Imma ignore the events—outrageous, ridiculous and pathetic—of
this week and give you the opening hymn from last Saturday’s memorial
service for my friend Dick.
This isn’t perhaps the most rousing rendition of “Guide Me,
O Though Great Redeemer”, but all the Welsh male choruses I heard just…didn’t
click with me, for some reason.
But Dick would definitely have enjoyed the purpose of this
setting—the service
marking the centenary of the establishment of the Royal Air Force, held in
Westminster Abbey in July, 2018.
You don’t get the full effect of the basses echoing the
refrain, but you should still crank it up and let it fill your space.
A couple of weeks ago I went to the Costco in Fairfax
instead of the one in Sterling. Dunno if that fact is relevant, but this is the
first time I’ve seen this product available in a Costco:
Actually, this is the first time I’ve ever seen anything
calling itself “chicken paws”. I once had chicken feet at a Chinese
restaurant in Milpitas. (They were delicious, but difficult to eat with
chopsticks. Slippery little buggers.) Actually—even “feet” is odd; technically
they’re claws.
I should have got a shot of the price, but fell down on the
job. Sorry.
I spent part of Saturday afternoon at the memorial service
for my friend Dick Kovar, one of the best exemplars of how to live a full life
I’ve ever known.
Dick died in June, at age 96. But it’s not just the number
of years that’s impressive, it’s that he and his wife Carolyn celebrated his 96th
birthday on Valentine’s Day with a romantic dinner at their favorite restaurant
in Vienna (Virginia), and there was a family Easter celebration six weeks
before his death at L’Auberge Chez François. He grasped life with a joyful zest
that radiated out to all around him.
I last wrote about Dick in 2015, so you can get
the basics there. (That was the occasion of the little kerfuffle at the
Dresden train station on his and Carolyn’s Mittel Europa tour, where he ended
up in hospital for about a week or so.) I was the transponder of his holiday
reports in the days before he got an iPad—he’d laboriously write out his daily thoughts
on his iPod and send them and photos to me; I’d transmit them on to an email
list of about 30 people. I loved those trips almost as much as if I’d taken
them myself.
(In fact, when I decided in 2018 to go to Prague,
Berlin and Paris, I stayed in hotels that had the Kovar seal of approval in
each city.)
Dick’s long career in public service is outlined in this
obituary—30 years at the CIA as an editor, analyst and other things. Postings
around the world—which I found out about in dribs and drabs as, for example, he’d
mention that the French officers club in Saigon had great champagne brunches,
or that he acquired his taste for gin and tonic at parties thrown by the
British embassy in Nigeria.
(Fun fact: the last few trips that Dick and Carolyn took
before Covid were to Italy. Naturally, they dined on wonderful meals, but there
was a problem with getting bartenders to make a proper, Kovar-quality martini;
they didn’t seem to understand the concept of dry vermouth. IIRC, he ended up
taking a flask of vermouth on the last trip or two so that he could enjoy his
pre-prandial cocktail fully.)
On the subject of booze, back in 2014 I posted some stats
on global drinking, where the US turned out to be somewhat…not on top in
terms of whiskey; India—while behind Ireland and the UK—was still a contender. When
Dick read it, he commented that when he visited an Indian military base one
time, his observation was that the officers could definitely put it away.
There’s one more anecdote I want to share. I may have mixed
up the specifics, but either way, it’s illustrative of the kind of world Dick
created around him. In an email (or possibly a Facebook post), Dick mentioned a
party he and his wife had thrown for the international community somewhere; in
the course of it, a guest—a Sikh—managed some expansive gesture (I can’t
recall). Dick’s elder daughter Elspeth corrected him: it wasn’t a Sikh, it was
a Gurkha, and he’d done a back flip over a terrace railing into the garden
below without spilling a drop of his drink.
Regardless of whether it was a Sikh or a Gurkha doing a dance move or a back flip—that’s what I call a party.
Dick was in the CIA across our involvement in Southeast
Asia, some of the periodic blowups in the Middle East, Central American
skullduggery and other sundry geopolitical hot times. I don’t know this, but I
assume he would have been right in the thick of it—his job at some point
entailed preparing and delivering the President’s Daily Brief (back in the days
before that had to be reduced to two bullet points and a cartoon). He took
early retirement in 1980, worked as an editor for Time-Life Books and
returned to the agency as a contractor/consultant. He did this in one form or
another until 2015, when he finally really retired, at age 86.
