White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Husband and Wife Who Founded Memorial Day

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(Channeling Gen. John A. “Black Jack” Logan)

WASHINGTON — It’s Memorial Day. I see you’re walking from Logan Circle to Constitution Avenue to watch the parade honoring all the nation’s veterans.

I’ll be there, too. In spirit.

Do you see the bronze statue in the circle? That’s me: Gen. John A. Logan, sitting erect on my horse, my sword drawn and the ends of my thick mustache flying in the wind. I was nicknamed “Black Jack” for my swarthy complexion, boot-black hair, eyes and that mustache.

At the outset of the Civil War, I won re-election to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Jacksonian Democrat from Illinois’s 9th Congressional District, a region that had partisan and divided loyalties. I tried to take a neutral stance, but I ended up fighting to preserve the union. I rose from colonel to major general, distinguishing myself in eight major campaigns. Many historians consider me to be best of the Union Army’s “political” generals.

Gen. Ulysses S. Grant offered me a brigadier generalship in the postwar U.S. Army, but I returned to politics, winning three more U.S. House elections as a Republican from Illinois, and an advocate of African-American civil rights and public education.

Later I won three U.S. Senate elections, which spurred me to run for higher offices. I was a vice-presidential candidate on the Republican ticket that lost the general election in 1884, and I failed twice to become my party’s presidential nominee.

Enough about my political career. If you can dally, I’d like to tell you about the origin of this national holiday, which involves me and my wife, Mary, an indefatigable Washington hostess and a prodigious writer and public speaker.

In March 1868, when I was a congressman and commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans, my wife and I were invited to tour the battlefields of Virginia. Unfortunately, I couldn’t accompany her on what she called a “pilgrimage” in her May 30, 1903, article in The Los Angeles Times, headlined “Memorial Day: A Noted Woman’s Story of Its Origin and Growth.”

She wrote that on her visit to the oldest church in Petersburg, Va., whose bricks had been brought from England, “as we passed through the rows of graves, I noticed that many of them had been strewn with beautiful blossoms and decorated with small flags of the dead Confederacy.”

When I met her at the train station, she told me about this “sentimental idea” and I said, by her account, “What a splendid thought! We will have it done all over the country, and the Grand Army shall do it! I will issue an order at once for a national Memorial Day for the decoration of the graves of all of these noble fellows who died for their country.”

While I’d known about the Decoration Day observances in the South (and mentioned them in a speech in 1866), my wife’s enrapture with the idea likely got me moving on an annual national day to honor the fallen.

On May 5, 1868, at Grand Army headquarters in Washington, I issued General Order No. 11, designating that May 30 “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion. … It is the purpose of the Commander-in-Chief to inaugurate this observance with the hope it will be kept up from year to year …”

Now, on your way to the parade. But I hope you’ll take the time, as I said in my order, to visit the graves of our heroic dead and “garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of springtime.”

An Authentic Dublin Pub Crawl in Celebration of St. Patrick’s Day

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People who are no more Irish than the King of Siam or the Paramount Chief of the Bumangwato will, come March 17, celebrate an island nation famous for its skill with words and its fondness for drink.

It all began, of course, in the 5th century with a Romano Christian missionary from Britain, Patrick, who brought Christianity to Ireland. As a bonus, he chased the snakes out of Ireland. Where the fondness for something brewed, distilled or fermented came from is not recorded, but it is an intrinsic part of Irish life.

Life in Ireland often revolves around having a drink. It is treated much as we would treat having a cup of coffee. In Dublin once, I ran into a friend who I had not seen in a year: a serious man with a big job in government. He thought, in the Irish way, that we should catch up over a glass of something, although it was just after 10 in the morning. “I think Murphys is open,” he said as naturally as someone in an American city would have said, “There is a Starbucks on the next corner.”

In Ireland St. Patrick’s Day was, until recent years, a somber religious festival. It was in America where the idea that the Irish could have a huge craic, as the Irish call a party, took hold.

Even so, the biggest celebrations, to my mind, are in Boston, Chicago and New York. But there are celebrations everywhere the Irish have set foot from Hanoi, Vietnam to Ushuaia, Argentina, off the tip of South America.

