“Tsar Mikhail” and the Passion for Old World Techniques and Caviar

In Memory of Alexandra Dimitrievna (Dimitrieva) Grishaev: March 3, 1913 (born) March 4, 1998

My 6-year-old son Michael Alexander can crack an egg in one action without scattering a single shell fragment. He knows how to judge a batter’s consistency, and that every effort may require slightly different proportions of ingredients added gradually to attain it.

Yes, he’s very fortunate to attend a school and other programs that recognize the need for children of all genders to learn the vital life skill of cooking from natural, whole ingredients. However, his talents emerged the very first time he begged to assist me in the kitchen. City kids have the benefit of witnessing every household task rather than being holed away in a basement. He had a knack for basic culinary and baking techniques that instantly reminded me of my own youth.

That innate ability is handed down from the great-babushka (grandmother) he never met.

My babushka, Alexandra Dimitrievna (Dimitrieva) Grishaev, was a professional baker and her culinary excellence is lauded nearly two decades after her death by the hundreds of people she served during huge parties, memorials, and other special events in her own home, my parents’ home, and other peoples’ homes for some 40 years. At the first major memorial after her death on March 4, 1998, I helped my mother serve dozens of people at home, preparing a fresh salmon dish that went from pan to table within seconds to retain the interior succulence and the exterior crust of the fish. I also helped my mother prepare hundreds of filled and folded blinchiki (Russian crêpes) for the post-funeral meal at the monastery where she’s buried. Any stress that normally comes preparing such delicate foods in volume was absent, as if my babushka was watching over me.

When my son helps in the kitchen, I am draped in memories of baking and cooking with my babushka and degushka (grandfather), as these were not activities assigned to one gender in my childhood home. My degushka, Grigori Ustinovich Grishaev, hand ground all the grains for his proprietary black and rye breads. The two of them made sausage from select meats and casings they bought from a German delicatessen by using a hand grinder clamped to the countertop. He took the fish he caught to a local smoker. They brought home five-gallon containers of raw milk from the monastery where they’re now buried, and made their own smetana (sour cream), masla (butter), and pakhta (buttermilk.)

As foodies, celebrated chefs, and other conscious eaters now relish to these old world ways, I lament how many Americans were raised with food products from boxes and cans. I am forever grateful to my babushka and degushka for passing down these traditions that have manifested in the правнук (pravnuk) they would have surely called Tsar Mikhail.

My maternal grandparents lost all three of their infant sons, the eldest named Mikhail (Michael), to starvation and disease. Survivors of wars and terror regimes who were unable to scrap food for their own children do not take for granted the gift of foraging and preparing their own food. Even if my son is undergoing a stage of rejecting certain (if not most foods that aren’t comprised of the finest raw fish and caviar) I take comfort in his ability to create foods from real ingredients just like his grand-babushka.

An Unlikely Soldier: In Memory of Michael William “Brother Mike” Gural

My father, Michael William “Brother Mike” Gural, was a pacifist humanist. But being born into abject poverty to factory worker immigrant parents in Newark, NJ., in 1926, he enlisted as a Medical Administrative Corps (MAC) Officer with Army Serial #12102416 at Ft. Dix New Jersey in 1943, “for the duration of the War or other emergency, plus six months, subject to the discretion of the President or otherwise according to law.” .[1] He did it to send money back to his parents, so they could escape the crime-ridden, downtrodden neighborhood, where the family lived in a single-room efficiency above a rowdy saloon. One of his older brothers died as a child at the former NY Marine Hospital, known solely as the “Quarantine,” in Staten Island, where we was sent after a tragic injury. My paternal grandparents, who died before I was born, had no access to health insurance and no money for medical care. The dreaded Quarantine was the only option. They didn’t have a car, and couldn’t afford to travel from New Jersey to Staten Island to visit him. My father attempted to send them enough money to cover medical bills while he was serving overseas.