One story that encapsulates his career for me is his 1987
testimony at the trial when General William Westmoreland sued CBS for
defamation in a documentary the network aired about US forces in Vietnam under
counting enemy forces. Dick shed light on the ways governments can “reshape”
reality to conform to their preconceived notions—at the price of individual
integrity, citizen trust and thousands of lives. You should read WaPo’s report. (Dick at one point sent round
a paper about this, but I can’t find it.)
Throughout this, the continuo of Dick’s life was music,
both sacred and secular. I met him in the church choir, where he was the
linchpin of the bass-baritone section. But for decades his great musical joy
was performing in the annual Washington Revels at Christmas time. This WaPo story gives you a bit of the flavor of those performances.
Photo by Kate Patterson for WaPo
(There were about 20 Revelers at Dick’s memorial service;
they both sang and reminisced about the joy he added to their productions. He
was, it seems, a natural ham.) He loved Welsh hymns, and they permeated the
service on Saturday, starting with “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah”, to the
tune of “Cwm Rhondda”—one of the most majestic melodies ever, with a fabulous
bass echo, which Dick always relished when we sang it in church.
But Dick also had a deep, through-the-bone faith. We had a
couple of convos about that over the years; the resurrection and the life were
not in any respect theoretical to him, they existed as the alpha and the omega,
and so he was comfortable with the notion of death. Far from being something to
be dreaded or feared, it’s just the threshold to the next life, so why not step
through it with the same anticipation that you experience when you go from the
kitchen to the living room on Christmas Day? (My paraphrase.)
In this vein, Dick was endlessly curious about near death
experiences. He would send round accounts of the experiences people who’ve been
clinically dead and restored to life report. The white light, the benevolent
welcome. But I don’t think he needed them as proof—he already knew.
The last time I spoke with Dick in person was in 2023. I
think that was the only time I’ve ever seen him not wearing a tie—it was a very
nice polo shirt, buttoned to the top, under a sport coat. Most of our
relationship since choir days (which was in the last century) was via email and
Facebook. I’m sorry about that, but I’m also cognizant of that fact that
writing, to him, was his element, just like music was; I didn’t get to hear the
voice, but I definitely got the spirit.
On the subject of writing—I ragged on Dick for years
to write his memoirs. I don’t know if he did, or even if there’s just an
outline or a draft or a collection of anecdotes; I hope to God there is,
because—in whatever form or condition—it is pure gold.
So I’m grateful for the decades of exchanges, jokes, minor
tech crises, travel reports, links to Katherine Jenkins videos and everything
else Dick gave me. When I heard the news of his death, my first response was, “Oh,
no. No.” My second—almost immediately—was, “What an amazing, spectacular life,
and thank you for gracing mine with your friendship.”
I’ll leave you with two things. The first is a letter from
Fra Giovanni Giacondo (a Dominican and then Franciscan priest, architect and
archaeologist) to his friend, Contessina Allagia degli Aldobrandeschi, on
Christmas Eve, 1515. (There’s historical dispute about the authorship of this,
but it’s immaterial to the present discussion.) Dick read this version at his younger daughter Carrie’s wedding:
“I salute you. There is nothing I can give you which you
have not. But there is much that, while I cannot give, you can take. No heaven
can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven! No peace
lies in the future which is not hidden in this present instant. Take peace! The
gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach is joy.
Take joy!
“And so I greet you, with the prayer that for you, now and
forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away.”
And I cannot write about Dick without music. “It Is Well
with my Soul” was not part of Saturday’s service, but I just feel that it’s
right. So here’s the Jehovah Shalom Acapella group of Uganda singing it. They’ve
got a good bass singer anchoring it.
Oh—Saturday evening, I made a little toast to Dick. Not a martini—I don't like gin and I've reached the point in my life where I have to spend my alcohol calories wisely, so I don't drink anything I don't like. So I had a little slurp of Highland Park 12. Sláinte mbaith, Dick.
I know—I say that pretty much every Friday, but that’s our
timeline. Charlie Kirk, a stochastic terrorist who spent more than half his life fomenting fear,
hatred and violence, was fatally shot Wednesday at one of his hate rallies,
this time on a Utah college campus. (Fun fact: evidently the Utah legislature
passed a law making it perfectly legal to carry firearms on school campuses. “What
could go wrong?” they reasoned.) At time of writing, the one (White) man
initially apprehended as a suspect has been released, and authorities are still
searching for the shooter.
Which means we do not yet know why he was shot. We do not know whether the motive was political.
