7.11.2026 – big disappointment

big disappointment
small, forgettable and short
on chocolate chips

Over the holiday we got together as a family as most families do and as most families do, we got together over a lot of food.

My daughter Alexis brought a bag of her homemade chocolate chip cookies.

Pretty much the basic chocolate chip cookie but with added chunks of milk chocolate that had family members urging family members to try one who then urged family members to try one, mostly saying, you have got to try one!

Maybe the best chocolate chip cookies I ever had.

Crunchy enough to crunch but soft enough to not crumble and the double hit of chocolate, but boy howdy, yessir, I am telling you, I had to sit down.

According to AI, The chocolate chip cookie is undeniably the most American cookie. Invented in the 1930s by Ruth Wakefield at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, this iconic combination of buttery dough and semi-sweet chocolate morsels is now baked in over half of American households and remains the undisputed favorite nationwide.

According to Wikipedia, There is no official cookie for the entire United States. However, the beloved chocolate chip cookie is America’s unofficial national favorite and serves as the official state cookie for both Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

My home state, Michigan, in an act of near apostasy, as named the CHERRY chocolate chip cookie as its official State Cookie while my current state of South Carolina made something called the Benne Wafer as its state cookie. It is made, I understand as I have never had one, benne seeds also known as Sesame Seeds. I think that is about all you need to know about South Carolina to understand South Carolina.

Who else would make a cookie out of sesame seeds when chocolate chips are available?

I found somehow, irresistibly satisfying and appropriate that in the Washington Post article, The best and worst bites at the Great American State Fair by WP Food Critic Warren Rojas and editorial aide Jade Tran, who set out to eat at the food booths at the Great American State Fair [sic] in Washington, DC over the 4th of July that:

The $4 dollar chocolate chips cookies was one of the biggest disappointments: small, forgettable, and short on chocolate chips.

The Great American State Fair.

One thing to do.

Sell the food that made America Great.

And start with the Chocolate Chip Cookie.

Simple when you get right down to it.

What was delivered?

Something small.

Something forgettable.

Something short on Chocolate Chips.

Kind sums it all up for me.

And when I say all I mean ALL!

7.10.2026 – where we gather to

where we gather to
serve our community, there
is America

Adapted from the line, Wherever men and women of good will gather together to serve their community, there is America in a Radio Address for the Mobilization for Human Need, October 13, 1940 by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

President also said:

… in this critical moment of our history, we must be more than ever conscious of the true meaning of the “community spirit” which it expresses. It is a spirit which comes from our community of interests, our community of faith in the democratic ideal, our community of devotion to God.

Wherever men and women of good will gather together to serve their community, there is America. It was true in the first little town meetings in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, when the good folk assembled to decide measures of defense against the Indians, and how to build their first school, and how to care for their aged and sick. It is still true in this great national drive, all the way across our continent, for the Community Chest Funds.

When we join together in serving our local community, we add strength to our national community, we help to fortify the structure of our whole Union. That form of fortification—that spiritual fortification is not to be dismissed lightly by those in other lands who believe that nations can live by force alone.

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel in order to be tough. The vigorous expression of our American community spirit is truly important.

The ancient injunction to love thy neighbor as thyself is still the force that animates our faith—a faith that we are determined shall live and conquer in a world poisoned by hatred and ravaged by war.

Sad to say this we need to repeat:

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel in order to be tough.

Wherever men and women of good will gather together to serve their community, there is America.

7.9.2026 – we are all to blame …

we are all to blame …
sometimes is wiser not to
look over the hill

Been thinking a lot of the next 10 years.

The years when that current man in office is no longer in office and those folks who supported that current man in office will have to explain their support for that current man in office.

Let me be clear, I am confident that the current state of affairs of this ship of state will not last, cannot be sustained and in the words of Longfellow will:

Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Fear not each sudden sound and shock,
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee.
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,
Our faith triumphant o’er our fears,
Are all with thee, – are all with thee!

But of those who support this current man in office?

Those who support this administration that wraps itself in the Bible without bothering to read the words that say so simply:

… the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law (Galatians 5:22-23 KJV).

Love.

Joy.

Peace.

Longsuffering.

Gentleness.

Goodness.

Faith.

Meekness.

Temperance.

Against such there is no law!

I mean, come on, what does anyone have to tell themself to bend the meaning of these simple words so that they can be applied to that man currently in office?

Last night I was reading On my own : the years since the White House by Eleanor Roosevelt (Harper: New York, 1958), and Mrs. Roosevelt wrote about visiting Germany when she had been appointed as a member of the US Delegation to the United Nations meetings in 1946.

She wrote:

I remembered my friend, Carola von Schaeffer-Bernstein, born Passavant, as a very lovely blonde girl when we were at school together at Allenswood. She had a soft pink and white complexion, and she had been a very earnest kind of person. In the First World War, her husband was a general on the Eastern or Russian front and I remembered that following that war she had written me a rather sad letter in which she expressed sorrow about the war but said that “we are all to blame” because we have not lived by the teachings of Christ.

Now, in American headquarters at Frankfurt, I expected to find a greatly changed person but, in fact, she was no more changed by the passage of years and the long years of war than I, perhaps less. She was still lovely, and it was only when you looked the second time that you noticed that she was tired and worn by the strain of life in an occupied country. She was dressed plainly but well and her attitude toward me, while a bit reserved, was much as it had always been. I suppose, too, that our conversation was not much different than it had been when we met in earlier days. They were living in straitened circumstances but they were not destitute. If I had originally felt that she might be in difficulties and that I might in some way help her, it became obvious that she was not.

We said nothing — I suppose we avoided saying anything — in particular about the war until she was almost ready to leave, when I made some remark about the tragedy of Germany. She answered promptly.