My father's complete dossier was turned to ash in the National Personnel Records Center fire of 1973, sometimes called the 1973 National Archives fire, that destroyed as many as 18 million official military personnel records at the United States National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) in the St. Louis suburb, Overland, Missouri. As a result, there is no digital evidence of his service before and during the start of the Korean War, nor his service in the South West Pacific theatre. I vividly recall him telling me about a typhoon (though I don’t think it was the Pacific Typhoon, of Dec. 18, 1944) while he was on a ship as a Radio Sergeant working in the kitchen. The crew was taking a recreational swim, and my father, a former competitive swimmer, was strong enough to pull himself and others out of the tumultuous waters.

His involvement in D-Day, however, is recorded at The National WWII Museum, formerly known as the D-Day Museum, in New Orleans. Further tangible proof is found on a plaque in the house my father built in 1966, and where my mother has lived since they married in 1969. (My father died on June 21, 2002, of cancer.)

I’m unsure if my mother has any pictures of my father in a military uniform. He embraced his identity as a scholar and a professor, and he always noted that Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the G.I. Bill, helped to lift him dire poverty.

1. Online Military Records in AAD | National Archives

Lament, Regret, and the Eeriness of 14: In Loving Memory of Brother Mike

One of the many books my scholar father gifted me from his vast collection to sate my passion for all things otherworldly was a book of amulets and talisman. I cried just now when I couldn’t find it in our pared-down West Village-sized library, though I found some comfort holding my prized copy of “An Encyclopaedia of Occultism,” by Spence, Lewis (1874-1955).

Both those books served as the 1980s version of an open Chrome tab, as I’d reference them constantly and apply my findings to subvert anything and everything normative that I was forced to write or discuss. I’d get written comments from teachers like “I’m not sure how this fits in. It didn’t. Not in any contemporary and contemporaneous sense. Inserting strange references to facts, myths, or theories that have been long debunked or dismissed, was my way of rebelling, ever so strangely.

I recall re-reading parts of the tome on amulets and talisman and being fascinated by the story of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the underworld. Unlike my son Michael Alexander, who has a photographic memory of everything he reads or learns about science, I have always struggled to remember details and instead relied on my own ability to weave elaborate stories around a few facts. One high school teacher commented on my report card that “Natasha has a great ability to ‘write’ history.” Her interpretation of that comment was meant to justify the lower “effort” grade that didn’t correlate with the higher letter grade. I took it as a compliment.

Back to Osiris and his myriad identities. As I lay awake early this morning profoundly saddened and anxious because Michael Alexander is being repeatedly bullied and physically harmed at an after-school program (born into poverty in Newark, N.J., my father taught me to always fight back, yet my son must be a pacifist and is applauded by the program site director for his “good behavior,” which means he does not strike back as the victim of ongoing attacks by two boys), many random thoughts sifted through my brain. For some reason, I thought of Osiris.

In some retellings of the myth (there are many), Osiris was slaughtered and carved into 14 parts by his brother Set. Isis, the sister Osiris married, recovered 13 pieces of his body. The 14^th piece, his penis, was devoured by fishes. Somehow, 14 stuck in my head, the subject of a perverse and playful song like a miscreant version of the “Number of the Day” segment that premiered on “Sesame Street” in Season 33, which aired in 2002, the year my father died. No, I was not watching “Sesame Street” daily before I had a child in 2010.

The 14 stuck in my mind like the jingle in Mark Twain's 1876 story "A Literary Nightmare.” I was stuck with that earworm, as the only way to ditch it is by transferring it to another person. Somehow, 14 was distinctly mine in the early morning hours enveloped in anxiety.

Michael W. "Brother Mike" Gural died 14 years ago today, on June 21, 2002. It’s essential that I make Father’s Day a joyous occasion for my husband and son. I last saw my own father on Father’s Day, June 16, 2002. Because of a female boss who treated my emotional struggle over my father’s demise from Stage IV colon cancer spread to the liver, the peritoneum (the lining of the abdominal cavity), and eventually the brain, with callous disregard, I had just returned from a shift at The Associated Press when I got the call from my sister on my landline.

How I could I not have been at his side? This cavernous regret will follow me to my own grave, haunting me forever like an unwanted spirit.

