I grew up in Paris, Michigan, USA. My father was a union ironworker. Most winters, he relaxed at home and read constantly at the kitchen table, with a glass of beer and a pack of Old Gold or Lucky Strike cigarettes in front of him. On Saturday nights, we often gathered around the kitchen table for lack of anything else to do, it seems. When we gathered, he liked to recite poetry. His favorites were the Yukon poems of Robert Service. His single favorite poem was “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.” The first stanza goes:

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up

in the Malamute saloon;

The kid that handles the music-box

was hitting a jag-time tune:

Back of the bar, in a solo game,

sat Dangerous Dan McGrew

And watching his luck was his light-o’-love,

the lady that’s known as Lou

Another one that he knew by heart was titled: Is It Really Worth the While? He had memorized a certain version of it, which I did not find when I searched a book titled Best Loved Poems. That book, on page 622, contains a different version—the author, as noted in that book, is unknown. Here is the start of the one my father often recited:

Sometimes, old pal, in the morn’

When the dawn is cold and gray,

And I lie on my perfumed feathers

Thinking thoughts that I dare not say,

I think of the stunts of the night before

And smile a feeble smile,

And Say to myself for the thousandth time

Is it really worth the while?

[The version he learned may be quite hard to get hold of, so here is the rest of it. He usually stopped two stanzas down, with the words “Even as you and I,” though I can recall that he sometimes fumbled with a few of the lines, but managed to include this one: “Though the path be exceedingly hard.”]

Then, I pick up the morning paper

And see where some saintly man

Who never got drunk in all his life,

Who never said hell nor damn,

Who never stayed out till the wee small hours,

Or courted a frivolous life,

But preached on the evils of drinking,

—The wine and the cigarette—

“Cut off in the prime of life,”

So the headlines highly say;

“He went to meet his Maker;”

“He passed the Great White Way.”

They’ll bury him deep and a few friends will weep

And the world will go on with a smile

And the saintly man is forgotten soon

Even as you and I.

Then I say to myself, “Well, Bill, Old Scout,

When it’s time to take the jump

And you reach that place where the best and the worst

Must bump the eternal bump,

You can smile to yourself and chuckle,

Though the path be exceedingly hard,

When you were on earth you were going some:

Now, is that an unholy thought?”

So I arise and attach a crackled ice band

To the crown of my battered hat,

And saunter forth for a gold gin fizz—

She’s a great old world at that;

And I go on my way rejoicing—

What’s the use to complain or sigh

Go the route, Old Scout, and be merry,

For tomorrow you may die.

I will never forget those recitations. He seemed happy and outgoing on Saturday nights.

My mother was quite religious. When a friend and I from graduate school went to see a film version of Eugene O’Neill’s play A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Catherine Hepburn captured some parts of my mother. That character was high on some sort of pain medication, I think—something she should not have been taking—and pranced about the house talking about how she should have been a nun.

My mother was never high on anything, but she loved church services, and most evenings sat in a rocking chair, going through the rosary several times, it seemed. She wasn’t distant either; she was fully involved. I will never understand obsessive behavior, I guess. Anyway, she wasn’t robbing banks, and she was always there! That mattered.

Anna Frances Whalen, my mother, was from Stoco, Ontario, Canada. She met my father, George Clement Battle when she attended Uncle John Battle’s wedding at the church on Stoco. He married my mother’s cousin, Lena [Helena] Whalen. How the two of them met, I do not know. Here is a picture of my early family, my parents with their first three children. Carmeleta [actual spelling] was firstborn; she stands between my parents. Rosemary, who had Down Syndrome, is in my mother’s arms. My father is holding Noreen. The north hay field is in back of them.

Uncle John was a year or two older than my father. He and Lena lived a mile west of us on the south side of the road. My father got the family farm, eighty acres at the edge of Mecosta County on 21 Mile Road. Though the road continued west to Uncle John’s place, they were in the next county, Newaygo, and the road name changed to 15 mile. He owned a hundred twenty acres there. It was a farm set on rolling hills.

This is a link to our family history photo album on my Google Photos site. First is a highlight slideshow; next, is the complete album.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/HFwZJmovrq9HeNh69

https://goo.gl/photos/44R6RiYW3Mj9zsAW7

If you click on the circle with a lower case “i” in it while viewing the album in full, usually details are available.

My niece Debbie Prosser sent me this history of the Battle name recently:

Origin, popularity and meaning of the name BATTLE

Back

Origin

Battle : 1: English (of Norman origin): from Old French de la bataile ‘(man) of the battle-array; warrior’. This name was taken to Scotland by a family from Umfreville France in the early 13th century.2: Irish (Sligo and Mayo): adopted for Mac Concatha ‘son of Cú Chatha’ a personal name meaning ‘hound of battle’ (where con is genitive of cú ‘hound’ + cath ‘battle’).

