Tag: Memoriam

Condition’s normal and you’re coming home.

Pilot of the Enola Gay, Paul Tibbets, 1915-2007. “He never apologized for unleashing the devastating explosive force and insidious nuclear radiation that leveled more than two-thirds of the buildings in Hiroshima and killed at least 80,000 people, and perhaps as many as 127,000…’I never lost a night’s sleep over it,’ Tibbets said…He said he wasn’t proud of all the death and destruction and Hiroshima, but he was proud that he did his job well. ‘I didn’t start the war,’ he said. ‘I didn’t do anything except what I was told to do; what I had sworn to do, years before, which is “Fight for the defense of this country.”‘“

My Father’s Father.


Charles Francis Murphy, 1923-2007. Yesterday (which was also my mom and dad‘s 40th wedding anniversary, and the eighth anniversary of my own, briefer nuptials), my grandfather passed away at the age of 84. A former miner and longtime veteran of the US Geological Survey, for whom he worked as a cartographer for the bulk of his career, Grandpa spent his life making maps and friends all over this great big nation, before settling down in Lovettsville, VA, and later, New Bern, NC. Father of six children and grandfather to eighteen, he and my grandmother enjoyed their 63rd wedding anniversary this past February. He will be missed.

Through a Lens Darkly.


“I shall remember this hour of peace: the strawberries, the bowl of milk, your faces in the dusk. Mikael asleep, Jof with his lute. I shall remember our words, and shall bear this memory between my hands as carefully as a bowl of fresh milk. And this will be a sign, and a great content.” Ingmar Bergman, 1918-2007.

The Philosopher and Social Hope.

“Solidarity is not discovered by reflection, but created. It is created by increasing our senstivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginialize people different from ourselves by thinking, ‘They do not feel as WE would,’ or ‘There must always be suffering, so why not let THEM suffer?’” Richard Rorty, 1931-2007.

Falwell’s that Ends Well.

Jerry Falwell, 1933-2007. My thoughts on this are basically the same as on Strom’s passing in 2003, and once again I’d refer everyone to Hunter S. Thompson’s Nixon obit. Of course, it’s bad form to speak ill of the dead…still, I’m sure countless people and pets around the world passed yesterday who are more deserving of eulogy than this contemptible, hypocritical bigot. Let’s just hope, for Falwell’s sake, that God is more compassionate and forgiving than he ever was.

The Best and the Brightest.

“If you get information that is going to jar the Government of the United States and jar the people of the United States, that’s what you get paid for. Don’t expect to be popular. The better you do the job, the more likely you are to go against conventional wisdom, and people don’t like to hear bad news. So you are not going to be popular.” David Halberstam, 1934-2007.