After crying for a few hours, both because of my lament and remorse over being absent at the time of my father’s death, and because I know how enraged my father would be over the institutionalized abuse being perpetuated by a program director who laughs off any criticism and leaves it to her powerless site director to apologize but do nothing to stop the cycle of bullying and attacks on my son, I fell asleep for a precious short time. Gurals are not victims. Gurals fight back. Gurals do not put up with institutional abuse. Yet my son is as much the prey of bullies who go unpunished, as I was the sucker who worked extra shifts, filing thousands of pieces of copy, as my father lay dying just four hours away.

I can change my son’s fate by switching him to another program in the fall, though he already has been conditioned to believe that it’s “good news” when he won’t raise fist back at his assailant, which makes me fearful and ashamed as the daughter of a man who taught her to always fight back -- if not physically, socially. But I will never reclaim that moment when my father took his last breath.

Waking with the alarm this morning, I was overcome by grief, like Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short story “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.” Thankfully, I do find value in the world and would not commit suicide, but in darkness and despair I identify with the narrator ahead of his chance encounter with a girl who reinstates his will to live and his faith in humanity.

“Then such grief took possession of my soul that my heart was wrung, and I felt as though I were dying; and then,” according to the English translation by Constance Garnett, “then I awoke.”

It takes 14 days (or one fortnight, short for fourteen-night) for the moon to wax from new to full or to wane from full to new. Yesterday, at 22:34 UTC (6:34 p.m. in New York), the sun reached its highest declination in the sky, its farthest point north for the year, otherwise known as the June solstice. The June full moon occurred on the same day.

Life Lessons From Babushka: Why I Bake Like I’m Blind and I Swim Like a Fish

I ignore recipes, even for baking. (Unless I am trying to execute something with a high failure rate like flourless chocolate cake for guests.) I'm able to understand most non-English speakers enough to determine whether they are in eminent peril and whether I can and should try to help. I've long been a tireless advocate for teaching infants and toddlers to swim without any floatation device. Even if I still panic when I see it, I know that head injuries can create a massive pool of blood without being life-threatening.

IMAGE: My mother and my babushka, 1949.

All of this, and much, much more I owe to my babushka who played one of the most critical and influential roles in my early childhood.

My mother’s mother, Alexandra Dimitrievna (Dimitrieva) Grishaev, was born March 3, 1913, in Dubrovka, a village in Vitebsk Oblast, Belarus. She died one day after he 85^th birthday on March 4, 1998, in Wilbraham, Massachusetts. (You can grasp why this week is the toughest for my mother.) After decades of suffering, including losing all three of her sons as infants in the 1930s, watching many of her closest relatives and friends brutally murdered, toiling on the verge of starvation in various prison camps, and nearly drowning after being forced to walk a plank en route from Germany to England, she spent her last decade invalid, unable to speak or walk. My mother was her primary caregiver, after the two of them spent more than two years caring for my dying maternal grandfather, who also was bedridden.

Nobody escapes reigns of terror and mass murders without suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, but my babushka was generally able to repress any obvious psychological impact throughout my early childhood. I was a toddler, maybe 2-years-old, the first time I’d witnessed her in an emotionally fragile state. My mother, father, and degushka (maternal grandfather), had gone to the maternity hospital, and I was home with babushka. She was giving me a bath. Always eager to be in water, I recall babushka signing to me in a joyful, buoyant voice. The telephone rang, and she ran to answer it, in the days before cordless phones were ubiquitous in suburban homes. She returned, kneeled down beside the tub, continued washing my hair, and resumed signing. But the tune had become funerary, something anyone, even a very young child, who has experienced Russian Orthodox mourning would immediately recognize. My mother had lost the baby. Of course my babushka mourned properly and purposefully at burials and memorial services, but with a powerful voice that conveyed respect for tradition and the deceased. This was different. It wasn’t until fluid had filled her brain and dementia went undiagnosed beyond treatment that she would revert to that desperate, rote, haunting sound.

Because of my babushka’s unflappable resilience and adoration of children, I lived a blithe childhood, owed to her tenderness and unconditional love. I recall the intensity of her smile, knowing she was there to nurture and protect me.

One of my fondest and most vivid memories is kneeling on a high stool to reach the counter while making blinchiki (crepes not to be confused with blini, which are more like pancakes). (Legally) blind, likely from a combination of typhoid fever and near-drowning, my babushka didn’t rely on recipes, even when working in a bakery or preparing feasts for hundreds of people. She taught me how to measure and add ingredients gradually by judging the texture of the batter, a skill that I’ve gratefully carried down to my son.