But if you are very lucky, you will celebrate in Dublin. And what better way than with an authentic pub crawl.

I know just a bit about pub crawling in Ireland because I was lucky enough to be involved in a wonderful Dublin pub crawl in 2012. It was not a bunch of celebrants struggling from one pub to another, but rather a work of planning art.

I was in Dublin for an engineering conference which coincided with the 60th birthday of one of our number, Sean O’Neill — by birth an American, but otherwise through and through Irish.

A pub crawl was organized by the engineers with precision: times, distances, and safety procedures.

There was a map and the 12 pubs were selected with fiendish skill. The early ones were fairly far apart. But as the crawl went on, they grew closer together, and the last two were next to each other — in consideration of possible loss of mobility.

We were urged to go with a buddy, eat something about halfway and, in case of pub fatigue, to call a taxi.

If you get to Dublin and want to try the engineers’ crawl, here are the pubs in order: Toners, O’Donoghues and Doheny & Nesbitts on Baggot Street; Dawson Lounge on Dawson Street; Kehoes on St. Anne Street; Davy Byrnes on Duke Street; O’Neills and O’Donoghues on Suffolk Street; The International Bar and Stags Head on Wicklow Street; The Long Hall on Georges Street; McDaids and Bruxelles on Harry Street.

I think I made it as far as The Long Hall, one of Dublin’s most famous bars, before I cried uncle, refused a last drink and hailed a taxi. Others persevered and, amazingly, lived to tell the tale.

You probably know that Ireland is so lush that its flora is supposed to support 40 shades of green.

Well, there is another shade of green not mentioned in the tourist brochures. It is the 41st shade and you see it in the bathroom mirror the day after a pub crawl. Surely, some of you will see it on March 18.

 

Photo: DUBLIN, IRELAND – SEPTEMBER 5, 2016: The Long Hall on September 5, 2016 in Dublin. The Long Hall is a famous landmark in Dublins cultural quarter visited by thousands of tourists every year. Editorial credit: Millionstock / Shutterstock.com

Holidays: The Pain in with the Glitter

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By Llewellyn King

We all know about the dark side of the holidays: the pain of the lovelorn; the stress for the recovering alcoholic; the torment of parents who cannot provide gifts, even homes, for their children. Then there are those who bear loss: loss of employment, loss of a parent, loss of a partner and, most sad, loss of a child. And there are those who are shut-in, alone, and possibly hungry; others are in pain, physical pain that defies amelioration.

In the holiday season, my thoughts are about those who suffer from Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). Its sufferers are walled off in plain sight, jailed by a disease that has no known cure and promises only suffering — by the day, the month, the year, the decade.

The government estimates that as many as  1 million Americans and another 17 million people worldwide are imprisoned by ME. Little is known about it, and nothing about the causes. It is understood to be a disease of the immune system, but there are those who want to believe, and have convinced some governments, that it is a psychiatric affliction. It is easier for government institutions, like Britain’s National Health Service, to believe in psychiatric nostrums than to treat and research the terrible suffering of the sick, the physically sick.

ME patients can be bedridden for years, unable to tolerate light or sound, and must rely on families or friends for basic needs. Sometimes they may seem a little better, but they cannot do the things of normal life. They are vulnerable to collapse after exercise or just normal activity.

Patients tell me that they know too well what my friend, colleague and ME sufferer Deborah Waroff says is the excruciating loneliness that comes with the induced isolation. It is the kind of loneliness that moved the 17th-century English poet John Milton to say, “Loneliness is the first thing which God’s eye named, not good.”

How often can a caregiver ask, “How are you feeling?” when the answer is known; was known yesterday, last year, and the year before, going back decades.

One sufferer told me she thought, in the height of her suffering, that she was already dead and was in limbo. Many sufferers have written to me saying they pray that they will not wake in the morning.

Suicide rates are high. Surely, suicide must be preceded by a loneliness that cannot be imagined? ME victims – and I have interviewed or had correspondence with hundreds — feel that not only do they suffer from symptoms which vary from pain in the joints, a sense that their limbs are exploding, headaches and mental fog, but they also have debilitating fatigue. Deborah Waroff, who has suffered since 1989, says it is like being a car that has no gas: You press the accelerator and nothing happens.

