said Ritter again and again and again that Iraq could not possibly have had weapons of mass destruction. The Iraqi military capability had been devastated in the war of the first Bush. Then there was Lieutenant-General Brent Scowcroft, U.S. National Security Advisor under Presidents Ford and G.H.W. Bush. Scowcroft strongly opposed a war against Iraq. He stated that there was no connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein—another one of the Administration’s arguments for attacking Iraq. Or there was Hans Blix, Chief United Nations weapons inspector who, in 2002, presided over the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission which found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

This was public information. This was information that I was able to access at the time. In fact, every single reason that the Bush-Cheney White House gave for the invasion of Iraq was false and could be shown to be false before Congress voted to give the president the power of war. There were no weapons of mass destruction, nor was there any capability of producing them. There was no connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Indeed, they despised each other. Thus there was absolutely no connection between Iraq and the attack on the World Trade Center. The entire justification for invading Iraq was a tissue of lies.

Hillary Clinton and the Congress of the United States swallowed these lies with almost no resistance in 2003 and authorized the president to wage war against a country that did not threaten the United States. This is certainly criminal under the provisions of international law to say nothing of the United Nations' charter.

I am sick and tired of hearing about faulty intelligence. Anyone who cared to look carefully at that time could see that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon were twisting arms and sliming opponents to get “information” that would support their position. The "Downing Street Memo” illustrated this as did the testimony of former CIA officers. While one can understand that, given our educational system, people are not trained to think for themselves, the members of Congress have a minimal responsibility to ascertain facts before authorizing war. Or is that too radical a position

That the media collaborated in the lies simply makes the scandal more reprehensible. The complicity of The New York Times with its story tellers like Judith Miller weaving fairy tales of aluminum tubes and big bombs is a disgraceful blot on the record of American journalism—such as it has become.

In 1898 the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, sent the artist Frederick Remington to Cuba to draw pictures of the insurrection.. Remington got to Cuba and cabled Hearst, “There is no war. Request to be recalled.” Hearst cabled back, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war”. And so he did. Hearst lives on in our media and our government. Who cares if it’s true if it sells?

It’s a hoax. It’s a ghastly, grisly hoax. The reasons for a war are fabricated. Or, to be less polite, they are lies. It’s incredible that these lies have taken four years to unravel.

There’s another way to put it. The war in Iraq is a crime. It’s a crime against the men, women and children of Iraq. It’s a crime against the American men and women who are sent there to be killed or maimed. And those who continue to authorize this crime are criminals. It’s that simple.

All this talk about how the United States should have done better is totally beside the point. And talk about how the United States now should do it better is absurd. There is only one way for the United States to do better in Iraq and that is to leave—NOW.

There is no way to render an abomination pleasing. A criminal war is a criminal war. There is no way to make it more polite, more palatable, more refined. Congressional Democrats with your good old boy good will take heed. It’s a crime and the perpetrators of this crime—George Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and those who led us into this—are war criminals. And impeachment is off the table??!! Lying about a blow job is a greater crime than orchestrating the deaths of thousand upon thousands? Who’s crazy?

This is about people—human beings. It is about men, women and children who have been killed or maimed because of the United States attack and war upon Iraq. Last October the Lancet, the British medical journal, estimated that between 426,000 and 793,000 Iraqis had been killed from the time the United States invaded until July 2006. If one were to project that number proportionally upon the United States that would amount to ten million Americans. Ten million American casualties. Can you imagine that? At least a million Iraqis are refugees in their own country. That would translate to twenty million Americans. Think of ten million Americans killed and twenty million others wandering homeless around this country.

As for U.S. troops, the president of this country has already sacrificed more Americans in Iraq than Osama bin Laden killed in the Twin Towers. Who’s crazy?

And now the Vice President of this country, the man who twisted the information about Iraq in 2002, is touring the world beating the drums against Iran. Once again unsubstantiated reports (rejected by U.S. Army officers) are brought forth to implicate Iran in the death of U.S. soldiers. Let us bring this lunatic home. The only debatable issue here is whether he should be impeached or tried as a war criminal. But we need not collude any longer in the delusions of madmen.

What about people? There are children who are blown up. What did they do? There are fathers who leave widows and orphans. There are women who leave motherless children. These are not statistics. They are living human beings as divine as any of us with every right to live and flourish. What right does this government have to turn a country into hell and destroy its citizenry?

It’s obscene that this Congress can’t even debate a non binding resolution to end the war. Well, we do not need non binding resolutions. We need to get all U.S. troops out of Iraq with all deliberate speed.

We do not need discussions on how better to arrange American troops in Iraq. We need to bring those troops home. We do not need to bolster U.S. forces there. We need to remove them.

At the time of writing, the Congress is poised to grant the administration one hundred billion dollars to continue the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Democratic party leaders claim that they oppose the war but don’t want to undermine our troops and put them in harm’s way.

Let’s forget about logic folks. But how can you fund a war that you oppose? Or, as one of the few sane senate voices, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, put it, cutting funding doesn’t leave the troops stranded. It brings them back home. He was echoed by a Marine sergeant who pointed out the absurdity of maintaining an opposition to a war that you finance. But, hey, logic has very little to do with it. Neither does sanity. Look at Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia supporting a filibuster to his own bill. As for the Democrats they are, once again, buckling under when the word “unpatriotic” is in the air. Does this sound familiar? Happened with the Vietnam War. Happened during the McCarthy period.

The Democrats in Congress won on the issue of the war in Iraq. By and large they are being ever so polite. Impeachment off the table? I think not. This is not a time for politeness but for scathing rebuke.

This country can no longer support the hell that it has created. Every second that we allow this war to continue diminishes our own humanity. Our representatives and, particularly, our senators must hear this. Let Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden and the others put their ears to a thunder in the ground. Let them put their political fingers to a whirlwind. Let them feel a storm. They are our servants. We are not theirs. Enough is enough.

Welcome

What to do? When your guts are in an uproar you can see a gastro-enterologist or you can see a shrink. Or you can write.

There's nothing wrong with my digestive system. [Knock on wood or "Please God" as my late Uncle Joe would say]. And I will resist the stereotypical temptation of older folks to talk about their bodily functions.

As for seeing a shrink, I don't think my intestinal uproar is due to any deep rooted neurosis. I have other deep rooted neuroses. (Don't we all have them?)

So that leaves writing. I can share my upset with the world. I can throw my words into that mysterious space of the internet where millions can see it. that's what this is all about.

I can write anything I want. But my father's dictum still rings in my ears after over half a century: "any job worth doing is worth doing well." So I will spell correctly and do my best to write as clearly as possible.

As I see it, this site will give me an opportunity to bring forth issues that concern me. That's the nature of the first piece. "Enough is Enough is Enough" expresses it all in the title. It has been a long time coming.

But, lest you think that this will be entirely political, I also include a second piece, "Today is Water", a poem I wrote a few days ago.

There is only one thing more tedious than writing about what one is going to write about. That is reading about someone writing about what he is going to write about. So enough of that. In the words of Maurice Sendak, "let the rumpus begin."