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 being better for encouraging penance in sinners than anything you can think of, according to Mario DiPietro, the new owner of the building.

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.