December 20, 2018 There is a straight line, chalk true and plumb right, from The Iliad to Fury, a movie about tank-driving Hoplites in the Great Patriotic War, as our Russian allies called it.

December 20, 2018

There is a straight line, chalk true and plumb right, from The Iliad to Fury, a movie about tank-driving Hoplites in the Great Patriotic War, as our Russian allies called it.

But first a word about my Uncle John, my mother’s baby brother.

When he enlisted in 1940 the United States Army promised him, swore to him, that he would have been home by Christmas, 1941.He didn’t get back until almost summer, 1946.

He didn’t get to bury his father, Dick Lonergan, Badge #291, Jersey City Police Department, just before Christmas, 1941 because he was on a boat going to Hawaii to get ready to get on a boat to go to Australia where he would get ready to go wherever his Boss, Douglas MacArthur, went. The first time he fired a weapon in combat it was older than he was. He told me that the 1903 Springfield was excellent for killing kangaroos. He also told me that nobody enjoyed beer more than the Aussies. Advance, Australia Fair! Every time we went into combat, every time, no exceptions, that we went to war in the 20^th century, Australia went with us.

He told me, as we stood close to the tracks at the Jersey Central Railroad Station on 8^th Street in Bayonne and watched as trains ran over the coins we had put on the rail that the sound, the God-awful noise, the cacophony, never ever left him.

That was during the Korean War.

I asked him what he would do if the Army sent him to Korea.

He told me he would surrender.

My mother wrote to her brother every day since he left Jersey City.

 I was born in 1943, on the anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto, the one where the Christian good guys killed the radical Islamist terrorist bad guys who wanted to “stable their horses in the Sistine Chapel”. They killed them like their ancestors killed them at Tours 739 years before and just like their grandchildren would kill them at Vienna a bit more than a century later. [Can you picture the world without Bach, without Mozart? They could. Remember, they outlawed whistling. Just because somebody lives to be killed doesn’t mean we should stop killing them. If it did we would still be on Okinawa.]

My father’s father, Jack Smith of Ballyglass, Galway, Connaught, cousin of Billy Mann, great grandfather of James Quinn, ring bearer at my daughter Courtenay’s wedding and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, was losing his sight before I was born. My mother told her brother that I had beautiful blond hair. “Don’t cut it until I get back”, he asked. The only way he could tell the difference between me and anyone else in the play pen was by the length of my hair. “When are you going to make a man out of him?”, he asked his son later to be known as Judge Smith.  And so I remained a beautiful, blue-eyed, long haired boy until 1946.

I began reading Kipling sometime in the mid-50s after watching the movie “Gunga Din”. Kipling was the transition between the Romantic Era and what is generally known as Modern Poetry. As such, he was acknowledged by T.S. Eliot, the eternal Horatius at the Gate, guarding the “Permanent Things”. I am glad to see that Warren Buffett, when asked how to get through the travails of the market, suggested a close reading of “IF”, to which I add “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”. I am glad to see that Buffett is following my lead.

The great Depression, the one that FDR promised to end by cutting deficit spending and balancing the budget, was made exponentially worse when the Federal Reserve cut the money supply by 25% and he raised taxes, was man-made. Yesterday, when the Fed again raised the discount rate, just 4 months after raising it, and causing a mini-deflationary commodity cycle, for no visible economic reason, would suggest, particularly if you believe that the Russkies somehow convinced Wide-Bottomed Hillary to stop campaigning in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, a conspiracy so vast that it has no name. The absence of proof is not proof of anything but still………….

It took my Uncle John 43 years to perfect his claim for partial disability against the VA. He was ably represented by lawyers working for the DAV and the VFW. He was buried with full military honors in May, 2001

I was lecturing at an alternative high school with the alternative being that they listen to the curmudgeonly old White guy, me, or they go to the pokey. I had mentioned that the best reason to read the Iliad was that you get to read the Odyssey in context. A large Black teen, bordering on the more feral side, perked up and said, “Ain’t that the story of the dude who took ten years to get back to his old lady?” Pure genius. What the Hell was that guy doing a half-step from serious time?

Raise a glass this Christmas Day in honor of my Father, Judge Martin J. Smith. Born on June 18, 1901, he died on Christ mas Day, 1978. My Mother, ever the practical one, remarked that Saint Mary’s, the Church on 15^th Street and Avenue C in Bayonne, that his father helped build, would be “beautiful”, what with the Christmas decorations.

Kevin Smith

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET

PS – As Davey Crockett said, “You can all go to Hell. I am going to Texas.”