Babushka made the cakes when we celebrated my “burzdays.” Raised speaking mostly Russian and reading and writing mostly English, I’ve always been proficient in what I joke is “Immigrant” or “first-generation English.” Russian-speaking women have approached me countless times on subway platforms asking in Russian how to get Corbin Place. I’d have to apologize in Russian, saying I only know that the B train goes to Brighton Beach. A couple months ago, an elderly Chinese woman who spoke no English, walked directly to me as I exited a downtown 6 train at Spring Street. Somehow, I figured out she needed to get uptown, so I walked her to the proper entrance and had the attendant scan her MetroCard to prove that she’d just swiped at the wrong platform. She smiled, nodded, and clenched my hand, reminding me so much of my babushka. Tourists seem to sense this, as I’ve somehow directed people to their destination without speaking the same language. About 20 years ago, I interjected when I heard emergency room staff say they needed a German translator for a newly-immigrated Polish family. Without fluency, even proficiency, in Polish, I managed to translate enough to ensure the elderly patriarch saw an orthopedist for the leg and hip injuries he’d sustained in a fall, rather than the cardiologist the staff suspected he needed.

Because they didn’t have YMCAs in prison camps and displaced persons camps, my mother never learned to swim, though she loves and does not fear the ocean. Knowledge of my babushka’s near-drowning (along with my affinity with immersion in all bodies of water) were enough to convince me that swimming is one of the most vital life skills. My babushka would be gratified to see my son swim with great confidence and zeal. I started taking him to public swimming pools when he was just a couple months old, much to the criticism of other mothers, caregivers, and city park employees, including one who asked for name and contact information.

One of the most terrifying memories from my adolescence was finding my babushka lying in a pool of her blood at the bottom of her basement stairs. While she assured me she would be fine as she vigorously grasped my hand, I called my father, who – based on his experience growing up in a rough Newark, New Jersey slum and fighting in two major wars -- reassured me that “all head injuries are like that. There’s always a lot of blood.” While I always worry, I am not squeamish and can pull it together enough to seek proper medical attention at the sight of vast quantities of spilled blood.

My babushka is with us in spirit. Her exuberance and unrivaled talents couldn’t be squashed by a generation or two subjected to Americanization. Oh, how she and Michael Alexander would enjoy each other. And my husband Mike would never get enough of her piroshki, as my humble version needs practice. I’m sure Mike would advise me that with practice, I could master the art and do hers justice. Maybe I’ll make that a goal once Michael Alexander accepts that dumplings are a food just like sushi.

The Specialist and The Undertaker

“I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there's a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don't treat left nostrils, it's not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there's a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

It seems finding the right medical attention would have been easier in 1880 Russia than it is now for my mother in 2015 Western Massachusetts. At least 135 years ago, there was some humor to be culled from the absurdity of the process.

My mother has been ill with a few possibly related symptoms. It’s easy to jump to conclusions, and naturally the worst-case scenarios plague me day and night.

I’m not a doctor, so I cannot diagnose and treat her. The problem is the person “treating” her isn’t a doctor either. Trapped in Western Massachusetts, she is limited by the number of medical practitioners she can chose from without having to travel to Boston or New York, or Paris or Vienna, which she doesn’t want to do, at least not for repeat visits.

The utter incompetence wrangled in outright arrogance of the Western Massachusetts “medical community” astounds me. My mother has been mistreated in so many ways. I’m often tempted to find a lawyer to make the case for medical negligence, even abuse.

Whether it’s personal or just the way this small-town system disrespects the elderly, my mother sees a physician’s assistant rather than a medical doctor. The practice claims this is all she deserves, despite have Medicare along with a pricy state plan my father had paid into for decades as a state university professor. My mother says this non-MD is “nice,” but yet every time she leaves that office her health continues to decline.

Meantime, my mother has been banned from one of the few specialist offices in this insular community, because she went to see another specialist, one time. It is against the “office policy” to “allow patients back after they have left the practice,” say the churlish staff who command the phones and act as gatekeepers for anyone with any potential intelligence.

