WASHINGTON. T ALK about a bunch of hookers at a wedding rehearsal.
All they did was frit and fret about freakin’ detail which guarantees our lives will not be for the better or the worse despite their gas-bagging rhetoric.
They clattered away and the White House joined the cacophony.
Basically it was this:
Washington to America: “Drop dead.”
But about a mile-and-a-half from the Senate building where men and women used to use prudent muscle to attack villainy, there was quiet and tranquility.
Under a marvelous American flag fluttering proudly in brutal wind and in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, life stood a little bit more still.
I am standing between Constitution Avenue and N.W. Henry Bacon Drive.
Before me on a long, painful black chiseled wall are the names of 58,214 humans who bought it in Vietnam.
Gargantuan in length, ghastly in waste, but gorgeous in the simple, but supreme sacrifice for others.
Pete Bushey of Great Kills, Staten Island, was with his girlfriend, Mary Anne Clifford.
They were looking for the name of John Geary who was, as Pete said, “a friend of my father.”
I wanted to know what he thought about was happening in the Senate between the Boy Scouts and the hustler.
Quietly, but politely, almost at a whisper he said: “I don’t think we should mention that man’s name when we are here before this wall.”
Pete is an EMS worker dedicated to saving lives.
He will save more lives and destroy none.
There was Robert Limon from Las Vegas whose elder brother Rosilio got a Purple Heart in World War II.
He looked at this black shining wall of honor and said: “That’s his name, Clyde E. Newman, killed in 1968. I am awfully moved. He was a great friend of mine from Tonopah, Nev. And there is all this hocus-pocus going on about that man. Nobody is asking him about the nuclear capability he gave to China.”
There was a tiny American flag and a fresh red rose under one of the giant black slabs at W23, which began with the name Donnie Ray Harley and ended with the name James F. Haider.
God, how I wished I could have shaken their hands before bravery snatched away their sweet bird of youth.
Stephen Long of Laurel, Md., was looking for the name Thomas Edward Jones under the slab at W29.
“We have just come from Arlington Cemetery and I don’t know how that man can make a speech from there,” Long said.
His aunt, Carole Wilhelm, of Springfield, Va., jumped in: “I will be a little bit more indelicate. I don’t even know how he has the guts to talk in Arlington or around this Mall.”
Carole wanted to talk about Thomas Edward Jones, a helicopter lieutenant who died in a mystery field in 1969 making sure the guys and gals like you and me could live without tyranny.
“He never saw his baby. His son, also called Thomas, was in his mother’s arms at the memorial service. He is 30 today, but never saw his father. That man they are talking about in the Senate, he has no guts.”
You look along this wall – Osbourne, O’Shea, Zimmerman, Hernandez, Del Cambre, Grissom – and you spend long times thinking about manhood, bravery, death, and maybe how they died or maybe how their loved ones went through another agony when they were told he ain’t coming back.
You feel extremely inferior under the weight of decency.
And then there was Tonya Flynt Vega, excoriating her father Larry Flynt, the porn peddler, who in cahoots with that incredibly resistible man James Carville wants to “out” the Republicans and will give money for it.
“He’s a hustler for crying out loud,” she said about the human who helped give her life.
How attractive.
“And you the media are being hustled,” she said with obvious reference to the toilet paper smut magazine her father publishes.
Isn’t this just grand?
The Senate behaving like a bunch of hookers at a wedding rehearsal, the White House in disgusting retreat, and a porn peddler is in the midst of an impeachment hearing.
Going to the Vietnam Memorial doesn’t cost a dime.
But it may cost you big time in the bank account of your heart.
And that bum, the “C” man, struts as tall as a bamboo stalk with no honor.
I don’t know who reported this story in the first place, but I’ll borrow it:
In the frightening cleanup at Omaha Beach they found the body of a Marine who had been mortally wounded, but had a gasp of life left inside him to scrawl something on the sand before life slipped away.
Written was the following: “Tell the people back home I gave today so they can have tomorrows.”
Can you imagine the “C” man giving anything today for someone’s tomorrow?