Politics

‘Mystic chords of memory …’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

On this particular Veterans Day, in this particular time and place and moment, I think more of my Civil War ancestors, and what it meant to be a part of the Union. I do not know what it meant for them; I know what they mean to me.

* * * *
I do not know what my great-great-grandfather James Metcalf (above) saw at the Battle of Gettysburg. He and his father, Amos, my great-great-great-grandfather, were both there with the 6th Battery, 1st Battalion, Maine Light Artillery.

The list of locations (from the National Park Service) at which the 6th Battery saw action while my Metcalf ancestors served from November 15, 1861, till the war’s end includes the names of some of the bloodiest battles in Civil War history: Antietam, the Wilderness Campaign, the months-long Siege of Petersburg, and Gettysburg. James was a private and his father was a hospital cook, so perhaps their experiences were different ones. However, both died years after the war of diseases contracted in service: Amos was disabled with rheumatism and died in 1883, and James died of malaria in 1905. Amos was in his forties during the war, and James turned twenty in 1863.
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All Love Is Local

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The late film critic Pauline Kael is mistakenly said to have remarked after Richard Nixon was reelected, “How could that be? I don’t know ANYONE who voted for him.” The story is apocryphal, as Ms. Kael never said it; but many of us have reacted in a similar naive way if only for a split-second after an election whose results surprised/dismayed us.

Unlike our film critic friend, I do indeed know people who voted opposite me yesterday. (To be open: I voted for the vice-president and our local representative and in favor of a proposition in New York that may prove salutary and, now, surprisingly important in the coming years.) You see, I attend several recovery meetings each week and sit next to men and women who feel vehemently happy today or at least contentedly pleased about the result of the presidential election and unhappy the proposition passed.
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Me, a One-Hit Wonder

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The photo above shows it, the moment in which my life did not change. I may desire the sensation of a life-altering fame, but I know that one semi-viral tweet only serves to remind one that that sensation has not yet been felt in this life. Is it possible to desire something that one has not experienced? Is “desire” the correct word here?

Anyway, a tweet of mine tossed off last night with insouciance of a man who knows nothing about insouciance was liked 750 times (so far) and re-tweeted more than 130 times, and viewed/read/chuckled at (I hope) more than 200,000 times in under twenty-four hours. This is worth a post here if only because my average Twitter engagement is usually 200,000 times smaller than that.

Some of you may be acquainted with the feeling. Some of you may have watched one of your tweets fly out of the nest and somehow attract attention from hundreds of thousands of other Twitter-nests. This is my first time. In thirteen years on Twitter, ten with the current account, this is the first hit tweet. And nothing has changed for me: I am as annoyed or not annoyed by the world and most of its denizens as if 200,000 pairs of Twitter-eyes had not alighted on my one-liner.
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