Almost there.

 So here we are, the Inglorious Ninth of June, wherein I celebrate the 39th anniversary of my employment here at the egregious mold-pit wherein I labor for my daily bread. Next year there will be parties and perhaps an interview with the local media, although I wouldn't bet on it, and I will no doubt go home afterwards and weep into my pillow at the waste I have made of my life.  But as I said, that is next year. This year, I can only contemplate the noisome mess that I will be in one year and wonder how the hell I got myself into this situation.  I didn't want to be a minor bureaucrat; I wanted to play center field for the New York Yankees, a common life fantasy in these parts and one that I could never realize given my complete inability to hit a curve ball. How swiftly was ambition crushed, my life torn from its preordained path and sent down the loathsome path to the lower depths of the bureaucracy! How wretched are the cruel twists of fate that lead some to the pinnacles of glory and others to the soul-sucking monotony of life in triplicate!  Life is not fair, which what I will be annoying everyone I know with for the next year. By the time the 40th anniversary rolls around I am sure that everyone will be sick and tired of listening to me and will be conspiring to hit me over the head with a shovel and selling my carcass at the weekly farmers' market for meat. I have great things to look forward to this year.

Day of Days

 

The eighty-first anniversary of the Normandy invasion is upon us as I write this and will probably be gone by the time you read this because I write slowly when I choose to write at all. I suspect that there will be slightly less press coverage of the anniversary than there was last year—the press, like everyone else, is fond of a nice round number. There will be fewer veterans this year as well, the passage of time succeeding in doing what the Germans failed to do in the year between the great day and the first anniversary of the event. Very soon there will be no one left who witnessed that day and the day will pass from living memory into the realm of history, to become one with Nineveh and Tyre. Lest we forget what great things were done for us, let us remember the situation on June 6, 1944. The map below demonstrates the political situation in Europe on the morning of D-Day. On that morning, the Greater German Reich dominated continental Europe, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the eastern Soviet Union, from the Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. By June 6, 1945, the Greater German Reich, the racial empire of the Aryans that would last a thousand years, had ceased to exist, having surrendered to the Western Allies and the Soviet Union a month before. The Thousand Year Reich, gone in less than a year from the time the first Anglo-American paratrooper landed in France.