For my mother, the challenge of finding doctors to treat her among these parochial confines, is complicated and restricted by an abundance of those who have failed to diagnose and properly treat both my mother’s parents, and my father. All three arguably suffered more than required and died prematurely due to a lack of proper medical attention, even negligence. My mother had been encouraged to file negligence claims. If only for fear of being further ostracized from the Western Massachusetts pond of medical professionals, she refused to take any legal action.

Yesterday, when I called her from my office to check on her latest and most alarming symptom, I asked if she’d made a specialist appointment. After enduring inane phone calls with the office that refuses to allow patients who have “left the practice” back, I embarked on a search for an office with any semblance of compassion.

I finally found another specialist practice, with a far less surly receptionist who heard my plea for my mother’s immediate health woes. Her symptoms constitute what merits a 911 call, but she’ll never make the trip to the ER or consider the post-insurance expense of an ambulance. Meantime, her “primary care” office, by denying her visits with a physician, repeatedly dismisses these critical red flags.

In the midst of this painful conversation -- she was choking back tears and riddled with anxiety and I was mustering any ounce of emotional strength to not openly and loudly weep, instead gnawing the insides of my mouth to keep mum – she shifts gears.

“I know you don’t like taking about funerals,” she opens her new train of thought. This has begun many conversations that have lead along a somber path in my mind and heart, and she knows that.

“But I have to make a decision about a pre-payment I made …”

I’ll abort the conversation, as the minutae of this doesn’t add any substance to the story.

Many hours after my unsuccessful attempts to answer her financial advice query, my husband -- who is far wiser and better equipped to advise her on such matters – managed to elicit her sardonic humor as he explained that her pre-payment was “safe.” She joked that perhaps she’d selected the wrong coffin color, as her eyes are blue, and they’d be closed anyway. I lack the disarming charm to win her jest.

As my husband puts it, “all she knows is death.”

From her early childhood, as the sole surviving sibling, watching her youngest peers, family, and other loved ones, shot down, blown up, brutally murdered, or die from starvation or exposure to elements, it’s no wonder this obsession with death seems “normal” to her. Moreover, none of the lives taken during her early years in prison and work camps, and on the run from various enemy factions, have any real existence after death. There are no marked graves. She has vague recollections of which oblast (region) some were dumped into mass graves. There was no opportunity to mourn properly, to practice any ritual, to honor the dead in any way, at the time of their death.

Even in her “free” life as an American, she has witnessed decades of anguish and torment, especially with the extended illnesses of her parents and her husband, all of whom she cared for alone, at home. She spared no expense for their funerals, but is frugal planning hers, aside from wanted to be sure limo services, taking her survivors 180 miles to and from her home to the monastery, are paid for.

To her, the right of burial is a great honor. I just wish I could make it easier for her. Coming from a very different perspective – one of weakness and a lack of the real-life experience that most people in a violent world must endure -- I empathize, but so detest the business of death in the United States, and want no part of it. For her, even the most gruesome of “parlors” offers a dignity that doesn’t exist during war or in death camps.

By the time I was my son’s age, 5½, I’d attended dozens of funerals with open caskets. After all, it’s just an extension of Russia’s death-laden folktales or skazki. And those are for children.

Vladimir Propp's The Historical Roots of the Magic Tale (1946) was criticized for being too dependent on Western scholarship and, worse yet, placing Russian narrative in a global context. Written 18 years after his Morphology of the Folktale, which was panned for being too formalist, Propp aimed to prove that folktales originated in ritual, especially initiation and funeral rites. In order to avoid prison and losing his professorship, Propp’s subsequent work, Russian Heroic Epic (1958), would take on a more Marxian, even Marxist, tone. But seven years before his own funeral, Propp returned to the acceptance and explanation of calendrical ritual in Russian Agrarian Holidays (1963).

To this day, I dream of mass graves I have never seen, but was told about as a young child, as well as funerals, past and future. My science-focused son speaks frankly and openly about death and dying, even as it relates to humans. But he has yet to ask me about a funeral. Trust that with my own myth-steeped experience, that’s the “big talk” I most dread as a mother.

