Legacy Matters
Memorial service celebrates 'magnificent Mortimer'
A gathering of celebrities and notables remember John Mortimer, lawyer, author and creator of Rumpole of the Bailey
who died in January.
In the worst act of terror since 9/11, a "radicalized Muslim US Army officer shouting, "Allahu akbar!" ("God is great!")" killed 13 people and wounded dozens of others at Ft Hood, Texas. I agree with Ralph Peters who says
This was a terrorist act. When an extremist plans and executes a murderous plot against our unarmed soldiers to protest our efforts to counter Islamist fanatics, it's an act of terror. Period.
When the terrorist posts anti-American hate speech on the Web; apparently praises suicide bombers and uses his own name; loudly criticizes US policies; argues (as a psychiatrist, no less) with his military patients over the worth of their sacrifices; refuses, in the name of Islam, to be photographed with female colleagues; lists his nationality as "Palestinian" in a Muslim spouse-matching program and parades around central Texas in a fundamentalist playsuit -- well, it only seems fair to call this terrorist an "Islamist terrorist.
I've read a great deal about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, but little, as yet, about his victims. I've cobbled together what I've been able to learn this morning on the Web about the people killed, the lives disrupted, the families shattered.
With deep condolences to all the families and friends of those killed and wounded.
Russell Seager
Capt. Russell Seager, 51, of Racine, Wisconsin, joined the army a few years ago because he was a psychiatrist who wanted to help soldiers returning from war adapt to civilian life again.
His uncle said, “He just wanted to help the soldiers because they helped us,...“And then he got shot by a psychiatrist.”
Amy Krueger
Sgt. Amy Krueger, 29, of Kiel Wisconsin joined the Army shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, vowing to take on Osama bin Laden. She was part of Captain Seager’s unit, which was headed to Afghanistan.
Her high school principal said "I know she was proud to serve and proud to share her experience. She took pride that she was able to serve her country."
John Gaffney
Capt. John Gaffaney, 56, of the Serra Mesa area of San Diego, who had worked with mentally disabled adults in San Diego, was a psychiatric nurse who arrived at Ft. Hood the day before the shooting to prepare for a deployment to Iraq. His close friend d and co-worker Stephanie Powell said, "He wanted to help the boys in Iraq and Afghanistan deal with the trauma of what they were seeing, He was an honorable man. He just wanted to serve in any way he can." He leaves a wife and son.
Michael Pearson
Pfc. Michael Pearson, 21, of Bolingbrook, Ill., joined the Army a year ago, was training to deactivate bombs and was known for his nimble fingers on his Fender Stratocaster guitar. His mother said "He was the best son in the whole world,
Jason Hunt
Specialist Jason D. Hunt, 22, joined the military three years ago because, he told his grandmother, in Frederick, Okla., “it was time to grow up.” And when his two-year commitment was finished, he re-enlisted, right in the middle of the Iraq desert on his 21st birthday. He got married just two months ago.
Francheska Velez
Francheska Velez, 21, of Chicago, was just return ing home from Iraq where she disarmed bombs. She was three months pregnant and scheduled to begin maternity leave in December. Ms. Velez had joined the Army three years ago to fulfill her father’s dream of serving the country and enlisted for another three.
“She knew I always wanted to be in the Army,” Mr. Velez, a Columbian citizen, said in Spanish. He learned Thursday of her death. “I didn’t expect it to happen here and not in Iraq. The worst thing was it wasn’t a terrorist. It was an American soldier.”
Lt. Col. Juanita Warman, 55, who grew up in Pittsburgh, also joined the military like her father and grandfather, her sister, Margaret Yaggie, said in a telephone interview. Lt. Col. Warman was a physician’s assistant who was also a member of one of the Army medical reserve units. She leaves behind a husband, two daughters and six grandchildren.
Kham Xiong
Kham Xiong, 23, of St. Paul, Minnesota, was preparing to deploy to Afghanistan and was standing in line for a physical at the center and was responding to a text message from his wife, urging him to come home for lunch when he was killed. Hs sister Mee Xiong said the family would have been able to understand if Kham would have died in battle. But the death on U.S. soil just didn't make sense. "He didn't get to go overseas and do what he's supposed to do, and he's dead ... killed by our own people," Mee Xiong said.
He leaves his wife and three children, ages 4, 2, and 10 months.
Michael Grant Cahill
Michael Grant Cahill , 62 from Cameron, Texas, suffered a heart attack two weeks ago and returned to work at the base as a civilian employee after taking just one week off for recovery, said his daughter Keely Vanacker.
"He survived that. He was getting back on track, and he gets killed by a gunman," Vanacker said, her words bare with shock and disbelief.