Meanwhile, every lizard with an R after their name (apologies to lizards) is
screeching about violent Democrats and demanding a civil war to set things
right. We have absolutely no information on why shot Kirk, much less why, but the
blood lust is strong and the Right is not missing an opportunity to score
unhinged points. The Kleptocrat has ordered all US flags be flown at half staff
and the (Republican-controlled) House of Representatives held a minute of
silence to honor the dead. And, of course, Kirk is getting the Presidential
Medal of Freedom. Just like Rudy Giuliani.
I’m expecting the day of his funeral to be declared a
national holiday. Maybe he’ll be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
(Another fun fact: the crowd hadn’t even fully scattered in
Orem, Utah, when there was another school shooting, this time in a Denver
suburb. Republicans have no thoughts or prayers to spare for those victims,
because they’re all going to Kirk.)
Let me state the uncomfortable obvious: this act came a day
after the notorious “Epstein 50th Birthday Book” was released by the
House Oversight Committee. This contained a contribution from the Kleptocrat of
a hand-drawn outline of a pubescent woman’s torso (that had more than a whiff
of necrophilia about it), a rather disgusting “dialogue” between Epstein and
Klepto and his very distinctive signature in the pubic region. I don’t even
know what the latest WH response to it is, because we’ve cycled through so many
that my brain is blurred.
But a right-wing sudden martyr could have seemed like a
good prospect for distraction. As well as impetus for more executive orders and
domestic invasions; not to mention new laws to “curb leftist violence”.
They’re already proposing that transgender people not be
allowed access to guns, in contravention of the sacred Second Amendment. How
long until they extend that ban to anyone registered as a Democrat? Or to
anyone saying anything derogatory about the Kleptocrat? Or the Sofa Shagger? Or
Homeland Barbie? Or Justice Opus Dei? Or Li’l Moses?
<sigh> STOP PRESS: The Kleptocrat has indeed announced a crackdown on anyone who says mean things about him. I am not making this up.
Unlike most on the Right’s spectrum, decent folks who’ve
been condemning gun violence all along have spoken up to condemn the shooting
of Kirk. (Another uncomfortably obvious note: there were no flags at half-staff
or moments of silence for Melissa Hortman, a Minnesota Democratic lawmaker, and
her husband, who were murdered in June by a RWNJ, who openly proclaimed his
intention to wipe out Democrats.)
We are meant to be a nation of laws, founded on the
principle that not even kings can escape the law. Anything that smacks of
extra-judicial activity is abhorrent—whether it be gang killings, masked
federal agents swarming our city streets to abduct people without legal
warrants or political assassination.
And I’m trying my best to view this particular murder as I do
other murder victims. Kirk was a human being; he had a wife and children. Those
children will grow up without him as their father and I hope they don’t turn
into the same hateful, entitled, grievance-filled person he was. The fact of
the matter is that Kirk’s long career as a professional racist, misogynistic
nationalist was made possible because he felt absolutely free to spew his sewage
because as a White male American he fully believed he was untouchable. He wasn't bold, he was entitled. And smug.
Matthew 26:52
Anyway—I can’t give you the “Horst Wessel Lied” only a
month after the last time. Let’s have The Boss and “Born in the USA”.
Because here we are.
As we head into the Covid and flu season, people in normie
countries can be glad that they’re not facing the chaos that this administration
has set loose on the United States. Under the direction of Health and Human
Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—a recovering (maybe) heroin addict
with a medical history of a worm literally eating part of his brain and insane
views on a vast array of medical issues—it’s every state for itself when it
comes to distributing the annual booster for a virus that, five years ago,
literally stopped the world in its tracks and killed more than a million
Americans.
Yeah—vaccines are worse than the disease, according to RFK,
Jr., so he’s issued directives severely restricting who can “legitimately” (people
over the age of 65, okay (begrudgingly), small children, folks with some
medical conditions) receive it and who just has to roll the life-or-death dice
(the rest of you suckers). Red states immediately jumped on the no-you-don’t
bandwagon—prepare for mass graves in Florida, y’all—and California, Oregon and
Washington have banded together in a fuck-you-CDC alliance to ensure that all
residents on the West Coast get access.
In the Old Dominion, Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin has
fallen in line with his masters and made it as difficult as he can with the
powers he has. So here’s my tale:
I had a video call with my PCP on Monday; the primary
purpose for me was to get clarification about the Covid vaccine. As in years
past, Medicare will only pay for it if you get it in a pharmacy (no idea why).
Being over 65 is an absolute justification for the shot, but my doctor issued
me a letter authorizing it for me anyway.
