history

Today in History, February 19

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A note about The Gad About Town web site: A very sad thing happened in my girlfriend’s family this week, and while she has been attending to matters related to this, I have been striving to attend to her. My intent with the “This Day in History” feature is for it to be just that, a feature, but I have not had the time to finish my backlog of posts. Thank you all for your notes of encouragement about this feature. And, look, here it is now:

Operation Detachment, more famously known as the Battle of Iwo Jima, began 71 years ago today. The battle for control of the island, whose value as either a resource or a staging area for future operations was questioned by civilian and military authorities alike even as the invasion commenced, raged for five weeks.
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Today in History, February 18

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Toni Morrison is 85 today. Her most recent novel, “God Help the Child,” was published last year.

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“What took you so long?”—Robert Hanssen

When he was arrested by FBI agents 15 years ago today, Robert Hanssen asked them, “What took you so long?” An FBI agent himself, Hanssen had been a volunteer mole selling secrets to the Soviet Union and then to Russia since 1979. By February 2001, he had grown suspicious that he was being monitored, finally, and had started to look for a new job, had complained that he suspected his car was bugged, and wrote to whomever might help him on the other side that he thought “something has aroused the sleeping tiger.” His 22 years of intelligence damage earned him $1.4 million and 15 consecutive life sentences. His arrest was announced two days later, on February 20, 2001.

He is held in the “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado, in solitary confinement for 23 hours each day.
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‘September 1, 1939’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Shortly before his death, the poet W.H. Auden told talk-show host (and former politician) Richard Crossman, “Nothing I wrote prevented one Jew from being gassed or stalled the war for five seconds.”

At first glance, this places the bar very high for the role of a writer in the affairs of the world, but it is simply a stark assessment of the reality that a writer has no say in the practical matters of life and death. He is not saying that words do not matter but is instead drawing the boundary between where they do matter and where they can not. Writers are makers and not doers, not “men of action,” Auden also liked to say.

One of his most famous poems is September 1, 1939, written to mourn the outbreak of World War II. The title is of course the date Germany invaded Poland. It was written quickly, allegedly that day, was not heavily edited, and published in The New Republic soon after. Auden came to reject the poem and he refused three times to include it in the three editions of his Collected Poems that he oversaw.

He told Crossman that the poem possessed rhetoric that was “too high-flown.”
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