Cahill, a physician's assistant helped treat soldiers returning from tours of duty or preparing for deployment. He had been married for 37 years to his wife Joleen
Aaron Thomas Nemelka
Pfc. Aaron Thomas Nemelka, 19, of the Salt Lake City suburb of West Jordan, Utah, chose to join the Army instead of going on a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, his uncle Christopher Nemelka said.
"As a person, Aaron was as soft and kind and as gentle as they come, a sweetheart," his uncle said. "What I loved about the kid was his independence of thought."
Aaron Nemelka, the youngest of four children, was scheduled to be deployed to Afghanistan in January,
I'm scratching my head wondering how the editor gave this report this headline - Soupy Sales goes out with love
SOUPY Sales would have loved his memorial yesterday at the Riverside Funeral Home. Freddie Roman, Joe Franklin and Kenny Kramer -- who inspired the character played by Michael Richards on "Seinfeld" -- were among those who paid their last respects.
One of Soupy's two rock musician sons, Tony or Hunt -- our source didn't know which -- recalled his dad's advice: "Be true to your teeth, and they won't be false to you."
Professor Irwin Corey had to be removed from the podium after his eulogy turned into a diatribe about health-care reform, in which he insisted that Soupy -- along with Odetta, Eartha Kitt and Miriam Makeba -- died prematurely because of inadequate treatment.
And a female rabbi told the crowd that Soupy's parents, Irving and Sadie Supman, the only Jewish family in Franklinton, NC, owned a dry-goods store and sold sheets to the Ku Klux Klan.
From American Digest PUDDY: The Gift
You can take lots of rides in this life, but a full sled careening down a hill of fresh snow is the closest to a ride of pure joy as you can get. You'll find it near the top of my list of "Best Moments in This Life." It's probably on yours too. If you've never done it, move it to the top of the Bucket List now.
The man buried here died in his 45th year: R. Scott Puddy
On the morning of June 18, 2002, Scott perished doing what he loved: practicing aerobatics in a Yak-52, in the mountains of Brentwood, Calif.
He was survived by his parents, his sisters, and his daughter.
The dark secret fear lurking inside you when you are a parent is that your children will die before you do. That fear came true for this family. All parents can imagine their grief, but all choose not to do so. But they did not choose, as so many do, to be utterly undone by grief. Instead they chose to balance grief with joy, "For Joy and sorrow are inseparable," and place upon this grave a bronze symbol of all that is best in this life and in this world.
It's a gift to their son, R. Scott Puddy, and a gift to any in the world who chance upon his grave. It's a gift outright.
While we haven't been able to erect a memorial at Ground Zero, the Russians gave us a moving sculpture in Bayonne New Jersey, overlooking the New York harbor. Astonishing that I never knew about it before this week.
A Beau Geste: the 9/11 Tear Drop Memorial
The Tear Drop Memorial was created by Georgian/Russian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli and is officially titled "To the Struggle Against World Terrorism" or "The Memorial at Harbor View Park". The monument is located at The Peninsula at Bayonne Harbor, New Jersey, and is lined up to look upon the Statue of Liberty. The persons most likely to see it would be those coming into the harbor by boat.
The monolithic block of vertical, earth-colored stone is over 100 feet high. It appears rent in the center from top to bottom and in the gap is a 40 foot, four ton nickel-plated tear drop. The base of the monument is a multi-faceted onyx pedestal inscribed with the names of all of those that perished on 9-11-01, from Flight 93 in Pennsylvania to the Pentagon to the twin Trade Towers.
The symbolisms of this touching and costly gesture are as profound as those of our adopted First Lady, the Statue of Liberty. The Tear Drop and the Russian people deserve, in spite of whatever else they are, a commensurate acknowledgment of this moving symbol of sympathy. It's a crime that even three years later the Russian's simpatico for our losses has not been widely recognized by America and her leaders.
In the southern part of Illinois, just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri, lies 2200 acres with 120 earthen mounds that's been designated a National Historic Site and a World Heritage Site. Cahokia Mounds is the largest prehistoric earthen construction in the Americas, the last remnants of an American Indian people called the Mississippians.
The focus of ongoing archaeological study, Cahokia was once the largest city in America with about 20-40,000 people at its peak. Nobody knows what the original name of the ancient great city on the MIssissippi because the people left no written records.
Andrew O'Hehir brings us up to date with what's been learned from the archaeological studies including the evidence of human sacrifice on a large scale. Sacrificial virgins of the MIssissippi.
At its peak in the 12th century, this settlement along the Mississippi River bottomland of western Illinois, a few miles east of modern-day St. Louis, was probably larger than London, and held economic, cultural and religious sway over a vast swath of the American heartland. Featuring a man-made central plaza covering 50 acres and the third-largest pyramid in the New World (the 100-foot-tall "Monks Mound"), Cahokia was home to at least 20,000 people. If that doesn't sound impressive from a 21st-century perspective, consider that the next city on United States territory to attain that size would be Philadelphia, some 600 years later.