Old Slides

I bought a digital slide converter last year at a thrift shop; I used it to convert most of my old slides, mostly from the 1970s, and store them in Google Photos. Here is my Google Photos album.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/VE1pEj98eEyNyuTG8

This picture is from my vacation with Yukio Ito in March 2000. I remember the month well, because before we took off for Liberty Island, in the cafe, many people wore ash crosses on their foreheads. It was March 8th. Where I came from, we didn’t do that, but, Hey! This was used on a travel site for a couple of years; it was Yelp. I granted permission. Anything a private person does is copyrighted; you know that, right? That is by virtue of the fact that that person did that, wrote that, painted that, photographed that.

Liberty March 2000

Home page politics

To Be or Not to Be

When I was about eleven years old, I was already tired of that hackneyed phrase. Fancy, old words: Why do people keep repeating that tired expression? I rejected it as a tired, old cliche: I did not know its depths. I did not even know the tragedy it came from. Now, for me, to be or not to be echoes down the years.

Being and nothingness; existence before essence; tragic sense of being. We know them all—even if not all of us picked up philosophy books. You are dumbfounded and befuddles by the things that come along in life; or, in the past, you read that notion in a book, and you were somewhat prepared. It works out about the same.

We are at a profound turning point in our lives and in our nation. I do not care about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I care some for Joe Biden, profoundly wonderful career; did great things; stayed steady; wow. However, I care about the evil that is Donald Trump. A long time ago, when I was a chaplain intern at a mental hospital for three or four months, I read the biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was an intellectual and part of a group who resisted, strongly resisted, Adolf Hitler. He and his group were found out; he was imprisoned and executed. He sketched out a book of moral philosophy on old pieces of paper when he was a prisoner, before his execution.

Scholars in the field, Moral Theology, who have studied his writings, taken from those old pieces of paper, have said it really could have amounted to something if he had been able to develop it fully, using decent paper, decent writing tools, decent time, and, I would think, a decent diet. He was on the way to writing something great, but he was not quite able to flesh it out.

Before that, Adolf Hitler wrote two volumes of his hateful ideas; he titled them Mein Kampf. In English, it means something like My Struggle. He got it out there, and it sold big, and he bought a villa in the mountains with the royalties. The great moral philosopher had a complaint too; he had a struggle too. Who wins? Who loses? The guy with the biggest platform wins, I think, until the reckoning, which will wither everything in its path that is not strong, and true, and right: The Arc of the Moral Universe is Long, But it Bends Toward Justice.

Hitler shot his female companion with a pistol and then killed himself with it, in a concrete bunker beneath the streets of the German Capitol. Our conservative candidate for president is neither true nor right, but he is strong. I support Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, not because they are saviors of western civilization but because they are decent and true—the other candidate is not. Are we a great nation who cares about its people; are we to be, or are we not to be that shining star, that place of clarity in this messed up world? I choose to be that better place.

Farcical Drama

9/21/2024 by John Battle

Donald Trump is one person; he alone has created a powerful farcical drama around Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. He has a team of advisors and a large number of lawyers, but he has orchestrated a monumental national drama around migrants eating pets—he came up with the idea, and carried it out. Voters are up in arms about poor immigrants eating pets.

Democrats: You need a farcical drama. Oh, you don’t want to do politics that way? That is not you? Okay, I get it,—but you don’t need a genuine farcical drama. He is chasing down cheap-ass rumors—and he is winning the political race with it. You don’t need cheap-ass rumors. You don’t want to do politics that way? Okay, I get it. From the preceding brief passage, we can say here are your tools: farcical drama, powerful farcical drama, people doing desperate things that are unethical or immoral or bad, orchestrated drama, voters up in arms, chasing down cheap-ass rumors, winning!

Facts are: He might be a serial rapist, he might end social security, he will be a dictator on day one. You have all the material you need. Chase down these powerful wrongs on his part, and make a prolonged, deeply wrenching (for voters) national, huge, drama out of them. Make the voters deeply horrified about his actual wrongs; do this over a period of weeks. Build the drama; make them see the joke that he is. Remember these things: prolonged—deeply wrenching—voters up in arms with his cheap-ass attempt at a comeback. Do you even understand the concept of an offensive strategy? What the hell are you waiting for? Up your game. Meet the challenge—you have a hell of a lot of material. Flood the airwaves with sensational coverage of the cheap-ass, often borderline evil, wrongdoings by your opponent. Win!