She, like other victims, has to ration her social life: a dinner with friends will result in collapse, and two or more days in bed. Likewise, going to a movie or a family gathering. Sometimes just making a simple meal is too much, and results in a return to one’s lonely bed.

Doctors, once they have decided that a patient has the disease, and if they have any knowledge of it, prescribe a variety of drugs from antivirals to large doses of vitamins. Some help with some symptoms, some do not. Ryan Prior, a young man who has made a documentary movie about ME, “Forgotten Plague,” takes as many as 19 pills a day. He was a star athlete in high school before being stricken. Now he manages his activities with stringent care. He is one of the lucky ones.

My correspondents from around the globe write to me about many things, but the most constant is their loneliness, exacerbated by the holidays. Marriages fail, love affairs go by default, and one is terribly, awfully alone.

There is aching aloneness for them each day, while others laugh and love. Mother Teresa said, “Loneliness is the most terrible poverty.”

That poverty is part of this disease. — For InsideSources

 

The Cruelty of the Holidays

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T.S. Eliot may have had it wrong: The cruelest months are November and December, when the holidays are upon us, not April. For those who are broken – broken in all the ways that people can be broken — the holidays are a special hell.
The bedridden, the incarcerated, the mourners, the maimed from accidents, disease or wars, the heartbroken – either those who have had their hearts broken by lovers or others, or those who have had no one in their lives — endure the holidays in anguish, hurting even more than the permanent hurt that has become their lives.
You may find the broken in the corners at parties, sitting glumly at the table. But the real suffering is unseen; the real sufferers cannot make it to the table – or dare not for fear that the outing will cost them later. The brave face can mask the deepest hurt. They are the permanently sick. Those who will be sick today, sick tomorrow and sick in the next holiday season as they were in the last.
There are people who suffer constant illness in all the myriad ways that a body can be afflicted or fail. No afflicted cohort is more deserving of understanding than another; none has a greater call for science to redouble its efforts for a cure than another.
But the effort to find cures is woefully skewed by the institutions of medicine, by the pharmaceutical companies and by those diseases that have celebrity champions, informing the public and the politics of research institutions. Yes, there is always politics and so there are winners and losers. Celebrities can help: Elizabeth Taylor did so for AIDS, Jerry Lewis for Multiple Sclerosis, and Michael J. Fox is doing so for Parkinson’s disease.
I write and broadcast about one disease in particular, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), also called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. It is a disease largely orphaned by the medical community which has no test for it — cannot say with assurance that a patient has it until months of debility validate that it is ME. In medical parlance, there are no biological markers. What is known is that it is almost certainly a disease of the immune system, and that there is no cure. It also has no celebrity benefactors and no lobby in Washington.
I think of it as a terrorist disease, which takes its patents hostage and confines them in an alternative world of muscle pain, headaches, diarrhea, dizziness, brain fog and almost permanent collapse. Some are adversely affected by light, others by sound.
One sufferer says that having ME is like being an engine without fuel: Your tank is empty and you hurt in new and refined ways almost daily. Sufferers go through long periods of disability where they cannot function at all. “I thought I was already in my coffin,” another told me.
The joys are few and sometimes from little things, like a pet or nature observations. One sufferer, Elisabeth Tova Bailey, wrote a wonderful book, “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating.” It is about the habits of a snail in a terrarium next to her bed, during two years of sustained collapse.
This is a disease that steals lives, chains them up in dungeons of despair where loneliness and suffering reach “excruciating proportions,” according to my colleague, Deborah Waroff, whose life was snatched by this disease 25 years ago. Together Waroff and I established a YouTube channel on ME, mecfsalert.
The loved ones, and the caregivers – if there are any — are enslaved by this disease, seeing those they care about in a place where neither love nor medicine can reach them. Literally and figuratively, they must fluff the pillows once again and mouth the empty words — lies really — of encouragement that we all utter in the face of hopelessness. Those who live on their own, often in poverty and sloth they cannot ameliorate for themselves, suffer what one woman told me was such sustained loneliness that she prayed nightly for death.
Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and New Year's Eve are on the way. Sadly, while the rest of us are suffused with joy, the permanently ill take stock and find their lives are terribly wanting and isolated on the holidays. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate