Cries for help that go unanswered

By Tom Walker

SPECIAL TO THE ARIZONA DAILY STAR

Friday, Aug. 4, was a day when everything changed.
I went to see 'Dunkirk' with a friend. We really enjoyed it- a strange yet powerful war movie about civilians who rescued more than 300,000 Allied troops pinned by the German army at Dunkirk. The war could have ended right there, a year before Pearl Harbor, if not for the heroism of small boat owners such as Mr. Dawson, played by Mark Rylance, who endures even the loss of a son to carry out his rescue mission.

Later, it was fun to relive the movie with my friend, over lunch. I thought I could see parallels between the civilian action that saved Britain from a fascist dictator and the protests, court actions and special inquiries that are working to save our democracy. Possible column in the works?

But all that blew up the moment I got home.
Our house has a courtyard in front with a locked gate. As I approached it, I heard someone crying, 'Help me, help me!' I rushed inside the courtyard and found Linda, my wife of 52 years, a woman who has helped me through so many health crises, lying flat on her back, unable to get up.

Barely able to speak, she said she had gone out into the courtyard to pick up something that had blown in. When she bent down to pick it up, she was knocked flat by a massive attack of vertigo, so powerful she couldn't stand.

That had been about 21/2 hours earlier. She'd been lying there in the heat of the day. Fortunately, she was in a shady area, not in the sun. I tried to help her up and give her water, but she couldn't sit up to drink it.

At the same time, I was dialing 911. And everything worked perfectly after that. The paramedics arrived within minutes, sirens and horns blaring. And very quickly, they had Linda monitored, neck-braced and hooked up with fluids. Then they transported her to Northwest Medical Center, with more sirens and horns.

There, doctors and nurses did blood tests, X-rays, CT scans, and other stuff. And found absolutely nothing. After a night in the hospital, Linda was discharged with this stunning diagnosis: 'Dizziness.' The follow-up instructions were a prescription for anti-dizziness medicine and a visit to her primary care physician and an ear, nose and throat specialist within a week.

By Monday, Linda was better, able to get around without a walker. She even baked some brownies. And I came away from this with some follow-up instructions of my own.

First, as the hospital doctors said, we're going to get a referral to a good ENT guy and really try to find the cause of Linda's vertigo attacks. Apparently it's hereditary; both her great grandmother and grandmother suffered from 'sinking spells.' And our son had attacks that eventually were traced to allergies.

Second, we're getting a medical alert system. I don't want to be accused of spamming, so I won't say the name of the company. But my sister and sister-inlaw recommended them. And third, we're going to work on neighborhood bonds. We live in a 56-unit townhouse complex, neighbors on both sides and across the street from a community swimming pool. And yet, no one heard Linda's cries for help.

I haven't been to an HOA meeting in years. But I plan to start pushing for a neighborhood that listens for cries for help. We'll see where that goes.

Tom Walker is a retired journalist who worked at the Arizona Daily Star and now writes novels and blogs. Contact Tom at twalker7251@comcast.net

Missiles, fire, fury and flagpoles

By Tom Walker

witsendmagazine 

 

One memorable night, I turned the launch key on an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and sent it roaring off toward a target thousands of miles away.

No harm done.

 That was in 1968. I was the commander of a two-man Minuteman missile combat crew, and this was just a test. We had been shipped along with a missile, chosen at random from our base in Wyoming, to Vandenberg AFB in California. Then, for a month, Steve Simmons, my deputy, and I monitored our missile from an underground silo just like the real ones.

Finally, the moment we’d been waiting for came.

Over the radio came a launch command from “Looking Glass,” the airborne command post for the Strategic Air Command. Just like the ones we’d heard in training, evaluations and rehearsals. Except this one was the real deal.

“Skybird, Skybird, this is Looking Glass,” the radio intoned. And then he gave us our order, with the launch code and the specific time we were supposed to turn the keys. Steve and I went through the steps of the pre-launch checklist, checked the go-code and found it was valid.

And then, at the set time, we turned our keys and watched the multi-colored monitor screens light up to signal a launch. But next, the part that wasn’t real: We hurried out through the vault entrance door to the capsule to watch the missile, a mile away, thunder out of its silo and blaze through the night air on its way toward the Kwajalein Atoll 4,000 miles away .Fortunately, Kwajalein was safe; our missile was armed with a dummy warhead.