(Now—I had been on the CVS site the previous week; their
vaccinations app showed that I could get the shot in a couple of stores not
particularly near to me, and only for a couple of days ahead. It wouldn’t let
me expand the timeframe. There was a statement that this was predicated on
availability, and that they would also welcome walk-ins. I didn’t feel
comfortable with the walk-in crapshoot, ergo the convo with my doctor.
Interestingly, the app showed availability in Maryland, where the vaccine
offered was Moderna; all of Virginia is Pfizer. Also—many Redditors said they
drove from Virginia to CVS stores in Maryland, walked in and got the shot
without issue.)
Later that day I happened to be near the CVS closest to me
(which hadn’t shown up on their app), so I walked in to ask. The pharmacist
said 1) they had the vaccine, but 2) I couldn’t get it without a doctor’s
prescription. Age didn’t matter—have to have the prescription.
“Everywhere in Virginia, you have to have a
prescription.”
Okay—I messaged my doctor, asked her to send the letter she’d
issued to me over to the CVS so I could make an appointment. Later that day I
received an email from CVS announcing an appointment for 1630 Tuesday.
Well, okay—a little NHS-y in terms of “this is what you get”, although much faster than their usual four to 400 weeks;
I debated whether to try to reschedule or just get it done.
Then Tuesday morning, this appeared in my queue:
The link took me to a page that announced no availability
anywhere.
So I called the pharmacy—had to leave a message for a
callback, because of course you can’t talk with anyone. Someone did call back,
however, and said that I could come in at the scheduled time.
Okay—by this point, my anxiety level was almost right up
there with autumn of 2020, when they first came out with the vaccine and the
process of getting into the queue for something that might save you from a
debilitating and deadly virus seemed obscure and arbitrary. (In hindsight, it
was a miracle of organization, given the circumstances, and much better
communicated than what’s happening now.)
So, I showed up at 1620, checked in, waited about three
days and was out by 1640. No worse than last year, really. Muscles at point of injection are a bit sore; otherwise fine.
But I have a couple of words for the Kleptocrat, RFK, Jr.,
Mehmet Oz (bobble head of Centers for Medicaid & Medicare), Glen Youngkin and
all you Republican Rapture-seeking flat-earthers: fuck you.
(Still have the flu shot to go, but I can get that at CVS.
Without a prescription.)
Had a bit of a brain glitch one day last week. I went to
Willard’s BBQ for take out and in the bustle of collecting the order and adding
all the extra sauce containers I left my wallet on the counter.
(Since I quit working, I don’t bother with a handbag
anymore; I just take my wallet and my keys. If I need anything more—like my laptop
or something to take notes, I dump it all in a backpack. But that wallet-only
does mean I have to carry it in my hand, because it’s a little fat for my
trousers pockets.)
Well, when I got home, I rifled through the car, then
called Willard’s, and the guy who answered said he couldn’t see any wallet. But,
just in case, I drove back, and there it was, right beside the cash register.
The fella who’d taken my order saw it on the counter and set it aside.
I thanked him profusely and pulled out a Jackson for the
tip jar. He said I didn’t need to do that, but I just said, “All my library
cards!”
And, here’s the thing—yes, two credit cards and two
debit/ATM cards, and the driver’s license. Those would all have to be replaced.
But it’s all the rest of the nonsense I stuff into that wallet. I pulled them
all out yesterday just to take inventory:
Cards to multiple local libraries
Grocery store affinity cards
Health insurance cards
Costco card
Coffee club card for Nordstrom (last occasion I was anywhere near a Nordstrom
was in the Before Times)
Weird Brothers coffee card (I quit going to Weird Brothers when they ditched
the punch card and went to an app)
Starbucks gift card (No idea where I got that, but probably at a conference) Two Target gift cards (Haven’t been in a Target since they caved to the
Kleptocrat)
Metro fare card
Shell gift card (That was a reward for filling out a post-training survey at
the Gigantic Software Corporation…in 2009)
Trader Joe gift card
National Parks lifetime pass
There was some cash in it too, because I’d gone to the
farmers market on Saturday and they charge you a “convenience” fee if you use credit
card instead of cash. But I confess that I go weeks and even months without ever pulling out
currency because it’s easier to just use plastic.
Well, for Gratitude Monday today, I’m obviously grateful
for the guys at Willard’s who saved me from losing all those bits and pieces. I’m
also grateful for having it called to my attention that I might not even need
my wallet—if I could just add one of those card holder jobbers to the back of
my mobile phone, I could just carry it, with my driver’s license and Amex card
tucked into the holder.