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Cahokians performed human sacrifice, as part of some kind of theatrical, community-wide ceremony, on a startlingly large scale unknown in North America above the valley of Mexico. Simultaneous burials of as many as 53 young women (quite possibly selected for their beauty) have been uncovered beneath Cahokia's mounds, and in some cases victims were evidently clubbed to death on the edge of a burial pit, and then fell into it. A few of them weren't dead yet when they went into the pit -- skeletons have been found with their phalanges, or finger bones, digging into the layer of sand beneath them.
What they found at Mound 72.
This mound contained a high-status burial of two nearly identical male bodies, one of them wrapped in a beaded cape or cloak in the shape of a thunderbird, an ancient and mystical Native American symbol. Surrounding this "beaded burial" the diggers gradually uncovered more and more accompanying corpses, an apparent mixture of honorific burials and human sacrifices evidently related to the two important men. It appeared that 53 lower-status women were sacrificed specifically to be buried with the men -- perhaps a harem or a group of slaves from a nearby subject village, Pauketat thinks -- and that a group of 39 men and women had been executed on the spot, possibly a few years later. In all, more than 250 people were interred in and around Mound 72.
Several years before he died, Bob Hope converted to Catholicism. McNamara's Blog reports
Before his death, the Hopes funded the building of a new chapel at the National Shrine in Washington, D.C. The name of the chapel? Our Lady of Hope!
In 1994 the Washington Post announced:
A new chapel donated by Bob Hope and his wife, Dolores, will be consecrated tomorrow at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The chapel was given in memory of Hope's mother, Avis Townes Hope, and honors Our Lady of Hope of Pontmain, France. Devotion to Our Lady of Hope began with four children in Pontmain who saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary in January 1871, as Prussian troops approached the town. They said she told them, "Pray, my children. God will soon grant your request."
Atlas Shrugs has some heart-breaking photos of children whose lives were broken or lost during the Holocaust. Sometimes it takes little children to awaken us again to the horrors of what happened in an advanced Western country
When the deportations to the extermination camps began, a chasm opened up in the lives of Jewish children. Throughout Nazi Europe, they fled and hid, separated from their parents and loved ones. Some of them found refuge in the homes of decent people whose conscience would not allow them to remain passive; several were hidden in convents and monasteries and boarding schools; others were forced to roam through forests and villages, hunting for food like wild animals and relying entirely on their own ingenuity and resourcefulness. Many were forced to live under assumed identities, longingly anticipating the return of their father and mother. Some were so young when separated from their parents that they forgot their real names and Jewish identity. Many were forced to train themselves not to move, laugh or cry, or even talk. Upon liberation, one little girl asked her mother, “Mommy, may I cry now?”
Father Patrick Desbois is a French Catholic priest who, virtually single-handedly, has undertaken the task of excavating the history of previously undocumented Jewish victims of the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union, including an estimated 1.5 million people who were murdered in Ukraine. Father Desbois was born 10 years after the end of World War II -- and yet, through his tireless actions, he exemplifies the "righteous gentile." The term is generally used to recognize non-Jews who, during the Holocaust, risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis. Father Desbois is a generation too late to save lives. Instead, he has saved memory and history.
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Father Desbois's French grandfather was imprisoned in a forced-labor camp in Rawa Ruska in the Ukraine during the war with 25,000 other French soldiers captured by the Germans. This initially motivated the priest to travel to the region and learn more about all of the Nazis' victims.
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Father Desbois is tired, as the circles beneath his eyes attest, but he wants to learn more. In 2009, he and his team will expand their work into Belarus and Ossetia. He hopes people will contact him through his organization's Web site, yahadinunum.org, and tell him where to look for more mass graves and more eyewitnesses to history.
"These were young children who were forced, in the course of one day, to fill the grave and to witness," Father Desbois said. "They heard the last words of the dead. They want to speak."
Time is working against the priest, who accompanies researchers on most of their trips into the former Soviet Union and has, to this point, personally interviewed 823 witnesses. Each interview takes up to two hours, and his team takes 10 to 15 trips a year to the region, each lasting no more than 17 days because, he explains, "We can't bear more, psychologically." But the surviving witnesses, most of whom were children at the time of the massacres, are already in their late 70s and early 80s, and Father Desbois worries that they won't be able to tell their stories for much longer.
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But this project that has become his life's work, he says, is inspired by two sources far greater than either history or circumstance. One is "min hashamayim," Father Desbois says in Hebrew -- from heaven, which inspires us to build relationships with our fellow human beings. The other inspiration, he explains, comes from the earthly world, and what is written in Genesis about the blood of Abel, murdered by Cain: "The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground."
I've written about Father Patrick before in The Evil That Men Plan and Do
These people want absolutely to speak before they die," says Father Desbois of the bystanders. "They want to say the truth."