Unlike the missiles that a couple of real-life dummies are talking about right now.

Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un are flinging around words like a pair of schoolyard bullies. Fed up with North Korean threats, Trump threatens “fire and fury” if they don’t stop. From North Korea, more threats: an “enveloping fire” on the U.S. territory of Guam, where we have an important Air Force Base.

Oh yeah? Well I dare you to do that. Well then, I double dare you. Oh yeah? Well I double dog dare you. Jeez. Will someone please stick their tongues to an ice-cold flagpole?

Fortunately, I spent my 3½ years of missile duty during a time when cooler heads were around. It was during the time of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. Of course, Johnson led us into a quagmire in Vietnam and Nixon — well, you know about him.

But neither of them was the kind of scary, irresponsible, and unprepared leader we have sitting right now uncomfortably close to the nuclear launch codes.

In all my years of sitting in underground launch silos, playing nursemaid to the ten nuclear-armed Minuteman missiles under my command, I never had to wonder about the sanity of the men who might order me to turn the key. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was the guiding principle of the Cold War; now it's Maniacally Angry Dialogue being hurled back and forth by a pair of reckless provocateurs.

I wonder what the men and women who make up missile combat crews now are thinking. Those aren’t dummy warheads on top of their sleek, shiny white missiles, after all.

Our leader and his aides need to keep that in mind.

The thorny road to distraction

Corruption is a tree, whose branches are
Of an immeasurable length: they spread
Ev'rywhere; and the dew that drops from thence
Hath infected some chairs and stools of authority.

— John Fletcher, ”The Honest Man's Fortune,” (1613)

By Tom Walker

witsendmagazine

Back when I was a sort-of cowboy working on my father’s ranch, I learned the danger of riding into a thicket of cat-claw bushes. The scraggly looking shrubs, with their sharp fishhook-shaped thorns, could leave you looking like you wandered into a den of wildcats.

And how ‘bout that Arizona Wildcats basketball team? Will they be the preseason No. 1 pick?

Wait, wait — must stay on message. I was writing about the danger of cat-claw thickets and how a cowboy only rode into them if he didn’t know better.

Same goes for a simple blog writer, who just wanted to say something about the current state of politics and then found himself trapped in a hopeless tangle of cat-claw thorns.

I weep, I howl, I despair. These times, this era of Trump, are driving me to distraction.

Speaking of distraction, how about these latest ones. Trump tweets out an early-morning message that says transgender folks are no longer welcome in the military. He says he has consulted with “my generals” about this abrupt change of policy.

Cat-claw thorns

But those generals — who just happen to be our generals, not his — were caught entirely off guard by his announcement. So were the thousands of transgender persons now honorably serving in the military. It was an announcement no doubt pulled out of Trump’s ample butt, but it served a purpose: It got us all talking about something other than Senate Republicans’ failure to repeal, replace or do anything with the Affordable Care Act, the most stinging defeat so far of the Trump agenda.

You aren’t free of the cat-claw thicket, though. There are more thorns to tangle you up. For example, the administration delivered two more anti-LGBT actions on Wednesday. Intervening in a private lawsuit, they argued that the Civil Rights Act doesn’t protect gays against employment discrimination.

And they nominated Sam Brownback, the anti-gay governor of Kansas, to be the U.S. ambassador at large to the Office of International Religious Freedom. After having pretty much trashed  Kansas with his policies, Brownback ranks behind only New Jersey’s Chris Christie in unpopularity.

The time-honored practice of bullies: Pick someone smaller than you -- minorities such as gays and lesbians, for example -- and single them out for persecution.

Thorns, thorns and more thorns.

Linda and I have become addicted to Netflix and HBO streaming shows like “The Borgias, “ “Big Little Lies” and, of course, “Game of Thrones.” All the intrigue, suspense, poisonings, stabbings and  complete chaos grab us and won’t let go. Sort of like a cat-claw thicket of the mind.

But the suspense and intrigue also keep me glued to shows like Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell. I record them and watch them late at night, along with Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers. Did I mention that the cat-claw thorns keep me up pretty late at night?

But speaking of distractions.

-- Trump, at the national Boy Scout Jamboree, delivers the kind of speech he might use at one of his rallies, full of self-praise and political fervor. The Boy Scouts had to apologize for his bizarre performance.

