Dispatches

Loosely based on the book read 1980

The front of perpetual war for perpetual peace is in our heads. As a Cold War and Vietnam era person the multiple communication venues marinated me.

Even now my obsessions are the same. War or Prosperity, Human Dignity or De-Humanization, then of course to escape the binary of the quotidian my logic weak and sickened nearly unto death by my many failed Dystopian fictions half told and so never sold I introduce the Synthesis. The great force of the Synthesis is the merger of the contradictions of my views. And this is what seems to me important as it did in my first college year at 17 -having MY singular view of Mont Improbable and not that necessarily as taught. Of course memory comes to me just now and I suddenly recall my first decision to not follow instructions but go my own way. First Grade. As a consequence of speaking 127 languages and proving Leonardo died in 1759 in London under the fake name John O' Bedlam the public school of Hershey PA decided I perfectly fit Accelerated First Grade.

My instructor and I did not resonate well. I objected as a learned Artiste to the mere “tearing” of paper. The irregularity and stupidity of hap hazard torn paper made me enraged. I had scissors. To make my Titanic from paper and scissors I intuitively understood to be more sea worthy than torn paper. So I did so. And to ensure it could sail through this medium of life in Hershey PA in 1963 just before the public murder of the only President I knew anything about I cut the prow into little saw teeth. Doing so created consternation. No cell phone existed but my teacher understood instantly I was Il Forza Del Destinio and stomped hard on my boat complaining I did not follow her clear instructions. For this insane insubordination she insisted I was not suitable for “Advanced” First Grade. Not being fluent in Aleut or the obscure Alexandrian dialect that preserved the orders of King Herod to slay the children and in being defiant by not following orders she determined without a standardized test I would go my own way. My parents were conflicted. Ultimately the resolution was speech pathology in Pig Latin. The teacher graded me -C and sought to remand me to Kindergarten. My parents paying$109 to the Principle got me in to Third grade and the rest got me here today, broke, unvaccinated, no PCR test, no mask, no gloves, no job after all these years of dodging them, cheap rent and fewer and fewer friends. And yet my optimism is astonishing. I think William Faulkner was a bit like me.

Faulkner” —-I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is  only the question: When will I be blown up? 

  William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 1950

In 2022 we add When will I be injected?

Dispatches:. Dispatches is a New Journalism book by Michael Herr that describes the author's experiences in Vietnam as a war correspondent for Esquire magazine. First published in 1977, Dispatches was one of the first pieces of American literature that portrayed the experiences of soldiers in the Vietnam War for American readers.

The longue durée (French pronunciation: ​[lɔ̃ɡ dyʁe]; English: the long term) is the French Annales School approach to the study of history. It gives priority to long-term historical structures over what François Simiand called histoire événementielle ("evental history", the short-term time-scale that is the domain of the chronicler and the journalist). It concentrates instead on all-but-permanent or slowly evolving structures, and replaces elite biographies with the broader syntheses of prosopography. The crux of the idea is to examine extended periods of time and draw conclusions from historical trends and patterns.