A “Vetuchu” Perspective on Veteran’s Day

I haven’t written about Veteran’s Day since I was assigned to do it by Wilbraham, Mass., public schools in the 1970s, or to cover memorial events as a cub newspaper reporter. I recall coming home from elementary school to delve into one of my father’s gargantuan etymological dictionaries to figure out how Veteran’s Day differed from Memorial Day, when we were doled out identical assignments. Basically, I learned it meant old, and specifically in Old Church Slavonic (still used in the Russian Orthodox liturgy) it was derived from “vetuchu,” meaning old.

The focus of Lubachka is on the civilian survivors and casualties of war, but today I’m writing about my American-born father and his U.S. military service. I know that witnessing so many civilian (as well as fellow soldier) casualties as such a young man had a tremendous impact on him, and certainly would help him empathize with the horrific plight of his future wife and her family.

Looking at this from a “vetuchu” perspective is unavoidable, as even fewer records of my father’s military service exist than those of my mother’s early childhood in work camps and civilian prisons. Michael William Gural’s military records were among the approximately 16-18 million destroyed in a July 12, 1973, fire at the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) in St. Louis suburb.

Moreover, I generally avoid writing or speaking about Veteran’s Day because of my strong views opposing much of U.S. military policy and action, present and future. But none of that undermines the tremendous respect I have for those men and women who were either forced or volunteered to serve their country, or at least do what they thought was best at the time.

I have a lot of anecdotal evidence of my father’s various stints in the U.S. Army, including how he was one of few survivors of a leisure swim off a boat during a tsunami in the South Pacific. A broad-shouldered, former competitive swimmer, my father did what he could to save others swept away in the violent waters.

Other stories were less heroic or tragic musings on daily life in the bunker, like how other enlisted young men (never him, he stressed) would use isopropyl alcohol to set ablaze the toes of a sleeping solider, peeping out of worn socks and combat boots that had been busted open with overuse. (My father was more a big-hearted comedian than a prankster.)

I also recall my father saying he’d lied that he was two years older to gain access early to ROTC so that he could both send money home to his impoverished immigrant factory worker parents in Newark, N.J., and also qualify for the GI Bill.

That evidence exists. The National Archives online database lists both the Michael Gural enlisting in 1943 at age 18. (He was born in 1926, and therefore was only 16 at the time.) Under serial number 32922859, my father is noted to have been “skilled occupations in the manufacture of miscellaneous products.” But based on serial number 12102416, my father reportedly enlisted in 1944, this time with his real birthdate of Oct. 18, 1926, as a Medical Administrative Corps (MAC) Officer.

I know he wore many hats during his years in the Army, also serving as a radio sergeant, a cook aboard the boat that encountered the deadly tsunami, fighting on D-Day, and eating horse meat while deployed ahead of the Korean War.

For all his sacrifices, my father was punished despite his greatest efforts to help and protect the United States. When he volunteered to parachute into Siberia -- because: a) he was too poor to ever parachute recreationally and really wanted to do it; and b) he spoke Russian – he was red listed. That punishment carried on for decades, well into my childhood and teens. We had an unlisted phone number to avoid the harassing and threatening calls of “commie” and “pinko.” He also was fired after a brief stint in a dream job with The Bureau of Labor for his alleged affiliation with anti-American factions.

To temper my views on Veteran’s Day, I’ll leave you with three quotes from my father’s peer Kurt Vonnegut, who dropped out of Cornell in January 1943 to enlist in the U.S. Army. Deployed to Europe to fight in World War II, Vonnegut was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, and interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing by hiding in a meat locker.

Reflecting on his own experience: “The Second World War absolutely had to be fought. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. But we never talk about the people we kill. This is never spoken of.”

From my favorite Vonnegut novel, Slaughterhouse-Five: “You know we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock ‘My God, my God,’ I said to myself. ‘It's the Children's Crusade.’"

I risk enraging some who haven’t read Cat's Cradle, but this quote must be taken in the context of the novel. The tedious task of writing local Veteran’s Day feature articles slapped across the top of the front page with a sprawling American flag graphic that put nothing in perspective (while real wars played out in the streets, gang violence claiming young lives almost daily) always makes me recall it: “Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.”