-- Trump’s new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, lets fly with a profanity-laced attack against the president’s top strategist, Steve Bannon, and calls White House Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus, a paranoid schizophrenic who leaks material to the press.

--  Priebus, one of Trump’s only links to mainstream Republicans, quits, and he appoints retired Marine Gen. John Kelly to replace him. Trump has wanted Kelly in the job for months.

-- Trump publicly repeatedly attacks his own attorney general, probably hoping to force him to resign so he can appoint a new, non-recused AG during the congressional recess who can fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Democrats as well as Republicans work to block any kind of recess appointment.

Alexandra Petri of The Washington Post seems to have a good grasp on the situation. “All the people with silly real names are being replaced by people with silly fake names.”

 Eventually, she adds, we will end up with a White House consisting “entirely of generals, reality TV villains, people who call themselves “Mooch” and “Mad Dog” with straight faces … A fine group to have running any country, if you don’t care what happens to the country.”

Unfortunately, I do care. And that’s why I constantly hope to find some way out of this thicket we’re in.

A get-well card for Arizona Senator John McCain

By Tom Walker

witsendmagazine

 I’ve never been friends with Sen. John McCain. Never liked him, never voted for him — not in any of his two congressional races or six U.S. Senate races, which apparently made little difference, since he won all of them handily.

I didn’t vote for him in his 2008 Republican presidential run against Barack Obama. Never even considered voting for him, really — especially after his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate, which unleashed her shrill voice and the even more shrill outburst of the tea party that followed. And I pretty thoroughly hated him for his TV ads that always addressed me as “my friend.”

That’s when I joined the army of non-supporters who chanted at their TV sets, “I’m not your friend, you old bastard.”

But today, I’ve joined another army: wishing John McCain well in his battle against brain cancer.

Sen. John McCain

McCain, 80, was diagnosed with a glioblastoma brain tumor after surgery to remove a blood clot above his left eye last week. Treatment options include a combination of chemotherapy and radiation.

“Glioblastoma” is an ugly word that describes a truly ugly form of cancer. It’s an aggressive kind of brain cancer that killed Sen. Edward M. Kennedy less than 15 months after it was discovered.

For a state best known for saguaros and sunsets, Arizona has produced a surprising lineup of congressional giants. (Sorry, Al Franken, you had the misfortune of living in Minnesota; but I am enjoying your book, Al Franken, Giant of the Senate.) But, of course, there was Ernest McFarland, the Senate Majority Leader from 1951 to 1953, and one of the “Fathers of the GI Bill.” And Barry Goldwater, who was the first Arizonan to grab the Republican reins and run for president in 1964. He lost by a landslide, but he was a key figure in the resurgence of the American conservative movement that later swept Ronald Reagan and the others — including, I guess, Donald Trump (gack) into the presidency.

Rep. Morris K. Udall chased after the Democratic nomination in1976 against Jimmy Carter. His self-deprecating wit and humor would be so refreshing in today’s political climate. Of course, in Trump’s case all the humor and wit would be used to throw aides under the bus.

Udall liked to tell a story about a café he visited in Iowa one day. “Hello,” he said, “I’m Mo Udall and I’m running for President.” And one of the café regulars said, “Yeah, we were just joking about that.”

Can you imagine Trump trying to tell that joke about himself? His head would explode first.

But getting back to John McCain.

“McCain’s significance inside Congress is hard to overstate,” the Washington Post reported, “and his absence, however long, will reverberate across the Capitol.”

Without McCain, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) can afford to lose only two more votes to salvage such beloved Republican issues as health care, taxes and defense spending. The Post also notes that McCain’s absence would deprive the Senate of its “moral conscience” on issues such as the investigation of the Trump campaign’s role, if any, in Russian 2016 election shenanigans.

Wait a minute. What moral conscience?

Anyway, McConnell said, “I know that he will face this challenge with the same extraordinary courage that has characterized his life. The entire Senate family’s prayers are with John, Cindy and his family, his staff, and the people of Arizona he represents so well.

“We all look forward to seeing this American hero again soon.”

That goes for me, too, Sen. McCain. Although I only spoke to you once, in an unmemorable interview when I was the political reporter for the Tucson Citizen and you were running for the District 1 seat in Congress back in 1982. You told me about your prisoner of war ordeal and I wrote it all down. Still, I didn’t vote for you then and have never voted for you. But you have my vote now, and my prayers.

Godspeed, John McCain.