Stating the obvious.

I should write more often, I should. In the amount of time since the D-Day post, the Allied armies had smashed their way across Europe and had just entered or were about to enter Germany, and here I am, without any great psychological pressure about whether I am going to live or die in a loud and altogether grotesque military manner, still unable to produce serviceable prose about the adventures of the denizens of our happy little burg and our ongoing war with those most unhappy inhabitants of Connecticut, the low and utterly loathsome crew of degenerates known as Nutmeggers. Our town is a clean and moral place--you can ask anyone--and there will be no megging nuts in public here if the citizenry in general and the Reverend Cornelius Van Vlack has anything to say about the matter. The Reverend Van Vlack is the former pastor of the First Dutch Reformed Church and then the Second Reformed Church, which is actually the same denomination using the same church building that the first Dutch Reformed dominie, the Reverend Jan DeWitt, built in 1709—the church fathers changed the name about fourteen years ago when they decided that the Dutch had been reformed enough and now it was time for the church to reform everyone else whether they wanted to be Reformed or not. The rest of us, being the sinners that we are, decided not to reform, and so the church building is now a pizzeria, pepperoni and prodigious amounts of garlic being better for encouraging penance in sinners than almost anything else you can think of.  Despite his church's conversion from Calvinism to calzones, the Reverend Cornelius Van Vlack has still not abandoned the cause; the moral rot that permits pineapples on pizza will never gain such sway that megging nuts in public will ever be acceptable behavior, even from people from Connecticut who don't know any better.  To advance that cause, the Reverend Cornelius Van Vlack and his militia patrol the mountains that separate our happy little burg from the envy of less happy lands (except Connecticut, of course), keeping a sharp eye out for all would be megging miscreants. We, and by we I mean the good people of our happy little burg, can sleep soundly in our beds because the good reverend and his merry crew of public-spirited citizens are keeping us safe from megging nuts and less safe from poison ivy, which they get all over themselves as they wander through the mountains wondering why they volunteered for this abuse and then transmit into our homes by not wiping their feet when they come into our houses. I am fairly certain that they do this just to annoy people.

In any case, I should write more often. 

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.