“It was everybody’s fault.” Then, echoing what she had written me a quarter of a century earlier. “We are all to blame. None of us has lived up to the teachings of Christ.”

I thought to myself that this was perhaps an easy way of not facing the problem, particularly for a German woman with education and social standing. But in my reply I pursued another thought.

“You have always been a very religious person,” I said. “How is it possible that one can be so devoted to the principles of the church yet not protest the mistreatment of the Jews?”

“Sometimes,” she replied, “it is wiser not to look over the hill.”

Soon afterward she left to return home. I never did ask her whether she or her family had been Nazis, but then, after the war practically no one had ever been a Nazi!

I think about the next 10 years.

I think about those responsible, those to blame.

We are all to blame when you get right down to it.

Sometimes, it is wiser not to look over the hill.

7.8.026 – ups downs but always

ups downs but always
the sense of motion and the
illusion of hope

But the years 1895 to 1900 which are the staple of this story exceed in vividness, variety and exertion anything I have known—except of course the opening months of the Great War.

When I look back upon them I cannot but return my sincere thanks to the high gods for the gift of existence.

All the days were good and each day better than the other.

Ups and downs, risks and journeys, but always the sense of motion, and the illusion of hope.

Come on now all you young men, all over the world.

You are needed more than ever now to fill the gap of a generation shorn by the War.

You have not an hour to lose. You must take your places in life’s fighting line.

Twenty to twenty-five! These are the years!

Don’t be content with things as they are.

‘The earth is yours and the fulness thereof’.

Enter upon your inheritance, accept your responsibilities.

Raise the glorious flags again, advance them upon the new enemies, who constantly gather upon the front of the human army, and have only to be assaulted to be overthrown.

Don’t take No for an answer.

Never submit to failure.

Do not be fobbed off with mere personal success or acceptance.

You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her.

She was made to be wooed and won by youth.

She has lived and thrived only by repeated subjugations.

From My Early Life. A Roving Commission by Winston Churchill (London: Thornton Butterworth, September 1931).

Twenty to twenty-five! These are the years!

Enter upon your inheritance, accept your responsibilities.

Never submit to failure.

Do not be fobbed off with mere personal success or acceptance.

Is this not possibly the best GraduationAddress ever made?

This was Winston Churchill looking back in 1931 to a time when he was 25.

Looking back.

Spent the holiday with the kids and grand kids.

And I thought about this speech and I thought about young people who are growing up today.

I can look back to a time when I thought Twenty to twenty-five! Those are the years!

But what the kids too young to look back.

Those kids who grew up in this day and age and feel that this day and age is the norm.

They have no clue to how it was before the darkness started.

I hope they have a future to look forward to because these days are not much worth being excited about.

I am reminded of this passage from the book, 1984, where George Orwell writes:

” … it occurred to him that the old man, who must be eighty at the least, had already been middle-aged when the Revolution happened.

He and a few others like him were the last links that now existed with the vanished world of capitalism.

In the Party itself there were not many people left whose ideas had been formed before the Revolution.

The older generation had mostly been wiped out in the great purges of the Fifties and Sixties, and the few who survived had long ago been terrified into complete intellectual surrender.

If there was anyone still alive who could give you a truthful account of conditions in the early part of the century, it could only be a prole.

Suddenly the passage from the history book that he had copied into his diary came back into Winston’s mind, and a lunatic impulse took hold of him.

He would go into the pub, he would scrape acquaintance with that old man and question him.

He would say to him:

“Tell me about your life when you were a boy.

What was it like in those days?

Were things better than they are now, or were they worse?”

“Tell me about your life when you were a boy. What was it like in those days? Were things better than they are now, or were they worse?”

Echoes deep into my toes.

7.7.2026 – its damnatio

its damnatio
memoriae in latin
rewriting the past

From Wikipedia, “Damnatio memoriae (Classical Latin pronunciation: [damˈnaːti.oː mɛˈmɔri.ae̯]) is a modern Latin phrase meaning “condemnation of memory” or “damnation of memory”, indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts, or remembered after death in a way contrary to what that person may have desired.

In ancient Rome, the practice of damnatio memoriae was the condemnation of emperors after their deaths. If the Senate or a later emperor did not like the acts of an emperor, they could have his property seized, his name erased and his statues reworked (normally defaced).

Compounding this difficulty is the fact that a completely successful damnatio memoriae results—by definition—in the full and total erasure of the subject from the historical record. In the case of figures such as emperors or consuls it is unlikely that complete success was possible, as even comprehensive obliteration of the person’s existence and actions in records and the like would continue to be historically visible without extensive reworking. The impracticality of such a cover-up could be vast—in the case of Emperor Geta, for example, coins bearing his effigy proved difficult to entirely remove from circulation for several years, even though the mere mention of his name was punishable by death.

The impossibility of actually erasing memory of an emperor has led scholars to conclude that this was not actually the goal of damnatio. Instead, they understand damnatio:

not so much as an attempt to obliterate memory entirely as to transform honorific commemoration into a form of visible denigration. That is: the power of an act of damnatio relies, at least in part, on the viewer of a monument being able to supplement the gaps in an inscription with their own knowledge of what those gaps had once contained, and the reasons why the text had been removed — Polly Low, "Remembering, Forgetting, and Rewriting the Past

In the United States you can find an example of the concept of Damnatio memoriae in the Old Chapel at West Point.

Inside this chapel, George Washington and all his Generals havea plaque in their memory.

One plaque looks like this:

It is there in honor of this feller named Benedict Arnold.

This same feller has a monument on the Battlefield at Saratoga where this same feller led an attack on the Redcoats.

Notice again, no name.

The next generation in Washington going have a lot of Damnatio memoriae to do but I will volunteer to help if I can.